Tag: Where In the Universe?

Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here’s #67! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

This colorful image is of NGC 346, the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic cloud, a dwar galaxy that orbits the Milky Way at a distance of 210,000 light-years. It combines X-ray, infrared and visible light captured by ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope — so a composite from space- and ground-based telescopes.

This images was released in October 2008 and it provides a new information on how stars in the Universe form. This image shows that wind- and radiation-induced star formation are at play in the same cloud, telling astronomers that star formation is a complicated process comprising different competitive and collaborative mechanisms.

Learn more about his image here.

Thanks for participating in this week’s WITU challenge, and check back next week for another test of your visual knowledge of the cosmos!

I’m a day late (sorry!) but here’s this week’s image for the Where In The Universe Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

This is a dust devil on Mars, captured by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The white mass is a swirling vortex of dust, and the darker line is a shadow cast by this swirling column of dust. This image is from some of the newest releases by HiRISE, see them all here. Find out more about this particular image here.

Check back next week for another WITU challenge!

Here’s this week’s image for the WITU Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. Take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from. This one is a little different, but several readers sent it in, suggesting we use it. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

This is a model of an exploding star’s core created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory developed to help show what happens inside core-collapse supernovae. The model was made using the lab’s IBM Blue Gene/P machine, currently ranked seventh on a list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Argonne’s Blue Gene/P boasts more than 160,000 processors, as many as would be found in Giants Stadium were it filled to capacity with people toting dual-core laptops.

To find out more about this images see this article in Scientific American.

It’s time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. Test your visual knowledge of the cosmos by naming where in the Universe this image was taken and give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for this picture. Post your guesses in the comments section, and check back later at this same post to find the answer. To make this challenge fun for everyone, please don’t include links or extensive explanations with your answer. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

This is a false color picture of Callisto, taken by Voyager 2 on July 7, 1979 from about 1,094,666 kilometers (677,000 miles) away. The surface of Callisto is the most heavily battered and cratered of the Jupiter’s moons and resembles ancient heavily cratered terrains on the Moon, Mercury and Mars. The bright areas are ejecta thrown out by relatively young impact craters. A large ringed structure, probably an impact basin, is shown in the upper left part of the picture.

How’d you do?

Check back next week for another WITU Challenge!

Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here’s #63! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below

This is the Bullet Cluster, as seen by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. This image is very fitting for this week, as Chandra is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary. What you’re seeing here is two large clusters of galaxies that have crashed into one another at extremely high velocities. At a relatively close distance from Earth (3.8 billion light years away) and with a favorable side-on orientation as viewed from Earth, the Bullet Cluster provides an excellent test site to search for something very interesting: the signal for antimatter. Find out more about that and the image here.

If you enjoyed this week’s WITU Challenge, check back next for another test of your visual knowledge of the cosmos!

Here’s this week’s image for the WITU Challenge, to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

If you need some more challenges, look back at all previous 61 Where In the Universe Challenges.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below

This the is Apollo 11 anniversary edition of WITU!

This is a microscopic look at one of the Moon rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts. It shows a glass spherule (about 0.6 mm in diameter) produced by a meteorite impact into lunar soil. Features on the surface are glass splashes, welded mineral fragments, and microcraters produced by space weathering processes at the surface of the moon.

The astronauts brought back 841 pounds of rocks from the lunar surface, and scientists say the rocks are completely unique and couldn’t have come from Earth. There is little or no water in these rocks, plus they are peppered with tiny micrometeorite hits, as seen on this sample. This could only happen to rocks from a planet with little or no atmosphere… like the Moon.

Enjoy the Apollo 11 anniversary hubbub and come back next week for another WITU challenge!

Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here’s #60! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek before you make your guess!

This is an image of clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The features here are called “cloud streets,” this type of cumulus clouds form when cold air from the ice blows over the open ocean, chilling the moist air. As the temperature drops, water freezes into tiny clouds, which are arranged in neat rows in line with the powerful sweep of the wind. The clouds from this image are forming over the Bering Sea, and although some clouds form over the cracking sea ice on the right side of the image, most are over the unfrozen water.

To see a larger version of the image and to learn more about it, see NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

Check back next week for another WITU Challenge!