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Mexico: Baja California Sur, and The Gulf of California | SpaceX Crew-5 Dragon
This view from a window on the SpaceX Dragon Freedom crew ship looks out at Baja California Sur and the Gulf of California as the International Space Station orbited 261 miles above the Pacific Ocean.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Learn more about the important research being operated on ISS:
Gravitational Lensing: Seeing Quintuple—5 Views of Quasar 2M1310-1714 | Hubble
Clustered at the center of this image are six luminous spots of light, four of them forming a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but only three: to be precise, a pair of galaxies and one distant quasar. Hubble data also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is caused by the presence of two galaxies in the foreground that act as a lens.
These galaxies were imaged in spectacular detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. The WFC3 was intended to operate until 2014, but 12 years after it was installed it continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images, such as this one.
The central pair of galaxies in this image are genuinely two separate galaxies. The four bright points circling them, and the fainter one in the very center, are actually five separate images of a single quasar (known as 2M1310-1714), an extremely luminous but distant object. The reason behind this “seeing quintuple” effect is a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object with an enormous amount of mass—such as a pair of galaxies—causes the fabric of space to warp such that the light travelling through that space from a distant object is bent and magnified sufficiently that humans here on Earth can observe multiple magnified images of the far-away source. The quasar in this image actually lies further away from Earth than the pair of galaxies. The light from the quasar has been bent around the galaxy pair because of their enormous mass, giving the incredible appearance that the galaxy pair are surrounded by four quasars—whereas in reality, a single quasar lies far beyond them!
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu
Gravitational Lensing: Seeing Quintuple—5 Views of Quasar 2M1310-1714 | Hubble
Clustered at the center of this image are six luminous spots of light, four of them forming a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but only three: to be precise, a pair of galaxies and one distant quasar. Hubble data also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is caused by the presence of two galaxies in the foreground that act as a lens.
These galaxies were imaged in spectacular detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. The WFC3 was intended to operate until 2014, but 12 years after it was installed it continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images, such as this one.
The central pair of galaxies in this image are genuinely two separate galaxies. The four bright points circling them, and the fainter one in the very center, are actually five separate images of a single quasar (known as 2M1310-1714), an extremely luminous but distant object. The reason behind this “seeing quintuple” effect is a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object with an enormous amount of mass—such as a pair of galaxies—causes the fabric of space to warp such that the light travelling through that space from a distant object is bent and magnified sufficiently that humans here on Earth can observe multiple magnified images of the far-away source. The quasar in this image actually lies further away from Earth than the pair of galaxies. The light from the quasar has been bent around the galaxy pair because of their enormous mass, giving the incredible appearance that the galaxy pair are surrounded by four quasars—whereas in reality, a single quasar lies far beyond them!
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu
Quasar: a very bright object in space that is similar to a star and very far away from Earth. A quasar gives off powerful radio waves. A quasar is so bright that it drowns out the light from all stars in the same galaxy. Quasars give off more energy than 100 normal galaxies combined.
Because quasars are so far away from us, it takes billions of years for the light they give off to reach Earth. The light stays the same, it just has to travel a long time to get to us. When we look at a quasar, it is like we are looking back in time. The light we see today is what the quasar looked like billions of years ago. Some scientists think that when they study quasars they are studying the beginning of the universe.
Quasars give off huge amounts of energy. They can be a trillion times brighter than the Sun! Astronomers think that quasars are located in galaxies which have black holes at their centers. The black holes may provide quasars with their energy. The word quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source. Quasars give off radio waves, X-rays, gamma-rays, ultraviolet rays, and visible light. Most of them are larger than our solar system.
Despite their brightness, due to their great distance from Earth, no quasars can be seen with an unaided eye.
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen)
Quasar: a very bright object in space that is similar to a star and very far away from Earth. A quasar gives off powerful radio waves. A quasar is so bright that it drowns out the light from all stars in the same galaxy. Quasars give off more energy than 100 normal galaxies combined.
