Download The Best Astronomy Images of 2012

The Best Astronomy Images of
2012
By Phil Plait|Posted Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012,
The Universe is beautifull
….. Which is interesting. It doesn’t have to be; it could be all
colorless and weird and lumpy. Instead, it’s bursting with color, sculpted by vast forces, molded into
fantastic shapes that please our eyes and delight our brains—especially once we understand what
we’re seeing.
Many of these, you might expect, are from Hubble, but other telescopes get their share, as well as
some that were taken by amateur astronomers with not much more than good cameras and a desire
to see and capture the Universe.
De tien allermooiste ruimtefoto’s van 2012
26 december 2012 Tim Kraaijvanger 7
Mooiste
Black Marble
Hoe ziet onze planeet er in het donker uit? De Suomi-satelliet kreeg de opdracht om nachtelijke plaatjes van
onze planeet te schieten. Alle foto’s werden aan elkaar geplakt, waardoor deze Black Marble ontstond. Vergeet
niet de hoge resolutie versie te bekijken, want die is spectaculair.
Tijdens zijn verblijf in de ruimte maakte de Nederlandse astronaut Kuipers , honderden foto’s van de aarde en
het internationale ruimtestation. De foto’s zijn hier te bewonderen. Kuipers fotografeerde Nederland regelmatig
op 400 kilometer hoogte.
Nederland, België en een stukje Duitsland. Hoge resolutie versie downloaden? Klik op de
foto
.
Atlas van het heelal
Is het mogelijk om een kaart te maken van het heelal? Ja! De Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer bracht in
maart een mozaïek uit met foto’s van het universum rondom ons. Uiteraard domineert het Melkwegstelsel de
kaart, omdat dit nu eenmaal het sterrenstelsel is waar wij ons in bevinden. Wie goed kijkt, kan zelfs planeten als
Jupiter en Mars herkennen. De hoge resolutie versie bekijken? Klik hieronder op de foto.
The Sun’s Arch Rival
On Aug. 31, 2012, the Sun had a major hissy fit: A vast arch of material was lifted up off the surface by
the Sun’s powerful magnetic field. Sometimes these arches collapse back down, but this one erupted,
blasting literally hundreds of millions of tons of superheated plasma into space at a speed of 1,400
kilometers per second (900 miles per second)—over a thousand times faster than a rifle bullet. The
scale of this is crushing—the arch was 300,000 kilometers (200,000) miles) across, 25 times larger
than the Earth. As we near the peak of the Sun’s magnetic cycle, we’ll be seeing even more activity
like this in the coming months.
NASA/GSFC/SDO.
Venus Transits the Sun
Venus orbits closer to the Sun than the Earth does, and on rare occasions our orbits align such that
Venus passes directly in front of the Sun. The last time this happened was in 2004, and it happened
again on June 5, 2012. Probably millions of photos of the event were taken, but one of my favorites is
this view from the NASA/JAXA (Japanese Space Agency) Hinode spacecraft, just as Venus was fully
entering the Sun’s disk. The Sun looks like a boiling cauldron with Venus silhouetted against it. The
ring around the planet is from Venus’s thick atmosphere, scattering and bending the sunlight coming
through from the other side.
If you missed the transit, you’re probably out of luck: The next one isn’t until December of 2117! So
you’ll have to be satisfied with pictures; I have a gallery of them, as well as a few others I liked here
and here.
JAXA/NASA/Lockheed Martin.
The Best Vacation Photo Ever
One of the single biggest events of the year was the successful—if hair-raising—touchdown of the
Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curiosity, on the surface of the red planet. The most advanced piece of
hardware ever to set foot wheel on another world, Curiosity is equipped with an array of cameras,
geological tools, and even a high-powered laser to zap rocks and determine their composition. On
Halloween, it used its Mars Hand Lens Imager to take 55 high-resolution pictures of itself, which were
assembled to create this amazing self-portrait. The reason you can’t see the arm holding the camera
is that it was essentially edited out of the final shot by careful selection of which pictures were used in
the mosaic.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems.
This picture stands as proof of what we humans can do: fling a spacecraft to another planet and safely
land a one-ton, laser-eyed, nuclear-powered mobile chemistry lab.
