Planetary Picture of the Day
Week of November 25, 2024
Happy Thanksgiving! This week, we were thankful for Mars rovers, telescope advancements, amazing spacecraft, and wonderful images.
Monday, 25 November 2024
Shiny Rocks?
On 22 November 2024, NASA's Perseverance rover imaged these very interesting rocks on Mars. Some of the flakes look like mica...?
Tuesday, 26 November 2024
First Close-up Picture of a Star Outside our Galaxy
Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, at a staggering distance of over 160,000 light-years from us, WOH G64 is a dying star roughly 2000 times the size of the Sun. This image of the star (left) is the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy. This breakthrough was possible thanks to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI), located in Chile.
The new image, taken with the VLTI’s GRAVITY instrument, shows that the star is enveloped in a large egg-shaped dust cocoon. The image on the right shows an artist’s impression, reconstructing the geometry of the structures around the star, including the bright oval envelope and a fainter dusty torus. Confirming the presence and shape of this torus will require additional observations.
Wednesday, 27 November 2024
A Lonely Landscape
This picture may look like a lonely mountain, but this landscape is out of our world—it's one of the closest color images ever taken of the surface of a comet. On March 10, 2015, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft used the OSIRIS camera to take this close-up of the tortured and jagged surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from a distance of just 29 kilometers.
Comet 67P is a four-kilometer-wide frozen mountain of rock and ice, hurtling through space on a long six-and-a-half-year orbit around the Sun.
Thursday, 28 November 2024
Jupiter and Io
This color composite, made from images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft as it passed by on its way to Saturn on Jan. 1, 2001, shows Io in front of Jupiter. Io was 9.55 million km from Cassini, and Jupiter was 9.9 million km away. The volcanic moon is about 3,630 km across—about 155 km wider than our Moon.
Friday, 29 November 2024
Sombrero Galaxy Dazzles in New Image
In a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a galaxy named for its resemblance to a broad-brimmed Mexican hat appears more like an archery target.
In Webb’s mid-infrared view of the Sombrero galaxy, also known as Messier 104 (M104), the signature, glowing core seen in visible-light images does not shine, and instead, a smooth inner disk is revealed. The sharp resolution of Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) also brings into focus details of the galaxy’s outer ring, providing insights into how the dust, an essential building block for astronomical objects in the universe, is distributed. The galaxy’s outer ring, which appeared smooth like a blanket in imaging from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, shows intricate clumps in the infrared for the first time.
