An international team of astronomers have discovered a massive gas ball hurtling through a distant galaxy cluster. This ball of gas is traveling more than 750 km/second (466 miles/second) through galaxy cluster Abell 3266. The enormous speed and pressure has heated the gas up to the point that it blazes in the X-ray spectrum. The discovery was made using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite.
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Icy Tail on Enceladus
A plume of water ice is seen streaming off the southern pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus in this photograph. Cassini used very long exposure to capture the wispy stream of vapour, so everything else in the image is overexposed. Cassini took the photograph on May 4, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) from Enceladus.
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Ancient Martian Volcano Caldera
This image, taken by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, shows Apollinaris Patera, an ancient volcano caldera near Gusev Crater on Mars. The massive volcano measures 180 by 280 kilometres (112 by 174 miles) at its base and rises 5 km (3 miles) above the surrounding terrain. The bluish-tinted haze are thin clouds above the rim of the caldera.
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Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae
One of the biggest brightest clusters of stars in the sky is 47 Tucanae, located in the southern constellation of the Toucan. Located about 16,000 light years away, this globular cluster contains a million times the mass of our Sun, and measures 120 light years across. The stars in the cluster are so dense, they average only 1/10th a light year apart; approximately the size of the Solar System. This photograph was taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.
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Highway of Stars in the Sky
A pair of astronomers from the US and Italy have discovered a stream of stars moving through the sky at 230 km/second (500,000 mph). The stream has been found to extend 30,000 light years across the sky, but it could extend even further. The discoverers believe the stream is all the remains of a gigantic star cluster that was torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravity. If correct, there could be hundreds more of these streams circling our galaxy.
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Earth’s Second Moon is About to Leave Us
In addition to the Moon, the Earth also has a collection of co-orbital satellites. These are really nothing more than asteroids briefly captured by the Earth’s gravity. Instead of orbiting the Earth, they take corkscrew paths around our planet, eventually escaping back into the Solar System. One asteroid, 2003 YN107, has been traveling with us since 1999, and now it’s about to depart, building up enough speed to escape the Earth’s gravity.
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Titan Behind Saturn and the Rings
This photograph shows Titan partly obscured behind Saturn and its rings. The image was taken from above the ringplane, and shows the side of the planet unlit by the Sun. Cassini captured this view on May 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.9 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Saturn.
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Supernovae Generated the Universe’s Early Dust
As early as 700 million years after the Big Bang, galaxies were already filled with cosmic dust. But where did it come from? There are two known sources of dust: old stars and supernovae. Astronomers studied nearby supernovae SN 2003gd using the Spitzer space telescope, and found that it had produced tremendous amounts of dust. Since there were many supernovae in the early Universe, they could be the source of all this dust.
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Ancient Life Survived Snowball Earth
Approximately 2.3 billion years ago, bacterial life had generated enough oxygen to make the air breathable for larger creatures. Unfortunately, this was also a stage when our planet went through one of its “Snowball Earth” phases, when the entire planet was encased in kilometer-thick snow and ice. Scientists have found evidence that multi-celled eukaryotes – our distant ancestors – were thriving on Earth, before and after the big chill. While most of the planet was covered, there were probably pockets that were ice free, where islands of life could survive.
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Hubble View of NGC 5866
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this magnificent view of disk galaxy NGC 5866, seen nearly edge on from our vantage point. The galaxy’s dark dust lane is clearly visible, and it appears to be slightly warped, compared to the disk of starlight. This indicates that it probably brushed past another galaxy in the distant past. NGC 5866 is located in the constellation Draco, approximately 44 million light-years away; it’s similar in mass to the Milky Way, but only two-thirds the diameter.
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