Category Astronomy/Space

This glowing nebula, named NGC 248, is located within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and about 200 000 light-years from Earth. The nebula was observed with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in Sept. 2015, as part of a survey called the Small Magellanic cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE). Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, K. Sandstrom (University of California, San Diego), and the SMIDGE team

This mosaic image of the Crab Nebula was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Features of this nebula and other astrophysical phenomena are being studied at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Credit: NASA / ESA / J. Hester / Arizona State University

Pan-STARRS SKY SURVEY This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawai’i by the Pan-STARRS1 Observatory is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length, taken over a period of four years. The shape comes from making a map of the celestial sphere, like a map of the Earth, but leaving out the southern quarter. The disk of the Milky Way looks like a yellow arc, and the dust lanes show up as reddish brown filaments. The background is made up of billions of faint stars and galaxies. If printed at full resolution, the image would be 1.5 miles long, and you would have to get close and squint to see the detail. Credit: Danny Farrow, Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestial Physics

This illustration shows how a series of five borehole muon detectors could be deployed in a horizontal well below a carbon dioxide reservoir. Credit: PNNL