Kleurrijk panorama van Gale-krater
Het hoogtepunt van 2012 was de landing van Curiosity op Mars. De eerste uren en dagen na de landing kregen
we de eerste foto’s van de Gale-krater te zien. Onderstaand mozaïek was de allereerste panorama in kleur. Wist u
dat dit mozaïek uit maar liefst 130 foto’s van 130 bij 130 pixels groot bestaat? Dankzij Curiosity ontdekken we
veel moois op Mars. Hopelijk doet de rover in 2013 nog meer mooie ontdekkingen op de rode planeet.
Winterwonderland op Mars
In het linkerrijtje staat een recente foto van ESA’s Mars Express. Dit lijkt een winterwonderland te zijn, maar
schijn bedriegt! Op Mars ligt namelijk geen sneeuw, maar bevroren CO2. Het gebied dat we op de foto zien,
maakt deel uit van Charitum Montes. Charitum Montes is een grote groep ruige bergen die zich over zo’n 1000
kilometer uitstrekt.
Wervelwind op Mars
Ook op Mars stormt het. In maart maakte de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter een fraaie foto van een stofhoos op
Mars. De wervelwind is ongeveer 800 meter hoog en heeft een diameter van ongeveer 27 meter. De Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter draait nog maar sinds 2006 om Mars heen, maar heeft al heel wat mooie kiekjes en
nuttige informatie terug naar de aarde gebracht.
Devils in the Dust
Mars is an amazing place. I sometimes still think of it as cold, barren, and dead, but this is simply
prejudice on my part. Well, it is cold, but dead it is not: It has an atmosphere capable of astonishing
feats, including creating enormous dust devils—mini-tornadoes— like the one seen here by the
HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This towering vortex was 800 meters (half a
mile) long as it swept across the ochre landscape. The plume was bent by the wind, creating that
gently sweeping tail, and you can see its shadow on the ground. Dust devils form when air warmed by
the ground below rises. If there’s a steady wind it can wrap the rising air into a vortex that can tip
vertically and swirl around. They’re common on Mars, but one this big is unusual … though not long
afterward, another one formed that was a staggering 20 kilometers (12 miles) high!
NASA/JPL/ University of Arizona.
Mysterieus Saturnus
Op plek vier staat Saturnus. Cassini richtte voor het maken van deze foto de camera’s op Saturnus en de zon. Op
het moment dat deze foto gemaakt werd, stond de zon precies achter de planeet. Zonlicht verblindde Cassini
hierdoor niet, terwijl de planeet en de ringen baadden in licht. Het resultaat: een top 10-waardige foto!
Saturn’s Eye into the Abyss
Saturn is most famous for its magnificent rings and bizarre fleet of moons. But the planet itself has
some major weirdness going on as well. Saturn is a gas giant, with a tremendously thick atmosphere
that is tens of thousands of kilometers deep. At its north pole there is a hexagonal vortex, a swirling
system of clouds and storms 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) across—twice the size of the Earth! In
the very center of the hexagon is a circular weather system, the Eye of Saturn, seen here by the
Cassini spacecraft. You can clearly see storms clouds rising above the cloud deck, and the detail is
phenomenal. This feature is about 2,000 km (1,200 miles) across—two-thirds the length of the United
States.
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
Rotating Gas Cloud
IC1396 is a huge cloud of gas and dust, a star-forming factory 100 light years across. Massive, hot,
young stars in the center have blown an enormous cavity in the center of the nebula, their fierce stellar
winds and blasting ultraviolet light eating the cloud away from the inside out. J-P Metsävainio is a
Finnish astrophotographer who took several images of this sprawling cloud, broke them up into layers,
made a computer surface model of the structure, then remapped it all into different frames seen from
different angles. The finished product is this jaw-dropping three-dimensional animation. I’ll note this is
an approximation to the real structure of the nebula, an educated guess. But it gives an incredible feel
to the object and a real sense of what it must really be like. (Image credit: J-P Metsävainio).
When a 30-Octillion-Ton Baby Throws an Epic Fit
When humans are babies, they tend throw lots of tantrums and, um, spew material out of both ends.
Stars do that too: Meet Sharpless 2-106, a baby star just getting its start but still capable of throwing
epic fits. At 30 octillion tons, it packs a bit more oomph than your standard human baby! You can see it
in this Hubble Space Telescope picture just below center. Like many young stars, it has a disk of
material swirling around it (too small to see here), and this can focus twin beams of matter and energy
which blast away from it like the beams of a lighthouse. This expanding material slams into the
surrounding cloud of gas and dust, pushing it aside and creating the hollowed-out region you can see
in blue. The actual process is fairly complex and not perfectly understood, but what’s not hard to
understand is the terrible and stunning beauty of this scene.
