Solar System By NASA

Jupiter Swirling Storms l NASA Juno

Two spiral galaxies, NGC 6040 and NGC 6039, are merging together at the right side of this Hubble image. NGC 6039 is seen face-on and is circular in shape. NGC 6040 seems to lie in front of the first one. In the lower-left corner, cut off by the frame, the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041 — a central member of the galaxy cluster that Arp 122 resides in — appears as light radiating from a point. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions

okay so. does anybody remember this creepy image? and yes, it's real, by the way.

this is barnard 68, a dark nebula that does not allow light to pass through. it's quite close to us too, and so dense that the stars behind it can't be observed from earth. it's just a molecular cloud, though! looks like a tear in the fabric of existence itself, but it's just a very big dark blob of gas floating in space. barnard 68 is often confused with the boötes void, which is also referred to as "the great nothing".

what's that, you say? oh, well... it's a region in space about 330 million light years wide. this is about 0.27% of the width of the entire observable universe. an area this large is expected to have around 2000 galaxies, but this one only has 60. everything else is just... dead, empty space.

okay, what if i told you that we actually are within a void ourselves? it's called the kbc void. another name is uhh.. local hole. anyways. it's theoretically the largest void we know of, about 2 billion light years across. it's extremely speculative, but it might account for the hubble tension; that is, shit seems to be flying away from us faster than it should be.

some people claim other things cause the discrepancy in our observations of the hubble constant, some debate whether it's consistent with our current cosmological model at all. it isn't completely accepted by the astrophysics community, but it's not a preposterous claim to make either. i personally think it's cool.

maybe shit does fly away faster from us because we live in a local hole. the rest of the universe is an intergalactic party, and we're not invited.

Neptune's rings & moon Triton © Voyager 2

Cosmic Delights and Distant Discoveries Unfold in ‘Astronomy Photographer of the Year 15’

Interacting galaxies

SPACEMAS DAY 2 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

There's a new space telescope in the sky: Euclid. Equipped with two large panoramic cameras, Euclid captures light from the visible all the way to the near-infrared. It took five hours of observing for Euclid's 1.2-meter diameter primary mirror to capture, the 1000+ galaxies in the Perseus cluster which lies 250 million light years away. More than 100,000 galaxies are visible in the background, some as far away as 10 billion light years. Euclid's initial surveys, covering a third of the sky and recording over 2 billion galaxies, will enable a study of how dark matter and dark energy have shaped our universe.

Image Credit: ESA, NASA

NASA's monster garage, 1980.

The Milky Way in the direction of Vulpecula and Cygnus // AC1000