Because quasars are so far away from us, it takes billions of years for the light they give off to reach Earth. The light stays the same, it just has to travel a long time to get to us. When we look at a quasar, it is like we are looking back in time. The light we see today is what the quasar looked like billions of years ago. Some scientists think that when they study quasars they are studying the beginning of the universe.
Quasars give off huge amounts of energy. They can be a trillion times brighter than the Sun! Astronomers think that quasars are located in galaxies which have black holes at their centers. The black holes may provide quasars with their energy. The word quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source. Quasars give off radio waves, X-rays, gamma-rays, ultraviolet rays, and visible light. Most of them are larger than our solar system.
Despite their brightness, due to their great distance from Earth, no quasars can be seen with an unaided eye.
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser
Bright Quasar 3C 273—Distance: 2.5 Billion Light Years | Hubble
Quasars are capable of emitting hundreds or even thousands of times the entire energy output of our galaxy, making them some of the most luminous and energetic objects in the entire Universe. Of these very bright objects, 3C 273 is the brightest in our skies. If it was located 30 light-years from our own planet—roughly seven times the distance between Earth and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us after the Sun—it would still appear as bright as the Sun in the sky.
This image from Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is likely one of the best of the ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.
The term quasar is an abbreviation of the phrase “quasi-stellar radio source”, as they appear to be star-like on the sky. In fact, quasars are the intensely powerful centers of distant, active galaxies, powered by a huge disc of particles surrounding a supermassive black hole. As material from this disc falls inwards, some quasars— including 3C 273—have been observed to fire off super-fast jets into the surrounding space. In this picture, one of these jets appears as a cloudy streak, measuring some 200,000 light-years in length.
WFPC2 was installed on Hubble during shuttle mission STS-61. It is the size of a small piano and was capable of seeing images in the visible, near-ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.
This image is a composite of visible (or optical), radio, and X-ray data of the giant elliptical galaxy, M87. M87 lies at a distance of 54 million light-years and is the largest galaxy in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Bright jets moving at close to the speed of light are seen at all wavelengths coming from the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. It has also been identified with the strong radio source, Virgo A, and is a powerful source of X-rays as it resides near the center of a hot, X-ray emitting cloud that extends over much of the Virgo cluster. The extended radio emission consists of plumes of relativistic (extremely hot) gas from the jets rising into the X-ray emitting cluster medium.
The optical data of M87 were obtained with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in visible and infrared filters (data courtesy of P. Cote (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics) and E. Baltz (Stanford University)). Wide-field optical data of the center of the Virgo Cluster were also provided by R. Gendler (Copyright Robert Gendler 2006). The X-ray data were acquired from the Chandra X-ray Observatory's AXAF CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS), and were provided by J. Forman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) et al. The radio data were obtained by W. Cotton and also archive processing using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array (NRAO/VLA) near Socorro, New Mexico.
Credits: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and Z. Levay (STScI)
Science Credit: Radio: NRAO/AUI/NSF/W. Cotton; X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/W. Forman et al.; Optical: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler
Zooming into the Black Hole Jet in Elliptical Galaxy M87 | Hubble
This video begins with a view of the stars and galaxies in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). We zoom into the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, which lies near the center of the Virgo cluster of galaxies. A high-speed jet of hot plasma is buried deep inside the galaxy. A supermassive black hole ejects the jet at nearly the speed of light.
This NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope time-lapse video captures the movement of the jet over a timespan of 13 years.
Distance:54 million light years
Credits:
NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and G. Bacon/Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Constellation Region of Galaxy M87 Credit: A. Fujii
Galaxy M87 Credit: R. Gendler
Hubble View of M87 Jet Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Meyer, W. Sparks, J. Biretta, J. Anderson, S.T. Sohn, and R. van der Marel (STScI), C. Norman (Johns Hopkins University), and M. Nakamura (Academia Sinica), and G. Bacon (STScI)
A Cosmic Searchlight: Black Hole-powered Jet from Galaxy M87 | Hubble
Streaming out from the center of the galaxy M87 like a cosmic searchlight is one of nature's most amazing phenomena, a black-hole-powered jet of electrons and other sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. In this Hubble telescope image, the blue jet contrasts with the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unseen stars and the yellow, point-like clusters of stars that make up this galaxy. Lying at the center of M87, the monstrous black hole has swallowed up matter equal to 2 billion times our Sun's mass. M87 is 54 million light-years from Earth.
