OrbitalHub

NASA dicit:

Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The deep-sky mosaic, created from nearly 7,500 individual exposures, provides a wide portrait of the distant universe, containing 265,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the big bang. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The universe’s evolutionary history is also chronicled in this one sweeping view. The portrait shows how galaxies change over time, building themselves up to become the giant galaxies seen in the nearby universe.

This ambitious endeavor, called the Hubble Legacy Field, also combines observations taken by several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, capturing the key features of galaxy assembly over time.

Video Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and G. Bacon (STScI)

Three of the world’s largest radio telescopes team up to show a rare double asteroid. 2017 YE5 is only the fourth binary near-Earth asteroid ever observed in which the two bodies are roughly the same size, and not touching. This video shows radar images of the pair gathered by Goldstone Solar System Radar, Arecibo Observatory and Green Bank Observatory.

Video Credit: NASA

An amateur radio-astronomer from Northern Ontario received this image from Starman and the Falcon Heavy test payload.

There are rumors that SpaceX is developing a revolutionary propulsion system. Clearly, the Falcon Heavy test launch was an opportunity to test this new drive. The payload with Elon Musk’s roadster was the perfect decoy for a mission like this.

In terms of drive performance, the roadster was able to reach the Saturn system in a little more than a year. It took Cassini seven years to reach Saturn. When Earth and Saturn are closest, the distance between them is approximately 1.2 billion kilometers. We can conclude that the roadster drive must be a remarkable piece of engineering. It could be the scientific breakthrough that will allow humans to colonize the Solar System.

Image credit: Zgabeartza Iftode

NASA dicit:

This visualization displays a simulation of the dust ring at Venus’s orbit around the Sun. Scientists hypothesize a group of never-before-detected asteroids orbiting the Sun with Venus are responsible for supplying Venus’s dust ring.

Video Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman

NASA dicit:

On the evening of March 6, 2019, the Moon started to transit the Sun, then doubled back and retraced its steps in the other direction — at least, that’s what it looked like from the perspective of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, in orbit around Earth. The relative speeds and positions of the Moon, the Sun and NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory resulted in this unusual lunar transit where the Moon appears to pause and reverse course.

Video Credit: NASA

NASA dicit:

“New research from the up-close Grand Finale orbits of NASA’s Cassini mission shows a surprisingly powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus. Researchers converted the recording of plasma waves into a “whooshing” audio file that we can hear — in the same way a radio translates electromagnetic waves into music. Much like air or water, plasma (the fourth state of matter) generates waves to carry energy. The recording was captured by the Radio Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument September 2, 2017, two weeks before Cassini was deliberately plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn.”

Video Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Iowa