“We Used To Look Up At The Sky And Wonder At Our Place In The Stars. Now We Just Look Down, And Worry

The Belt of Venus is a pink glowing arch seen across the sky when the shadow of the Earth’s translucent atmosphere casts a shadow back upon itself.

Views of Pluto

10 Images to Celebrate the Historic Exploration of the Pluto System

One year ago, our New Horizons mission made history by exploring Pluto and its moons – giving humankind our first close-up look at this fascinating world on the frontier of our solar system.

Since those amazing days in July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft has transmitted numerous images and many other kinds of data home for scientists and the public alike to study, analyze, and just plain love. From Pluto’s iconic “heart” and sweeping ice-mountain vistas to its flowing glaciers and dramatic blue skies, it’s hard to pick just one favorite picture. So the mission team has picked 10 – and in no special order, placed them here.

Click the titles for more information about each image. You’ve seen nine of them before, and the team added a 10th favorite, also sure to become one of New Horizons’ “greatest hits.”

Vast Glacial Flows

In the northern region of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum, swirl-shaped patterns of light and dark suggest that a surface layer of exotic ices has flowed around obstacles and into depressions, much like glaciers on Earth.

Jagged Ice Shorelines and Snowy Pits

This dramatic image from our New Horizons spacecraft shows the dark, rugged highlands known as Krun Macula (lower right), which border a section of Pluto’s icy plains.

Blue Skies

Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan.

Charon Becomes a Real World

At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more. 

The Vistas of Pluto

Our New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The backlighting highlights over a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere.

The Dynamic Duo: Pluto and Charon in Enhanced Color

The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. 

Strange Snakeskin Terrain

A moment’s study reveals surface features that appear to be texturally ‘snakeskin’-like, owing to their north-south oriented scaly raised relief. A digital elevation model created by the New Horizons’ geology shows that these bladed structures have typical relief of about 550 yards (500 meters). Their relative spacing of about 3-5 kilometers makes them some of the steepest features seen on Pluto.

Pluto’s Heart

This view is dominated by the large, bright feature informally named the “heart,” which measures approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart borders darker equatorial terrains, and the mottled terrain to its east (right) are complex. However, even at this resolution, much of the heart’s interior appears remarkably featureless—possibly a sign of ongoing geologic processes.

Far Away Snow-Capped Mountains

One of Pluto’s most identifiable features, Cthulhu (pronounced kuh-THU-lu) stretches nearly halfway around Pluto’s equator, starting from the west of the great nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum. Measuring approximately 1,850 miles (3,000 kilometers) long and 450 miles (750 kilometers) wide, Cthulhu is a bit larger than the state of Alaska.

Colorful Composition Maps of Pluto

The powerful instruments on New Horizons not only gave scientists insight on what Pluto looked like, their data also confirmed (or, in many cases, dispelled) their ideas of what Pluto was made of. These compositional maps – assembled using data from the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) component of the Ralph instrument – indicate the regions rich in ices of methane (CH4), nitrogen (N2) and carbon monoxide (CO),  and, of course, water ice (H2O).

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We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.

Interstellar (2014) dir. Christopher Nolan

Gravitational Waves.

M104, the Sombrero Galaxy

Credit: Jimmy Walker

Using the advanced adaptive optics system on the Gemini South telescope, astronomers have imaged a beautiful stellar jewel-box – a tightly packed cluster of stars that is one of the few places in our galaxy where astronomers think stars can actually collide. Stellar collisions are important because they can provide the key to understand the origin of exotic objects that cannot be interpreted in terms of the passive evolution of single stars. read more here credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA 

Visible light emitted from a black hole has been detected for the first time

Got a decent telescope at home? That's all you need to observe a nearby black hole.

For the first time, astronomers have observed bursts of visible light being released by a black hole as it swallows matter from nearby stars.

These flashes of light, which lasted between several minutes to a few hours, were seen coming from a black hole in the Cygnus constellation, located about 7,800 light-years away from Earth. Incredibly, some of the flashes were so bright, the team says amateur astronomers could see them with a modest 20-cm telescope.

“We find that activity in the vicinity of a black hole can be observed in optical light at low luminosity for the first time,” astronomer and lead researcher, Mariko Kimura from Kyoto University in Japan, told Charles Q. Choi at Space.com.

“These findings suggest that we can study physical phenomena that occur in the vicinity of the black hole using moderate optical telescopes without high-spec X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes.”

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All Quiet in the Nursery?

The dark patch snaking across this spectacular image of a field of stars in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent-bearer) is not quite what it appears to be.

Although it looks as if there are no stars here, they are hidden behind this dense cloud of dust that blocks out their light. This particular dark cloud is known as LDN 1768.

Despite their rather dull appearance, dark nebulae like LDN 1768 are of huge interest to astronomers, as it is here that new stars form. Inside these vast stellar nurseries there are protostars — stars at the earliest stage of their lives, still coalescing out of the gas and dust in the cloud.

Eventually, the protostars will become dense and hot enough to start the nuclear reactions that will produce visible light and they will start to shine. When this happens, they will blow away the cocoon of dust surrounding them and cause any remaining gas to emit light as well, creating the spectacular light show known as an HII region.

Credit: ESO