Credit: The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and NASA/European Space Agency (ESA)
Lord of The Stars: Monstrous Elliptical Galaxy M87 | Hubble
The monstrous elliptical galaxy M87 is the home of several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole, and family of 13,000 globular star clusters. M87 is the dominant galaxy at the center of the neighboring Virgo Cluster of galaxies, which contains some 2,000 galaxies.
Distance:54 million light years
Amid the smooth yellow population of older stars, the two features that stand out most in this Hubble Space Telescope image of M87 are its soft blue jet and the myriad of starlike globular clusters scattered throughout the image. The jet is a black-hole-powered stream of material that is being ejected from the core of the galaxy.
As gaseous material from the center of the galaxy accretes onto the black hole, the resultant energy released produces a fire-hose stream of subatomic particles that are accelerated to velocities near the speed of light.
Being in the center of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M87 may have accumulated some of its globular clusters by gravitationally pulling them from nearby dwarf galaxies that seem to be devoid of globulars today.
The 120,000-light-year-diameter galaxy lies at a distance of 54 million light-years from the Sun in the spring constellation Virgo.
This image was made from data taken in 2003 and 2006 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The image is a composite of individual filtered data that cover the visible and infrared portions of the spectrum.
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: P. Cote (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics) and E. Baltz (Stanford University)
NASA's SpaceX Crew-5 Mission: New Launch Week Photos
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft was launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata (Japan), and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina (Russia) onboard, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission is the fifth crew rotation mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. Mann, Cassada, Wakata, and Kikini have begun a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Learn more about the important research being operated on ISS:
Waxing Crescent Moon above the Atlantic Ocean | International Space Station
The waxing crescent Moon is pictured from the International Space Station as it orbited 267 miles above the Atlantic Ocean southwest of South Africa during an orbital sunrise.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
A New Crew Launches to the International Space Station | This Week @NASA
October 7, 2022: Launching a new crew to the International Space Station, the plan moving forward for Artemis I, and Webb’s new look at a pair of galaxies . . . a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA!
The hatch of SpaceX’s Crew-5 “Endurance” Crew Dragon spacecraft, with NASA astronauts Nicole Aunapu Mann and Josh Cassada, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata (Japan) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina (Russia), was opened on October 6, 2022, at 6:49 p.m. EDT/22:49 UTC. Crew-5 is SpaceX’s fifth operational mission for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Mann, Cassada, Wakata, and Kikina have joined the Expedition 68 crew of NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, Frank Rubio, and Jessica Watkins, Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA), and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. For a short time, the number of crew on the space station will increase to 11 people until Crew-4 departs.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
The three pictured galaxies—NGC 7173 (middle left), NCG 7174 (middle right) and NGC 7176 (lower right)—are part of the Hickson Compact Group 90, named after astronomer Paul Hickson, who first cataloged these small clusters of galaxies in the 1980s.
Distance:120 million light years
Note: The full dome video display format is designed for projection systems in planetariums.
The three pictured galaxies—NGC 7173 (middle left), NCG 7174 (middle right) and NGC 7176 (lower right)—are part of the Hickson Compact Group 90, named after astronomer Paul Hickson, who first catalogued these small clusters of galaxies in the 1980s. NGC 7173 and NGC 7176 appear to be smooth, normal elliptical galaxies without much gas and dust. In stark contrast, NGC 7174 is a mangled spiral galaxy, barely clinging to independent existence as it is ripped apart by its close neighbors. The strong tidal interaction surging through the galaxies has dragged a significant number of stars away from their home galaxies. These stars are now spread out, forming a tenuous luminous component in the galaxy group.
Distance:120 million light years
Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and R. Sharples (University of Durham, U.K.)
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