The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) Image Credit: NASA/ESA

The Icy Comet

This image of Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) was taken at the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz

Image credit: NASA/ National Science Foundation

PLUTO (bottom image: lower right) AND ITS MOON, CHARON (top image, bottom image: upper left)

enhanced color images via NEW HORIZONS

98% waning gibbous Moon | 11% waning crescent Moon 

by Bartosz Wojczyński

Nearby dust clouds in the Milky Way

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

is there a smell comparable to space ? i assume we dont know because we would die if we tried to smell it but thats so cool

yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it 

but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!

apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!

The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!

another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system! 

The planet Saturn, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This is Pluto as never seen before in human history.

Two galaxies on a cosmic collision course.

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/S.Mineo et al, Optical: NASA/STScI, Infr

Charting the slow death of the Universe

Paris (SPX) Aug 12, 2015 The study, which is part of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) project, the largest multi-wavelength survey ever put together, involved many of the world’s most powerful telescopes [1]. “We used as many space and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200 000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible,” says Simon Driver ICRA Full article

December 2006: Constructing the Space Station : NASA astronaut Robert Curbeam works on the International Space Station’s S1 truss during the space shuttle Discovery’s STS-116 mission in Dec. 2006. (via NASA)