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.
TopicsAMP Stories
Photoshopped NASA Photos Give New Life to Outer-Space Imagery
Remember when you were a kid and you used to stare up into the clouds and pick out shapes and animals? Well Chris Keegan has taken that timeless exercise to whole new level by applying it to photos of space from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Jakob Schiller
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James Oberg
New Horizons Just Sent the Sharpest Pluto Photos It Can Get
These images—the first in a series of high-res shots NASA will release in the coming weeks—are the sharpest humans will ever see of Pluto's surface.
Katie M Palmer
The Gaia Space Telescope Just Changed How You See the Stars
The first star map from the ESA’s Gaia space telescope is poised to revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way galaxy.
Natalie Wolchover
The Year's Most Awesome Photos of Space
For nearly three years, we have been gathering the best, most interesting, most beautiful photographs of space we could find, delivering one of them to you each day. Here are 35 of our favorites among this year's bunch.
Betsy Mason
A Probe Took Incredible Pictures of Mars on Its Way to a Far-Off Asteroid
NASA took advantage of the recent close approach of the Psyche probe to Mars to calibrate its observation instruments.
Jorge Garay
Why Garlic Repels Mosquitoes and Keeps Them From Breeding
Garlic, as your grandmother may have told you, repels mosquitoes; it also completely blocks them from mating and laying eggs. Diallyl disulfide, it turns out, deserves the credit.
Fernanda González
The Universe Is Full of ‘Impossible’ Black Holes. Scientists Now Know Why
There are black holes that are too big to be born from the death of a star but aren’t quite supermassive either. There’s finally evidence for where those came from.
Jorge Garay
Quantum ‘Jamming’ Could Help Unlock the Mysteries of Causality
To keep communications secure in a post-quantum world, cryptographers are digging down into the concept of cause and effect.
Matt von Hippel
The US Has a Plan to Combat Screwworm. It Involves a Lot More Flies
Releasing sterilized flies can crash a local population of flesh-eating screwworms. But the US currently has limited capacity to produce them.
Emily Mullin
Not to Alarm Anyone, but Flesh-Eating Screwworms Have Entered the US
The USDA this week confirmed the first known infection of the carnivorous fly larva, which feast on the flesh of living mammals, after the United States eradicated the nightmare bugs in the 1960s.
Beth Mole, Ars Technica
Old Oil and Gas Wells Could Find Second Life Producing Clean Energy
States across the US are looking to take major sources of pollution and use them to generate much-needed power.
Maria Gallucci