Under the Milky Way Planets
Those are great series of posters by visual artist/student Ross Berens.
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Galaxy Menagerie from WISE
An assorted mix of colorful galaxies is being released today by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, or WISE. The nine galaxies are a taste of what’s to come. The mission plans to release similar images for the 1,000 largest galaxies that appear in our sky, and possibly more.
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How unique is the Milky Way?
To find out, a group of researchers led by Stanford University astrophysicist Risa Wechsler compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies and found that just four percent are like the galaxy Earth calls home.
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Floating alone Planets may be more common than Stars
Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.
Collage of nearby galaxies
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, the mission team has put together this image showing just a sample of the millions of galaxies that have been imaged by WISE during its survey of the entire sky.
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Crux and the Milky Way from Easter Island
The constellation Crux or Southern Cross, shown at extreme top center above, lies within the stream of stars that makes up the Milky Way (lower left to top center). For the Southern Hemisphere, this is one of two constellations new to the GLOBE at Night campaign. The sky above Easter Island, where the image was taken, is so dark there’s a wealth of stars visible to the naked eye.
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Starry La Silla
The stars rotate around the southern celestial pole during a night at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in northern Chile. The fuzzy parts in the trails on the right are due to the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies neighbouring the Milky Way. image credit: Iztok Bončina/ESO
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Celestial fireworks from dying stars
This picture of the star formation region NGC 3582 was taken using the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The image reveals giant loops of gas ejected by dying stars that bear a striking resemblance to solar prominences.
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Two dying stars reborn as one
White dwarfs are dead stars that pack a Sun’s-worth of matter into an Earth-sized ball. Astronomers have just discovered an amazing pair of white dwarfs whirling around each other once every 39 minutes. This is the shortest-period pair of white dwarfs now known. Moreover, in a few million years they will collide and merge to create a single star.
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Milky Way over Tenerife
This band is the disk of our spiral galaxy. Since we are inside this disk, the band appears to encircle the Earth. The above spectacular picture of the Milky Way arch, however, goes where the unaided eye cannot. Photographer Juan Carlos Casado.
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