Space Universe🌌

☀️ + 📷 = ? The visible surface of the Sun is called the photosphere! It's about 60 miles deep and dark blotches called sunspots are the most common features seen in the photosphere. Photo is a Greek root word meaning "light"!

Squad Goals.😎 This cosmic group looks like it contains five galaxies, earning it the nickname 'Stephan's Quintet'. About 300 million light-years away, only four of these five galaxies actually interact; the odd man out is easy to spot. The four interacting galaxies have an overall yellowish cast. They also tend to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. But the predominantly bluish galaxy is closer, just 40 million light-years distant, and isn't part of the group.

“It was quite the blowout.” ➡️ to see what glaciologists watched this March, as an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated nearly before their eyes. The ice shelf was in an area of East Antarctica previously considered relatively stable. These images from the joint @nasa/@usgs#Landsat 8 satellite show the region after the break up, on March 23, 2022, and shortly before, on Jan. 9, 2022. It’s likely that a weather system known as an atmospheric river drove some of the fracture, bringing temperatures far above normal, along with enhanced ocean swells and winds. Ice shelves are floating extensions of ice sheets, so when ice shelves disintegrate, they don’t directly raise sea levels. However, they do act as corks in bottles, holding back land ice. When they collapse, glacial ice can start streaming into the ocean.

Clearing away the cosmic dust 🧹 Looking beyond what’s visible to human eyes, astronomers discovered that this spiral galaxy — seen from the side — has an intensely bright center, obscured by dark dust. Galaxy NGC 7172 is known as a Seyfert galaxy, with an active center powered by matter accumulating onto a supermassive black hole. This image combines data from two sets of nasa hubble observations, both of which were proposed to study nearby active galactic nuclei. The image also combines data from two instruments — Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3.

NASA needs people with all different skill sets to contribute to our mission. Womens History Month honors all of the women that have made it possible to stand where we are and the women, like Allison, who are paving the way for the future. Allison Stancil is the Production Lead of Optical Systems Group at NASA Wallops, where she began as an intern in high school. She schedules photo, graphic, and print jobs, in addition to being a photographer herself.

2,200 years ago, there lived an Egyptian queen 👑 Sixty million light-years from Earth lies Constellation Coma Berenices, which translates to “Bernice’s Hair,” named after this queen. This majestic spiral galaxy lives in this constellation, far, far away.

This photo taken by astronauts aboard the @ISS is made up of more than 72 individual long-exposure photographs as the ISS traveled over the Caribbean Sea, across South America, and over the South Atlantic Ocean.

"It's gone ... it's done!" "Yes, Mr. Frodo - it's over now!" Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1955 novel "Return of the King" celebrate March 25th as Tolkien Reading Day, in honor of the day hobbits Frodo and Sam brought the One Ring to the fires of Mount Doom and defeated the Dark Lord Sauron. As it happens, @nasahubble spotted a "ring" of its own in 2020. The "Molten Ring Galaxy" isn't really ring-shaped, but it looks that way because of gravitational lensing, which causes light shining from far away to be bent and pulled by the gravity of an object between its source and the observer. In this case, the light from the background galaxy has been distorted into the curve we see by the gravity of the galaxy cluster sitting in front of it.

Meet Dr. Aleida Higginson, a theorist & modeler in the Heliophysics Science Division.🌞 Her love of studying our Sun began with a summer internship, which exposed her to the creative processes of research. “I stayed in the field because I loved that heliophysics is the perfect bridge between the vast scale of astrophysics and our life here on Earth. It often doesn't occur to people that we do in fact have our very own star that we can study up close!” At NASA, Aleida advances understanding of the Sun's powerful magnetic field. #WomensHistoryMonth 📷 The bright light in the lower right of the Sun shows an X-class solar flare on Oct. 26, 2014, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. This was the third X-class flare in 48 hours, which erupted from the largest active region seen on the Sun in 24 years.

Molly Wasser helps to tell the story of our planets, Moon, and solar system. 🌕 As the Digital Media Lead for the Solar System Exploration Division, Molly develops content and educational campaigns across NASA social media platforms and websites. “STEM is such a broad field. There are so many ways to participate no matter your interests. I grew up loving art and film and then I found out I could make movies about astronomy! I didn't even know that job existed. And now I use my film and astronomy degrees to make Instagram videos about space.” 📷 1: This is Molly’s favorite image of the Moon because it looks like abstract art - but the patterns and shades of gray were created through a ferocious impact. The image was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s narrow angle camera, it’s a mosaic of ejecta from a fresh crater that impacted the southeastern wall of crater Darwin C. Credits: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

📷: Jupiter in infared (left) and visible (right) light taken by the Gemini North telescope and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, respectively. NASA's Juno mission offered the first 3D view of Jupiter's atmosphere. Credits: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/NASA/ESA, M.H. Wong and I. de Pater (UC Berkeley)

“Science and STEM fields are wonderful ways to connect curiosity, problem solving, and love of nature.”