The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.
An image combining orbital imagery with 3-D modeling shows flows that appear in spring and summer on a slope inside Mars’ Newton crater. Sequences of observations recording the seasonal changes at this site and a few others with similar flows might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today.
In August 2010, the Petermann Glacier along the northwestern coast of Greenland calved an ice island roughly four times the size of Manhattan. Nearly a year later, on July 20, 2011, a piece of that ice island—named Petermann Ice Island-A (PII-A) and about the same size as Manhattan—was still visible to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
If you have never been north of the Arctic Circle, it is easy to imagine that the “ice cap” at the top of the world is a uniform sheet of white. The reality, particularly during the spring and summer melt, is a mottled landscape of white, teal, slate gray, green, and navy.