In fact, this picture is so gorgeous it inspired my friend, space artist Lucy West, to paint it, and the
results are remarkable, to say the least.
[And yes, this one is my favorite of them all. Seriously, wow.]
Hubble: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
Cold Fire in Orion
In astronomy, as in life, what you see depends on how you see it. Our eyes are sensitive to visible
light, a very narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. When we look at M78, a cloud of gas and
dust near Orion’s belt, we see only the material that emits or reflects visible light. Interstellar dust,
thickly spread throughout the region, is cold and black.
But if you had infrared eyes, that dust would glow with thermal light in the far, far infrared. The APEX
telescope is designed to see that light, and when combined with a visible light image from the Digitized
Sky Survey, you get the incredible picture above. The APEX shot is colored orange, so what looks
black to our eyes glows like fire in this image. The bright knots of light are where new stars are being
born, enshrouded in thick dust. If all we could see was visible light, those stars would be completely
invisible, and we’d be missing the best part of the show.
ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2.
Monster in the Middle
Deep in the heart of the galaxy Hercules A is a monster black hole. Vast amounts of material are
falling into it, swirling in a disk that’s heated to millions of degrees. The disk is so hot in the center that
material wants to expand violently and blow away. Magnetism, friction, and other forces focus that
expanding material into twin beams which blast out of the poles of the disk with such speed and
ferocity that they travel for hundreds of thousands of light years before finally slowing down and puffing
out into twin lobes of matter. This image is a combination of observations from the Hubble Space
Telescope—which shows the galaxy Hercules A, stars, and background galaxies—and the Karl G.
Jansky Very Large Array, which detects the radio waves emitted by the jets and lobes. The structure is
well over a million light years end-to-end, but what else would you expect from an object whose central
engine is a black hole with 2.5 billion times the Sun’s mass?
NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage
Team (STScI/AURA).
Orion Over the Temple of the Serpent God
Astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard took this remarkable picture of Orion rising over the Temple of
Kukulkan in the ancient Maya city of Chichen Itza. The temple is 30 meters (100 feet) high, a
monument to the architectural savvy of the Maya. In Orion you can see the orange glow of
Betelegeuse, bright blue Rigel, and the fuzzy pink glow of the Orion Nebula (below the belt), a starforming nebula over 1,000 light years away.
Stephane Guisard www.astrosurf.com/sguisard
Going Deep. Really, Really Deep
The image you see here is nothing short of mind-blowing, for any number of reasons. Called the
Hubble Extreme Deep Field, it’s a combination of 2,000 separate exposures by the orbiting
observatory for a total of over two million seconds, or 23 days! For another, nearly every single object
you see in that picture is actually a galaxy, a vast collection of billions of stars. Yet this region of the
sky was chosen for this observation specifically because it was previously thought to be relatively
empty! Hubble’s sharp and sensitive vision reveals that the Universe, no matter where you look, is
never empty. Extrapolating from this image to the rest of the sky, it means there are hundreds of
billions of galaxies in our Universe, most, like those seen here, billions of light years away. The current
record-holder for most distant galaxy ever seen was detected in this picture as well. It’s a profound
and thought-provoking picture—a common characteristic of astronomical images.
NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden
University), and the HUDF09 Team.
Icy Aurora
On March 28, 2012, photographer Helge Mortensen was in Tromso, Norway on a mission to capture
the aurora borealis, the northern lights. He succeeded magnificently, taking this beautiful shot of the
eerily-glowing green lights over the icy landscape. You can see the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and the
Pleaides cluster in the picture as the particles from the solar wind slam into Earth’s atmosphere,
lighting up atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. I also like the water flowing in the bottom part of the shot; in
the 10-second exposure it forms a soft, smooth surface. By coincidence, one part of it forms a pattern
remarkably like a face, an aquatic Shroud of Turin. Can you spot it?
Helge Mortensen.
Milky Way and Mashed Potato Mountain
“This means something.”
Photographer Randy Halverson took this moody picture of the Milky Way rising behind the iconic
silhouette of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, known to countless dorks like me as the location of the alien
rendezvous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Halverson is amazing, and his time-lapse video
“Temporal Distortion” is well worth your time to watch.
