http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA12773.jpg
Fantastische Bilder! Man könnte glatt auf die Idee kommen, sich diese
runterzuladen und ein paar davon in einem Fotoladen auf Qualitätspapier
grossformatig ausdrucken zu lassen, um es sich hernach gerahmt zu Hause
an die Wand zu hängen
Im Kern der Rose dreht sich der 'Cosmic Cannonball', ein Neutronenstern mit einer Drehgeschwindigkeit von unglaublichen
4,8 Millionen Kilometern in der Stunde.
Beim Kollaps der Kernzone des Vorläufersterns verringert sich sein Durchmesser auf einen Bruchteil des vorherigen Wertes. Aufgrund des damit verbundenen Pirouetteneffekts rotiert der Neutronenstern in der Regel mit mehreren Umdrehungen pro Sekunde. Die höchste bislang gemessene Rotationsfrequenz beträgt 716 Hz (Pulsar PSR J1748-2446ad). Sie liegt nicht allzu fern unterhalb der durch die Zentrifugalkraft bedingten Stabilitätsgrenze eines reinen Neutronensterns von etwa 1 kHz.Quelle: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronenstern (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronenstern)
the planet HD ’209 (“Osiris”) has a sunset that looks truly alien. The star is white outside the atmosphere, since its temperature is close to that of the Sun. It then acquires a bluish tinge at it sinks deeper, because the absorption by the broad wings of the neutral sodium lines (the spectral lines responsible for the gloomy orange of sodium street lighting) remove the red and orange from the star light. Deeper down, Rayleigh scattering by the molecules in the atmosphere starts scattering the blue part of the spectrum as well, so that the only frequencies that are able to squeeze past are green, then murky brown. Outside the star’s disc, the atmosphere has a faint glow in its upper parts, due to re-emission in the sodium line, then it become bluer because of the Rayleigh scattering.
One key difference with a sunset on Earth is that the “sun” is much larger from ‘209, because the planet is very close. As a result, there is no perspective from which the star would fit in only one layer of the atmosphere, as it does in an Earthly sunset. Instead of changing colour as it moves near the horizon, the host star spans all colours at once. In this plot the geometry is as would be observed from a space station orbiting about 10 000 km above the planet.
the fact that one can see this comet against the background of the Sun means there is some physical process not yet understood. "Normally," says Goddard's Pesnell, "a comet passing in front of the Sun absorbs the light from the Sun. We would have expected a black spot against the Sun, not a bright one. And there's not enough stuff in the corona to make it glow, the way a meteor does when it goes into Earth's atmosphere. So one of the really big questions is why do we see it at all?"
Figuring out this question should offer information not only about material in the comet, but also about the Sun's atmosphere -- and so this opens up the door to a new niche of study.
A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin
With hardware from the Earth-orbiting International Space Station appearing in the near foreground, a night time European panorama reveals city lights from Belgium and the Netherlands at bottom center, the British Isles partially obscured by solar array panels at left, the North Sea at left center, and Scandinavia at right center beneath the end effector of the Space Station Remote Manipulator System or Canadarm2. ISS030-E-048067 (22 Jan. 2012)
The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere 'Blue Marble' is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 kilometers)
Similar morphologies are found within terrestrial lava flows, but the terrestrial examples often have distinctive cracks as lava backs up beneath a crust forming tumuli or pressure ridges. Why do we not see similar structures on the Moon? This is a mystery, but perhaps the impact melts have lower viscosities or different cooling processes than the lava on Earth!
This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 -- roughly 7 billion light years distant -- and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.
Called araneiform terrain, these clusters of radially-branching cracks in Mars' south polar surface are the result of the progressing spring season, when warmer temperatures thaw subsurface CO2 ice.
As dry ice below the surface warms it can sublimate rapidly and burst through the frozen ground above, creating long cracks. If the material below is dark it can be carried upwards by the escaping gas, staining the surface.
Each dark splotch is around 100 meters wide.
„Wer wagt es, Rittersmann oder Knapp,
Zu tauchen in diesen Schlund?
Einen goldnen Becher werf ich hinab,
Verschlungen schon hat ihn der schwarze Mund...." (F. v. Schiller)
Nachtphantasien: Teil 63 - It’s the end of the night as you know it
Finally, the Planck data also set a new value for the rate at which the Universe is expanding today, known as the Hubble constant. At 67.15 kilometres per second per megaparsec, this is significantly less than the current standard value in astronomy. The data imply that the age of the Universe is 13.82 billion years.
Zur Abwechslung mal eine Nachtphantasie - oder besser Erinnerung, die ich eben (0:13h)
gefunden habe: http://www.wimp.com/moonsurface/ Das waren noch Zeiten....
As the Voyager space probes plunge into the inky cosmic void, each carries a golden record with 27 songs ranging from Mozart to Chuck Berry. Now, with help from a musical physicist, the twin space probes boast a song of their own. Each craft carries a cosmic ray detector snapping hourly measurements of the number of protons whirring past them. Over the last 37 years, the probes recorded more than 320,000 such measurements. Domenico Vicinanza, a musician with a Ph.D. in physics, mapped each value with a corresponding note on the musical range, with larger counts corresponding to higher notes. Stringing and mixing the notes together, Vicinanza assembled the spacecraft’s musical score. In the song, Voyager 1 plays the piano while Voyager 2 accompanies on the string instruments. Each overlapping note during the song corresponds to the spacecraft simultaneously measuring cosmic rays while soaring through space billions of miles apart. While Vicinanza admits he composed the musical arrangement purely as a fun way to present the Voyager mission data, he says transforming data sets into music in this way can help scientists recognize trends and patterns they might otherwise miss. And that makes for music that’s definitely out of this world.
"Imagine you, outside of you, other than you are.
You could feel the falling fall inside a falling star.
Instantly, as fast as that shrink way down in size,
atom small, and split apart, wind up otherwise..."
The mosaic, centered at 2.9 degrees south latitude and 234.1 degrees west longitude, covers an area of 365 kilometers by 335 kilometers (225 miles by 210 miles). The smallest distinguishable features in the image are about 460 meters (1500 feet) across. These images were obtained on November 6, 1997, when the Galileo spacecraft was approximately 21,700 kilometers (13,237 miles) from Europa.
This colorized image of Europa is a product of clear-filter grayscale data from one orbit of NASA's Galileo spacecraft, combined with lower-resolution color data taken on a different orbit. The blue-white terrains indicate relatively pure water ice, whereas the reddish areas contain water ice mixed with hydrated salts, potentially magnesium sulfate or sulfuric acid. The reddish material is associated with the broad band in the center of the image, as well as some of the narrower bands, ridges, and disrupted chaos-type features. It is possible that these surface features may have communicated with a global subsurface ocean layer during or after their formation.
Mars and Earth as viewed from lunar orbit on 24 May 2014. Mars was about 112.5 million km away when this image was acquired, and the Earth was about 376,687 km from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). So, Mars was about 300 times farther away from the Moon than was the Earth and appeared as a small sphere of light in the sky from LRO's perspective. [...]
To make the image even more unique, it was taken from lunar orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This two-for-one photo was was acquired in a single shot on May 24, 2014, by the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on LRO as the spacecraft was turned to face the Earth, instead of its usual view of looking down at the Moon.
On October 8, 2014, active regions on the sun gave it the appearance of a jack-o'-lantern. This image is a blend of 171 and 193 ångström light as captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.