Space Universe🌌

This image taken by NASAHubble shows GAMA 526784 as a patch of light roughly 4 billion light-years from Earth. Ultra-diffuse galaxies like these are strange—some have high amounts of dark matter, while others have none at all! ALT TEXT: A black expanse of sky, lit up with points of yellow and blue light, each representing a star or galaxy. In the center left of the image, a smudge of white light, dotted with points of blue shows ultra-diffuse galaxy, GAMA 526784. Just above it, three particularly bright yellow lights show up in a line. To the bottom left of the galaxy smudge, a star shows up as a bright blueish light with points of yellow spiking from it.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is renowned worldwide for its colorful coral, plants and animals - and in recent years, it has been facing threats from Earth's changing climate, from ocean acidification to warming sea surface temperatures that cause coral bleaching.

From fog machines on Earth to craters on the surface of Mars, dry ice is quite the show stopper. Every winter, a layer of carbon dioxide frost (dry ice) forms on the surface of Mars. At its greatest extent, this layer reaches from the poles to around 50 degrees latitude, similar to the latitude of Canada on Earth. This image was taken in the middle of winter in Mars’ Southern Hemisphere. The crater is near 37 degrees south latitude and the south-facing slope of the crater has patches of bright frost that appear blue in enhanced color. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona ALT TEXT: Close up image of a crater on Mars’ surface. The crater is mostly shades of brown and tan, but with enhanced color, there are patches of blue inside the crater. These blue patches are carbon dioxide frost, or dry ice.

Getting answers to big scientific questions – like how warming temperatures change northern forests, or how to recognize the signs in small African farms that could face food insecurity – is @nasaearth scientist Chris Neigh’s favorite part of his job. Doing the science, teasing out information from satellite data with computing, is rewarding too, he said. It’s like BBQ when you just got a new smoker, so many new recipes you’d like to experiment with, and once you get it just right, the final product is the most satisfying part. #NASAEarthling Chris has always enjoyed hiking, camping and being outdoors, but didn’t know that Earth science was something you could make a career of when he started college. At the University of Maryland, he took a couple courses on using satellite data to study our home planet and did internships with Goddard scientists, learned about fieldwork opportunities, and was hooked.

Tonight, a full Moon will light up the night sky. OTD 50 years ago, Apollo 16 lifted off from NASAKennedy to explore the Descartes region of our Moon. As we look up tonight, we’re grateful for all of the great minds that pursued exploration. Image 1: Image of full Moon against night sky. The craters are grey against the white surface.

They both have a supermassive black hole at the center! This spiral galaxy is called M91 and lies approximately 55 million light-years from Earth. The supermassive black hole at the center of this galaxy weighs about 9.6 to 38 millions times as much as our Sun. Credit: NASAHubble, europeanspaceagency, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team ALT TEXT: This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a spiral galaxy called M91 against a field of stars. The arms of the spiral reach down on the left and up on the right. The colors are pink and purple along the outside. In the inside of the spiral, the colors are orange and white. There is a bright white dot in the middle.

When it comes to NASA Hubble, filters are a must for the vivid, colorful images we love to see. Hubble's cameras capture a wide range of wavelengths, visible and invisible, giving scientists information beyond what we could see with our eyes. Color images are created with the help of filters that only let light from specific wavelengths pass through. For example, in this image of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097, a filter at the 555-nanometer wavelength lets green light pass through. Filters yield a grayscale image showing only the amount of light with that wavelength, allowing astronomers to add color when processing the image.

ICYMI NASA’s Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) released its first science image in Feb. Its first target was Cassiopeia A, the remains of a star that exploded in the 17th century. IXPE is on a quest to study some of the most mysterious & extreme objects in the universe – the remnants of supernova explosions, powerful particle streams spit out by feeding black holes, and more.

For a quick Brain Break, take in the sounds of the wind on Mars, captured by the Perseverance rover, and nasahubble’s views of the red planet.

The rocks in this image of the Pilbara in northwestern Australia are some of the oldest rocks on Earth, over 3.6 billion years old. These iron-rich rocks formed before the presence of atmospheric oxygen, and life itself. Fossil stromatolites, or colonies of microbial cyanobacteria, dating to 3.45 billion years ago were found here. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite in Oct. 2004. The instrument was built by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. A joint U.S./Japan science team is responsible for validation and calibration of the instrument and data products.

While we haven’t found evidence of snakes 80 million light-years away, the constellation Serpens lies in the northern celestial hemisphere. 🐍 This galaxy, NGC 5921, is located in the Serpens constellation approximately 80 million light-years from Earth. Serpens is the only one of the 88 modern constellations to consist of two unconnected regions — Serpens Caput and Serpens Cauda. These two regions — whose names mean the Serpent’s Head and the Serpent’s Tail, respectively — are separated by Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. This galaxy, much like our own, contains a prominent bar. Roughly half of all spiral galaxies are thought to contain bars, and these bars affect their parent galaxies by fuelling star formation and affecting the motion of stars and interstellar gas.

Подтвержденный "April showers bring May flowers," but those aren't flowers in the sky! They're actinoform clouds: Huge flower- or wheel-shaped clouds that form over the ocean. No one knows exactly how or why they form, but scientists believe it's due to ocean currents and water temperatures. Off to their right are thin, spiraling von Kármán vortices — cloud formations that appear when winds blow around elevated objects, like islands.