SPoW_June22_2017
01The spiral galaxy ESO 486-21 is located some 30 million light-years from Earth. It’s constantly forming new stars, created when large clouds of gas and dust within the galaxy crumple inwards upon themselves.
02In this image, the gravity of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J2129-0741 magnifies, brightens, and distorts the far-distant galaxy MACS2129-1. With the aid of this “natural lens” and Hubble, astronomers discovered the first example of a giant “dead” galaxy, which stopped making stars a few billion years after the Big Bang.
03An enhanced-color image of Jupiter from the JunoCam reveals bands of clouds with three raging oval storms dubbed the “String of Pearls.” Each of the light and dark atmospheric bands is wider than Earth, tearing around the planet at hundreds of miles per hour.
04An enhanced-color composite photo from Pancam on NASA’s Mars exploration rover Opportunity during the mission’s “walkabout” survey of Endeavor Crater. The rover will examine rocks at the edge of the 14-mile-across crater to see if they were possibly transported by flood or eroded in place by wind.
05NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sits in front of the door to Chamber A, a giant thermal vacuum chamber located at the Johnson Space Center. The telescope will spend a hot Houston summer undergoing tests at sub-freezing cryogenic temperatures, simulating the below -370 degrees Fahrenheit it will experience in space.
06The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this photo of the Mars’ rugged surface. The shot is a tiny part of a much larger structure known as an inverted crater, which is a crater that’s filled by material that is more resistant to erosion than the rocks around it. It surrounded by bluish basaltic dunes giving the crater the appearance of waves crashing on shore.