Randy Halverson.
Galaxy With Arms Flung Wide
For sheer beauty, there is little in the sky to match a magnificent open-armed spiral galaxy. This is
NGC 5033, which is located 50 million light years away from Earth. That’s relatively close by cosmic
standards, allowing us to get a good peek at it even though we see it at a low angle. Accomplished
astronomer Adam Block took this image using the 0.8-meter Schulman Telescope on Mount Lemmon
in Arizona, and it’s a total exposure of 13 hours. You can see the combined glow of billions of older,
redder stars in the center, and the blue light from younger stars being born in the arms—the pink blobs
festooned on the arms are gigantic nebulae, clouds of gas and dust, where stars are being born and lit
from within by those stars. The oddly distorted shape to the arms (together with some other unusual
features) makes me think NGC 5033 recently had a close encounter with another galaxy, its gravity
warping the shape of the spiral. That’s actually pretty common in the life of big galaxies like this. It’s a
dangerous Universe out there.
Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona.
Pencil Thin
Massive stars do not go gentle into that good night; they rage, rage against the dying of the light. In
fact, they do more than rage: They explode. A hundred centuries ago, a far-away star did just that. At
the end of its life, the forces inside it tore it apart, detonating it, blasting away the star’s outer layers in
the most violent event in the Universe: a supernova. What you see here is called the Pencil Nebula,
one small part of the vast Vela Supernova Remnant, what was once a star but is now an ever
expanding cloud of gas. Material from the explosion is moving outward at thousands of kilometers per
second, slamming into gas floating in space, compressing it and causing it to glow. The colors in this
picture, taken by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope, represent different
elements: Oxygen is blue, and hydrogen red. Mixed in there are also elements like iron, nitrogen,
carbon, and more. These are essential for life as we know it, and in fact all the iron in your blood and
calcium in your bones were created in stellar explosions like this one. You are, very literally, made out
of the ashes of stars long—and violently—dead.
ESO.
Rocket. Laser. Aurora
If you asked a space nerd what the ultimate picture would be, they would say one that has a rocket, a
laser, and the aurora in it. Behold! Your wish is granted. (If it had a T. rex eating bacon it would be too
awesome to even gaze upon.) This picture, taken by Lee Wingfield, shows a rocket launch on Feb. 18,
2012 from a launch facility near Fairbanks, Alaska. The rocket carried an instrument on board to
measure how the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with storms from the Sun that cause aurorae. The
laser is a nice touch, but also has a scientific purpose: It can be used to measure the properties of the
atmosphere at different heights, dovetailing with the observations made by the detector on the rocket.
Experiments like this will help scientists understand the phenomenon of “space weather,” which can
affect satellites in orbit and our power grid here on Earth. But also? This picture is just pure awesome.
Lee Wingfield, NASA Wallops.
Scorched Comet
In late 2011, a new comet was discovered. Named Comet Lovejoy (after its discoverer), it has an
orbital period of more than 600 years, and at closest approach to the Sun skims right over the surface
of our star at a distance of 150,000 kilometers (90,000 miles). It reached this point in its orbit in
December, and most people thought it wouldn’t survive … but it did. And as it pulled away from the
Sun, the intense heat blew a magnificent tail from the comet that extended for millions of kilometers.
This picture, taken in late December 2011, shows the comet rising in the pre-dawn sky next to one of
the domes of the European Very Large Telescope in Chile, which was using a laser at the time to help
it focus on its astronomical target. The Moon and Milky Way punctuate this shot, as well as the stars
Alpha and Beta Centauri. If you follow the tail down, you’ll see it get redder nearer the horizon, which
is due to dust in our own atmosphere scattering away blue light from the comet, leaving only the red to
get through to our eyes.
Gabriel Brammer/European Southern Observatory.
Very Large Telescope, Very Large Nebula
Stars are born in clouds of gas and dust that collapse (perhaps when they collide with each other, or a
star nearby explodes and compresses the cloud). These nebulae can be small, enough to form a
single star, or huge, forming thousands. The Carina Nebula is one of these monsters: Even from more
than 7,000 light years away, it’s bright enough to see with the unaided eye. This stunning image is
from the VLT Survey Telescope and shows very nearly the entire cloud, a span of about 100 light
years.
ESO. Acknowledgement: VPHAS+ Consortium/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit.
