Io - The Volcanic Moon

Solar System: 10 Things to Know This Week

Need some space? 

Here are 10 perspective-building images for your computer desktop and mobile device wallpaper. 

These are all real images, sent very recently by our planetary missions throughout the solar system. 

1. Our Sun

Warm up with this view from our Solar Dynamics Observatory showing active regions on the Sun in October 2017. They were observed in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light that reveals plasma heated to over a million degrees. 

Downloads  Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

2. Jupiter Up-Close

This series of enhanced-color images shows Jupiter up close and personal, as our Juno spacecraft performed its eighth flyby of the gas giant planet on Sept. 1, 2017. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560  | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

3. Saturn’s and Its Rings

With this mosaic from Oct. 28, 2016, our Cassini spacecraft captured one of its last looks at Saturn and its main rings from a distance. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

4. Gale Crater on Mars

This look from our Curiosity Mars rover includes several geological layers in Gale crater to be examined by the mission, as well as the higher reaches of Mount Sharp beyond. The redder rocks of the foreground are part of the Murray formation. Pale gray rocks in the middle distance of the right half of the image are in the Clay Unit. A band between those terrains is “Vera Rubin Ridge,” where the rover is working currently. The view combines six images taken with the rover’s Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Jan. 24, 2017. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

5. Sliver of Saturn

Cassini peers toward a sliver of Saturn’s sunlit atmosphere while the icy rings stretch across the foreground as a dark band on March 31, 2017. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 7 degrees below the ring plane. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

6. Dwarf Planet Ceres 

This image of the limb of dwarf planet Ceres shows a section of the northern hemisphere, as seen by our Dawn mission. Prominently featured is Occator Crater, home of Ceres’ intriguing “bright spots.” The latest research suggests that the bright material in this crater is comprised of salts left behind after a briny liquid emerged from below. 

Downloads  Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

7. Martian Crater

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows a crater in the region with the most impressive known gully activity in Mars’ northern hemisphere. Gullies are active in the winter due to carbon dioxide frost, but northern winters are shorter and warmer than southern winters, so there is less frost and less gully activity. 

Downloads  Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

8. Dynamic Storm on Jupiter

A dynamic storm at the southern edge of Jupiter’s northern polar region dominates this Jovian cloudscape, courtesy of Juno. This storm is a long-lived anticyclonic oval named North North Temperate Little Red Spot 1. Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

9. Rings Beyond Saturn’s Sunlit Horizon 

This false-color view from the Cassini spacecraft gazes toward the rings beyond Saturn’s sunlit horizon. Along the limb (the planet’s edge) at left can be seen a thin, detached haze. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334 

10. Saturn’s Ocean-Bearing Moon Enceladus

Saturn’s active, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus sinks behind the giant planet in a farewell portrait from Cassini. This view of Enceladus was taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 13, 2017. It is among the last images Cassini sent back before its mission came to an end on Sept. 15, after nearly 20 years in space. 

Downloads Desktop: 1280 x 800 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 Mobile: 1440 x 2560 | 1080 x 1920 | 750 x 1334

Applying Wallpaper: 1. Click on the screen resolution you would like to use. 2. Right-click on the image (control-click on a Mac) and select the option ‘Set the Background’ or 'Set as Wallpaper’ (or similar).

Places to look for more of our pictures include solarsystem.nasa.gov/galleries, images.nasa.gov and www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

10 Spacetime Mysteries That Quantum Gravity Could Solve

“4.) In most approaches to quantum gravity, space-time is not fundamental but made of something else. That might be strings, loops, qbits, or some variant of space-time “atoms” which appear in condensed-matter based approaches. The individual constituents, however, can only be resolved when probed with extremely high energies, far beyond what we can achieve on Earth.”

What is the fundamental nature of the Universe? When it comes to General Relativity, our answer is matter and energy on one hand, and spacetime on the other. But there’s another side to that story: a quantum one. While matter and energy can be discretized into quanta, our notion of spacetime is purely classical. But depending on what our true, fundamental theory of quantum gravity actually is, it could have incredible implications for our Universe. Perhaps we have tiny little black holes popping in and out of existence on a continuous basis; perhaps the vacuum of space isn’t entirely transparent to light; perhaps time turns into space at some level; perhaps wormholes and baby Universes are real. These are mysteries that are currently unresolved, but quantum gravity could provide the answer.

What are the mysteries, and what does it all mean? Sabine Hossenfelder explores, with a fantastic video!

Planet Uranus ♅

Equatorial Diameter: 51.118 km

Satellites: 27

Notable satellites: Oberon, Titania, Miranda, Ariel & Umbriel

Orbit Distance: 2.870.658.186 km (19 AU)

Orbit Period: 84 Earth years

Surface Temperature: -220°C

Discovered Date: March 13th 1781

Discovered By: William Herschel

Image credit: Oscar Malet

Meteor impact craters of the world

An irregular island

This image, courtesy of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), captures the glow of distant stars within NGC 5264, a dwarf galaxy located just over 15 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Serpent).

Dwarf galaxies like NGC 5264 typically possess around a billion stars — just one per cent of the number of stars found within the Milky Way. They are usually found orbiting other, larger, galaxies such as our own, and are thought to form from the material left over from the messy formation of their larger cosmic relatives.

NGC 5264 clearly possesses an irregular shape — unlike the more common spiral or elliptical galaxies — with knots of blue star formation. Astronomers believe that this is due to the gravitational interactions between NGC 5264 and other galaxies nearby. These past flirtations sparked the formation of new generations of stars, which now glow in bright shades of blue.

https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw

Oct. 4, 1957 - Sputnik, the Dawn of the Space Age via NASA http://ift.tt/2hNf1Yq

A wispy and filamentary cloud of gas and dust, the Crab nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion that was observed by Chinese astronomers in the year 1054.

The image combines Hubble’s view of the nebula at visible wavelengths, obtained using three different filters sensitive to the emission from oxygen and sulphur ions and is shown here in blue. Herschel’s far-infrared image reveals the emission from dust in the nebula and is shown here in red.

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

Dunes, peaks and craters on Mars obtained by HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), a camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a significant solar flare as seen in the bright flash on the right on Dec. 19, 2014. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares

js

Secret Chamber? Cosmic Rays Reveal Possible Void Inside Great Pyramid

A large void has been discovered inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, thanks to cosmic rays. If the large space turns out to exist, its function — which could be anything from new chamber to sealed-off construction passage — is likely to be the source of much archaeological debate.  

An international group of researchers reported today (Nov. 2) in the journal Nature that by tracking the movements of particles called muons, they have found an empty space more than 98 feet (30 meters) long that sits right above the granite-walled Grand Gallery within the massive pyramid. The Great Pyramid, also known as Khufu’s pyramid, was built during that pharaoh’s reign between 2509 B.C. and 2483 B.C. No new rooms or passages have been confirmed inside the pyramid since the 1800s.

“The void is there,” said Mehdi Tayoubi, the president of the organization Heritage Innovation Preservation and a leader of the ScanPyramids mission, an ongoing effort to bring new technology to bear on Egypt’s most famous structures. Read more.