The Week's Best 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.
Top image:
This view of Jupiter, taken by the JunoCam imager of NASA's Juno spacecraft, highlights Oval BA — a massive storm known as the Little Red Spot. Despite its unofficial name, the Little Red Spot is about as wide as Earth.
A Galaxy Duo
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the unusual galaxy IRAS 06076-2139, found in the constellation Lepus (The Hare).
This particular object stands out from the crowd by actually being composed of two separate galaxies rushing past each other at about 2 million kilometers (1,243,000 miles) per hour.
A Snapshot Of A Baby Star
This intriguing image may look like a collection of coloured blobs, but it is actually a high-resolution snapshot of a newborn star enshrouded in dust. Just 1300 light-years away in the Orion Nebula, the star, named HH 212, is remarkably young. The average lifespan of such a low-mass star is around 100 billion years, but this star is only 40,000 years old — truly an infant in stellar terms.
Saturn's Shortening Shadow
The projection of Saturn's shadow on the rings grows shorter as Saturn's season advances toward northern summer, thanks to the planet's permanent tilt as it orbits the sun. This will continue until Saturn's solstice in May 2017. At that point in time, the shadow will extend only as far as the innermost A ring, leaving the middle and outer A ring completely free of the planet's shadow.
The Rann Of Kutch
The Sentinel-2A satellite takes us over western India to a seasonal salt marsh known as the Rann of Kutch. One of the largest salt deserts in the world, the area fills with water during the summer monsoon season.
If you're a stargazer at heart, you might also enjoy our selection of the best space photos from last week.