The Week's Coolest Space Images
Curiosity's Dusty Selfie (Header Image)
A self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity rover taken on Sol 2082 (June 15, 2018). A Martian dust storm has reduced sunlight and visibility at the rover's location in Gale Crater. Self-portraits are created using images taken by Curiosity's Mars Hands Lens Imager (MAHLI).
A Slice Of Glory
If you have ever seen a series of concentric rings of color near a mist or fog, you have likely seen a glory. This colorful optical phenomenon, bright red on the outside and blue toward the center, forms when water droplets scatter sunlight back toward a source of light.
'Oumuamua Races Toward Outskirts Of Solar System (Illustration)
This illustration shows 'Oumuamua racing toward the outskirts of our solar system. As the complex rotation of the object makes it difficult to determine the exact shape, there are many models of what it could look like.
Evolving Prominence
A small prominence hovered above the sun's surface over a two-day period (June 12-14, 2018) before breaking off into space. Prominences are cooler, darker clouds of plasma tethered above the sun by magnetic forces. These clouds of gases are notoriously unstable.
New Crater Blues
This new impact was found by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera team (CTX), who asked HiRISE to take a high-resolution image… These craters may be somewhere between two and four (Earth) years old, which is exceedingly young in geologic terms. Most of the craters we see on Mars (like others in this picture) are millions of years old. The blue appearance is due to the intense blast of the impact moving around dust on the surface.
The Oldest Stars In The Galaxy
Studies have shown that this globular cluster, named NGC 6139, is home to an aging population of stars. Most globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way are estimated to be over 10 billion years old; as a result, they contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, formed very early in the galaxy's history.
Asteroids Photobomb Distant Galaxies
As if this Hubble Space Telescope picture isn't cluttered enough with myriad galaxies, nearby asteroids photobomb the image, their trails sometimes mimicking background astronomical phenomena.