Gallery: Space Photos of the Week: Crab Nebula's Got An Exploding Heart
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasas-hubble-captures-the-beating-heart-of-the-crab-nebula"> NASA & ESA</a>01SPoW-June8-01b.jpg
Peering deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, this close-up image reveals the beating heart of one of the most historic and intensively studied remnants of a supernova, an exploding star. The inner region sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and tsunamis of charged particles embedded in magnetic fields. The neutron star at the very center of the Crab Nebula has about the same mass as the sun but compressed into an incredibly dense sphere that is only a few miles across. Spinning 30 times a second, the neutron star shoots out detectable beams of energy that make it look like it's pulsating.
<a href="http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news-detail.html?id=6560">NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA</a>02SPoW-June8-09.jpg
Scientists with NASA's Dawn mission have identified permanently shadowed regions on the dwarf planet Ceres (indicated by blue markings). Most of these areas likely have been cold enough to trap water ice for a billion years, suggesting that ice deposits could exist there now.
<a href="http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/07/Malaspina_Glacier">ESA</a>03SPoW-June8-05.jpg
The Sentinel-2A satellite takes us over southeastern Alaska to the Malaspina Glacier. Malaspina is a piedmont glacier – meaning that ice flows down a steep valley and spills out onto a relatively flat plain. It is the largest of its kind, with an area of about 1505 square miles. In this false-color image, red depicts vegetated areas while purple shows rock. The wavy purple lines around the lower half of the glacier are rock, soil and other debris that have been deposited by the glacier – called moraines.
<a href="http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/07/Enceladus_and_its_paper-thin_crust">LPG-CNRS-U. Nantes/Charles U., Prague</a>04SPoW-June8-02.jpg
Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a thin, icy crust. Buried beneath it is a global ocean of water, and at its south poles, huge geysers of water jet into space. These come from the ocean depths and suggest that the ice there must be relatively thin for this to happen. This picture of Enceladus, created by Cassini’s high-resolution camera, is colored to show the varying thickness of the moon’s surface. According to the model, the thickness varies between about 2.1 miles in the cratered equatorial regions (yellow) to less than 3 miles in the active south polar terrain (blue).
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This image of dark dunes on Mars was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A circular depression (probably an old and infilled impact crater) has limited the amount of sand available for dune formation and influenced local winds. As a result, the dunes here form distinct dots and dashes.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/napartak-nw-pacific-ocean">NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response</a>06SPoW-June8-06.jpg
This is a thermal image of Typhoon Nepartak as it approached Taiwan on July 7. The MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite reads cloud top temperatures, enabling scientists to learn where the strongest storms are located within a typhoon. The colder the cloud tops, the higher they are in the troposphere and the stronger the storms.