Tarantulanevel
Weer een mooie foto van een nevel, maar dit keer uit de keuken van de Hubble-telescoop. De Tarantulanevel is
een gigantisch stervormingsgebied. De foto is omvangrijk. Het uiterst rechtse puntje op de foto bevindt zich zo’n
650 lichtjaar verwijderd van het meest linkse puntje. Dit kunstwerk is dus ook één van de grootste mozaïeken die
ooit van foto’s van Hubble zijn gemaakt. Het helderste gebied op de foto is de jonge sterrenhoop NGC 2070.
Deze sterrenhoop is slechts twee tot drie miljoen jaar oud, maar bevat al 500.000 sterren!
The Chaos of Creation
30 Doradus is another vast star-forming factory, and this image is Hubble’s view of it. You’d never
guess it’s located about 170,000 light years away, 25 times the distance to the Carina Nebula! 30 Dor
is one of the largest stellar nurseries known, with some estimates of it having more than 100,000 stars
inside. It’s ridiculously complex, as you can tell if you get the 4,000 x 3,000 pixel image, and most
certainly if you get the monster 20,000 x 16,000 pixel one. That one will keep you busy for a long time;
you’ll see stars being born, stars dying, shock waves compressing material into filaments, and just
crazy beauty everywhere you look. I seriously can’t recommend enough you explore it.
Hubble: NASA, ESA, ESO, D. Lennon and E. Sabbi (ESA/STScI), J. Anderson, S. E. de Mink, R. van der Marel,
T. Sohn, and N. Walborn (STScI), N. Bastian (Excellence Cluster, Munich), L. Bedin (INAF, Padua), E. Bressert
(ESO), P. Crowther (Sheffield), A. de Koter (Amsterdam), C. Evans (UKATC/STFC, Edinburgh), A. Herrero (IAC,
Tenerife), N. Langer (AifA, Bonn), I. Platais (JHU) and H. Sana (Amsterdam); Chandra:
NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al. & NASA/JPL/PSU/L.Townsley et al.
Garden Sprinkler Star
R Sculptoris is a star in trouble. It’s old and dying. It’s a red giant, a star once like our Sun but now
swollen, bloated, and blowing off a dense wind of particles into space. However, it’s not all bad: It has
a friend, probably a low-mass star orbiting it. They actually orbit each other, and as R Sculptoris
dances in a circle, the wind that blows off from it forms a spiral pattern like a garden sprinkler shooting
out water. This picture is actually a slice of three-dimensional data taken by the ALMA radio telescope,
a new telescope designed to see cold dust and gas like that blown out of R Sculptoris. I’ll note the
details of what this star is doing are fascinating, and I suggest you read the original post I wrote about
it. It’s amazing, though, what subtle beauty can be created when a star beings to die.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).
The Ghost in the Shell
Like R Scupltoris, the star named U Camelopardalis (or U Cam for short) is dying. Unlike R Scul, it’s a
solitary star. Its core is going through some pretty epic paroxysms, spasms that episodically eject vast
spherical shells of gas into space. This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the latest shell, ejected
just 700 years ago. The amount of material in it is pretty small by stellar standards, just a tenth the
mass of the Earth. But it’s enough to make the beautiful and slightly eerie object you see here. I’ll note
that U Cam used to be a star very much like the Sun. When you look at it, you may be seeing the
Sun’s future, about 8 billion years from now.
ESA/Hubble, NASA and H. Olofsson (Onsala Space Observatory).
Helixnevel
De Helixnevel laat zien hoe ons zonnestelsel er over vier miljard jaar uit gaat zien. De bejaarde zon zal dan haar
buitenste gaslagen verliezen, waardoor er een planetaire nevel ontstaat. In het centrum van de Helixnevel is een
klein wit stipje zichtbaar: een witte dwerg. Ongelofelijk dat dit kleine stipje zo’n mooie nevel heeft gecreëerd.
Deze foto van de Helixnevel is gemaakt door de VISTA-telescoop.
NGC 5819
Op de foto is NGC 5189 te zien. NGC 5189 is een planetaire nevel. Welbeschouwd is het een schil van gas die
geproduceerd wordt door een ster die zich aan het einde van zijn leven bevindt. De stervende ster geeft een groot
deel van zijn buitenste materiaal af. Hubble nam de tijd voor het maken van deze foto. De foto is namelijk
opgebouwd uit verschillende foto’s die Hubble met verschillende filters maakte. Prachtig!