Space Universe🌌

This NASA Hubble image shows an infant star consisting of an incandescent jet of gas traveling at supersonic speeds. As the jet collides with material surrounding the still-forming star, the shock heats this material & causes it to glow. The result is colorfully wispy structures! The data in this image are from a set of Hubble observations of four nearby bright jets with the Wide Field Camera 3 taken to help pave the way for future science with @NASAWebb. Webb – which will observe at predominantly infrared wavelengths – will be able to peer into the dusty envelopes surrounding still-forming protostars, revolutionizing the study of jets from these young stars. Hubble’s high-resolution images of objects like these will help astronomers interpret future observations with Webb.

City of stars, are you shining just for me? 💫 An image taken by NASA Hubble shows a lenticular galaxy, NGC 1947. Lenticular galaxies like NGC 1947 are between a spiral and elliptical shape. Despite being home to millions of stars, NGC 1947 has lost most of its star-forming material, leaving this galaxy to continue to fade with time.

This image taken by NASA Hubble shows NGC 4826—a spiral galaxy located 17 million light-years away. This galaxy is often referred to as the “Black Eye” or “Evil Eye” galaxy because of the dark band of dust that sweeps across one side of its bright nucleus.

Swipe to see this image embroidered! This image of canola in bloom near Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada was captured by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 on July 23, 2019. And, it was later embroidered by Goddard social media specialist Katy Mersmann. One of Katy’s hobbies is embroidery and for inspiration, she uses climate and Earth science data. Today, we’re celebrating #WomensHistoryMonth with this fun combination of work and play. “I think there’s a really cool confluence between traditionally women’s crafts and also the STEM fields. I love embroidering something and sending pictures of it to one of the scientists I work with being like, ‘Hey! I put your data in fabric.’

“Hubble hasn't just changed the field of astronomy; it's really changed all of our perceptions of the universe and our place in it.” To celebrate #WomensHistoryMonth, we’re highlighting Elizabeth Tammi, the social media lead for @NASAHubble. She grew up near Florida’s Space Coast and was interested in space science from an early age. She started with an internship at NASA that led her to her current position. Elizabeth’s favorite part of her job is connecting with the public about the Hubble mission. “Finding ways to share new discoveries and images, while also communicating the legacy of such a groundbreaking and ongoing mission, is super rewarding and always exciting.” Elizabeth’s favorite Hubble image, pictured above, is of the Bubble Nebula!

The LAMP mission, short for Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations, launched from Alaska on Saturday, Mar. 5, at 6:27 a.m. EST on a suborbital sounding rocket. Our scientist from NASA Goddard said good data was received for their experiment! The mission hopes to understand an often overlooked kind of aurora, called a pulsating aurora, and to test a theory on what causes them

Centaurus A is the result of two galaxies that merged nearly 100 million years ago.💫 At the core of the misshapen elliptical galaxy is an active supermassive black hole, made visible by this multiwavelength image. The image depicts spectacular jets of material erupting from its core, sending material into space well beyond the galaxy's limits! With upcoming observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light, researchers hope to better pinpoint the mass of the galaxy's central supermassive black hole as well as gather evidence that shows where the jets originate.

These twin galaxies, NGC 4496A & B are in the center of the frame of this image from NASA Hubble. Even though these galaxies look like they are close together, they are at vastly different distances from both Earth and one another. NGC 4496A is 47 million light-years from Earth while NGC 4496B is 212 million light-years away. These galaxies aren’t interacting due to the distance between them, but appear to overlap in this image due to a chance alignment. This gives astronomers an opportunity to observe the distribution of dust in these galaxies. Dust absorbs starlight, making stars seem dimmer and shifting their light towards longer wavelengths. By measuring how starlight from background galaxies is affected by dust in intervening galaxies, astronomers can map out where the dust is in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms. The resulting “dust maps” help astronomers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars populating galaxies.

Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, covering 10,000 square kilometers. Abundant rainfall around the Altiplano (a wide and high part of the Andes) had the Salar de Uyuni brimming nearly to its edges, above normal levels. “This was probably related to the onset of a significant La Niña event. Strong La Niñas during the rainy season are related to positive rainfall anomalies in the southern Altiplano,” said hydrologist Jorge Molina Carpio of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés.

This image shows numerous small clouds, letting us see a rising column of air as tiny water droplets. These are known as towering cumulus clouds. Some very large thunderstorms appear toward the background of the photo, and several have extensive “table-top” features known as anvil clouds. These flat cloud surfaces develop when rising air reaches a level in the atmosphere where it is prevented from rising further.

A head-on collision between two galaxies fueled a triangular-shaped group of new stars forming. In this new image from NASA Hubble, astronomers suggest that these two galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm in NGC 2445 (the galaxy on the right), where thousands of stars are bursting to life. The galaxy on the right hasn’t escaped the one on the left (NGC 2444).

A Black Brant IX sounding rocket is set to launch this week from Alaska carrying the LAMP mission. LAMP, short for "Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations, will study an often-overlooked kind of aurora. Auroras come in different shapes and colors, waving their ribbons of vibrant green, red, and purple across the sky. But one variety of aurora displays a peculiar behavior: it pulsates. Like all aurora, pulsating aurora are set alight by electrons (and occasionally protons) from near-Earth space. These electrons plunge into our atmosphere and collide with atoms and molecules, causing them to glow in their distinctive colors – red and green by oxygen, blue by nitrogen – as they release their excess energy.