The Week's Coolest Space Photos
Every day satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system and outer space. Here are the highlights from this week.
Header image:
This illustration shows a red dwarf star orbited by a hypothetical exoplanet. Red dwarfs tend to be magnetically active, displaying gigantic arcing prominences and a wealth of dark sunspots. Red dwarfs also erupt with intense flares that could strip a nearby planet's atmosphere over time, or make the surface inhospitable to life as we know it.
Saturn's Moon Mimas (Blink And You'll Miss It)
Saturn's moon Mimas is visible as a mere speck near upper right. At 246 miles (396 kilometers across) across, Mimas is considered a medium-sized moon. It is large enough for its own gravity to have made it round, but isn't one of the really large moons in our solar system, like Titan. Even enormous Titan is tiny beside the mighty gas giant Saturn.
The Radioactive Core Of A Dead Star
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscope Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has, for the first time, imaged the radioactive "guts" of a supernova remnant, the leftover remains of a star that exploded. The NuSTAR data are blue, and show high-energy X-rays. Yellow shows non-radioactive material detected previously by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in low-energy X-rays.
When The Sun Gets Active
A pair of relatively small (but frenetic) active regions (of the Sun) rotated into view, spouting off numerous small flares and sweeping loops of plasma.
Two Symbiotic Stars
R Aquarii (R Aqr, for short) is one of the best known of the symbiotic stars. Located at a distance of about 710 light years from Earth, its changes in brightness were first noticed with the naked eye almost a thousand years ago. Since then, astronomers have studied this object and determined that R Aqr is not one star, but two: a small, dense white dwarf and a cool red, giant star.
If you like looking at images of red dwarf stars, then you'd probably want to check out the coolest space photos from last week.