Archives de catégorie : Space

The Sun Unleashed: Monster Filament in Ultraviolet

One of the most spectacular solar sights is an explosive flare. In 2011 June, the Sun unleashed somewhat impressive, medium-sized solar flare as rotation carried active regions of sunpots toward the solar limb. That flare, though, was followed by an astounding gush of magnetized plasma — a monster filament seen erupting at the Sun’s edge in this extreme ultraviolet image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Featured here is a time-lapse video of that hours-long event showing darker, cooler plasma raining down across a broad area of the Sun’s surface, arcing along otherwise invisible magnetic field lines. An associated coronal mass ejection, a massive cloud of high energy particles, was blasted in the general direction of the Earth,and made a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetosphere. via NASA https://ift.tt/2qiokjX

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS; Processing: Rick Lundh

Explanation: Brush strokes of Jupiter’s signature atmospheric bands and vortices form this planetary post-impressionist work of art. The creative image uses actual data from the Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam. To paint on the digital canvas, a image with light and dark tones was chosen for processing and an oil-painting software filter applied. The image data was captured during perijove 10, Juno’s December 16, 2017 close encounter with the solar system’s ruling gas giant. At the time the spacecraft was cruising about 13,000 kilometers above northern Jovian cloud tops.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180407.html

Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh

Explanation: This bright cosmic cloud was sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from the hot young stars of open cluster NGC 3324. With dust clouds in silhouette against its glowing atomic gas, the pocket-shaped star-forming region actually spans about 35 light-years. It lies some 7,500 light-years away toward the nebula rich southern constellation Carina. A composite of narrowband image data, the telescopic view captures the characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to red, green, and blue hues in the popular Hubble Palette. For some, the celestial landscape of bright ridges of emission bordered by cool, obscuring dust along the right side create a recognizable face in profile. The region’s popular name is the Gabriela Mistral Nebula for the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180406.html