Space Photos of the Week
A close-up look at the universe’s many wonders, from nearby planets to faraway galaxies.
- NASA/JPL-Caltech01Jupiter’s storms are truly dazzling. This tempest, rotating counter-clockwise, is located in the planet’s Northern hemisphere and is truly enormous—for scale, each pixel in this image is 4.2 miles across.
- ESA02Mars might no longer have active volcanoes, but the “stretch marks” visible in this photo are remnants of when volcanic activity pulled apart the planet’s crust. This region, known as Sirenum Fossae, is located in Mars’ southern hemisphere.
- ESO03Terraformers, take note: Scientists recently discovered Ross 128b, an Earth-like planet just 11 light years away. The small dot in the center of the image is the red dwarf star it orbits around.
- NASA04Tiny moon alert\! This image of Mars captures one of its moons, Phobos, mid-orbit. That repeating pattern of dots in the top left of the image is actually the small irregularly shaped moon in transit around Mars.
- ESO05COSMOS-Gr30 is a bizarre and complex cluster of 10 galaxies. The colorful space bubble stretches out three times as wide as our own Milky Way, making it the largest bubble of ionized gas ever discovered.
- NASA06Coronal holes like this one are openings in the sun where parts of the star’s magnetic field loop outward but don’t return. The highly charged particles flung from these holes collide with Earth at speeds averaging 900,000 mph, generating our famed polar auroras.
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