In recent days, NASA’s space probe Dawn approached the dwarf planet Ceres and took a number close-up pictures of its surface. The latest images published by NASA were taken navigation purposes but start showing details of the geological elements, in particular the many craters of varying sizes. They make Ceres look like the Moon and show a story full of impacts.
NASA announced the nine instruments selected for the space probe that will explore Europa, a large Jupiter’s moon. The interest in a mission of this type has grown over the years, since the Galileo space probe found evidence of the existence of Europa’s subsurface ocean. The new mission will try to determine whether that ocean contains life forms.
The most detailed image ever obtained of the Medusa Nebula was taken using ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) in Chile. It reveals in a much better way the filaments of glowing gas that make it up. Those are snake-like filaments that led to the nickname Medusa with which is commonly known, inspired by the myth of the creature with snakes in place of hair. This nebula shows what might happen to the Sun some billion years in the future.
An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal” describes the discovery of the brightest galaxy of the universe made using data from NASA’s space telescope WISE. Known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, it emits light equivalent to that of over 300 trillion suns. It belongs to the ELIRG (Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxy) class recently identified thanks to WISE.
The scientists of the Rosetta space probe’s OSIRIS camera’s team discovered a curious rock formation in the region called Aker of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. They look like the balancing rocks existing in various places on Earth and precisely these are three rocks that seem to have very little contact with the comet’s surface.
