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US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shared stunning images of celestial objects, planets, nebulae, Moon, star clusters, interacting galaxies, and more from space.
Here are some pictures taken from space by NASA.
Eta Carinae may be close to exploding, but the timing has not yet been confirmed. It is a stellar system consisting of at least two stars with a combined luminosity five million times that of the Sun, located about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina. Eta Carinae has a mass about 100 times that of the Sun. According to NASA, about 170 years ago, Eta Carinae underwent an unusual explosion that made it one of the brightest stars in the southern sky.
NASA released the first image of the moon taken by the United States Ranger 7 spacecraft on July 31, 1964. After 17 minutes, it hit the moon at the northern edge of the Sea of Clouds. The 4,316 images sent back helped identify safe moon landing sites for Apollo astronauts. Until then there were no closeup images of the lunar surface.
This detailed image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3430, which lies 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo Minor, was taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope. A nearby galaxy with a gravitational interaction is enabling some star formation in NGC 3430 — which appears as bright blue spots, but is outside the galaxy’s main spiral structure. The distinctive shape of NGC 3430 may be one reason why astronomer Edwin Hubble used it to help define his classification of galaxies. Edwin Hubble classified nearly four hundred galaxies as spiral, barred spiral, lenticular, elliptical or irregular based on their appearance.
On July 22, 2024, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory launch, the Chandra team released this never-before-seen image of NGC 6872, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pavo (the Peacock). This image showcases the corners of the universe.
NGC 6872 has a diameter of 522,000 light-years, more than five times the size of the Milky Way galaxy. In 2013, astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil found it to be the largest known spiral galaxy based on archival data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. According to NASA, that record was broken by NGC 262, a galaxy that has a diameter of 1.3 million light-years.
In celebration of the second science anniversary of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the team released a near- and mid-infrared image of two interacting galaxies, the Penguin and the Egg, on July 12, 2024.
Webb specializes in capturing infrared light—beyond what our own eyes can see. The ongoing interaction between the galaxies dates back 25 to 75 million years, when the penguin and the egg completed their first rotation. They will make many additional rotations before merging into a single galaxy hundreds of millions of years from now.
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