Thursday, June 04, 2015

THE LATEST ASTRONOMICAL PICTURES 6/2015

This (above) should get an award for the best astronomy photo of the year. It's a jagged cliff looming over a gravel foreground on the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The part of the cliff we see in this picture is 850 meters wide.



Here's (above) Saturn's moon, Hyperion. Despite its 250 kilometer size, the spongey moon exerted very little gravitational pull on the probe that took the picture. It's mostly hollow inside, in the way that a sponge is hollow. The oddly-shaped craters are thought to be that way because the impacts that created them threw the ejecta into space rather than compacting it into the surface.


Here's (above) a creepy picture that's generating a lot of controversy. The star on the lower left is a supernova first seen a few weeks ago near the disk galaxy it seems to be associated with.

Calculations of the star's distance and brightness have led some to conclude that the great majority of energy in the universe is contained in the fabric of space itself, and not in galaxies and stars.


These computer-generated pictures show Pluto's moon "Nix" tumbling wildly around the common center of the double planetoid, Pluto/Charon. We'll know more about this in a month when NASA's Pluto probe passes these bodies.

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