The Moon from Zond 8
Which moon is this? Earth’s. Our Moon’s unfamiliar appearance is due partly to an unfamiliar viewing angle as captured by a little-known spacecraft — the Soviet Union’s Zond 8 that circled the Moon in October of 1970.
Tagged: universe
Dark Cloud is creating a Monster Star
Dark Cloud SDC 335.579-0.292 was observered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA) in Chile. It is 500 times the mass of the Sun and the largest ever seen in the Milky Way.
How big is the Solar System?
This is a classic exercise for visualizing just how big our Solar System really is. Both the relative size and spacing of the planets are demonstrated in this outdoor exercise, using a grapefruit to represent the size of the Sun.
IBEX provides first view of the Solar System’s Tail
NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, recently mapped the boundaries of the solar system’s tail, called the heliotail. By combining observations from the first three years of IBEX imagery, scientists have mapped out a tail that shows a combination of fast and slow moving particles. The entire structure twisted, because it experiences the pushing and pulling of magnetic fields outside the solar system.
Unveiling Venus: What we know about ‘Earth’s twin’
It can be called the morning or evening star, depending on where you are or what time it is, but it is anything but a star; in fact it is one of our nearest planetary neighbours, Venus.
Artist Katie Paterson reforges Meteorite
A large Campo del Cielo meteorite (a type of iron meteorite from northern Argentina) has been melted down and reforged in the same shape as a piece of artwork. The meteorite is currently in London, but will be launched into space in the future.