Who doesn’t love a penguin’s devotion to its egg in the dead cold of the ice shelf? These two certainly look the part (and are gravitationally drawn to each other to boot). This image of a pair of galaxies, collectively called Arp 142, combines data from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Within the “penguin” are long blue filaments of gas, marking the birth of new stars, while the “egg” has mostly green gas, indicating this odd galaxy contains not hatchlings but rather ancient stars.
X marks the spots: This swirl of light is the renowned Messier 51 spiral, aka the Whirlpool Galaxy, seen here in a combination of visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope and x-rays from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. All the regions in bright pink indicate ultraluminous x-ray sources. That circle at left calls out a neutron star, discovered earlier this year. Neutron stars are some of the more strange and interesting bodies in space—so dense that just a teaspoon of their matter can weigh more than 1 billion tons. With great density comes a great deal of gravity, which sucks up nearby material. As the neutron star steals its surroundings, gas heats up and glows in x-ray light.
Speaking of stellar appetites, it’s always lunchtime for WISE J224607.55-052634.9. We’ve got an extremely bright galaxy eating its neighboring galaxies, and yes, we just wrote that sentence. This gluttonous spectacle, courtesy of NASA’s space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, captures not the biggest or grandest of galaxies, but one of the most luminous such bodies ever discovered—350 trillion times brighter than our sun. Trillion with a “t.” A supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s core, larger than 4 billion suns, stuffs itself with matter that gets mushed up and heated, radiating light. Oh, there’s more: Because of its black hole, this galaxy can be called a quasar, and within that category, an especially luminous quasar astronomers have dubbed a Hot DOG—short for hot, dust-obscured galaxy. It follows that when galaxies eat, everything else is pretty much a condiment.
The Dawn mission came to an end this year. It ran out of fuel to keep its communication antenna pointed toward Earth, making it unable to talk to its team. Dawn was the first interplanetary spacecraft, putting itself in the record books for being the first spacecraft to orbit two planetary bodies—the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Since it arrived at Ceres in March 2015, it has sent home some really great science, including photos of this feature called Cerealia Facula, located in the Occator Crater. The bright region is white salty ice, a discovery that surprised NASA. Turns out that Ceres might have been geologically active more recently than previously thought, making it a good spot to look for potential life in the solar system. Although Dawn is done, it will remain in a stable orbit around Ceres for the next 50 years or so to protect the surface from any potential contaminants left on the spacecraft from Earth.
InSight landed on the dusty, rocky surface of Mars on November 26, and moments after touching down, it took this photo of the ground. The dark spots are specks of dust on a lens cover. NASA knew it needed to protect InSight’s camera, because coming in through the atmosphere at more than 12,000 miles an hour and then landing were sure to kick up some debris. To the right of the frame, you can just make out one of InSight’s feet, and near the bottom center, a rock that is soon to be named for posterity.
Fast-forward a few weeks, while the dust literally settles, and InSight has unfurled its solar panels and popped off its lens covers. Then, for the first time in the two-year mission, InSight took a selfie. It’s a rite of passage for all major space missions: Scientists don’t take such photos to be cute (even though they are) but because they come in really handy for examining the spacecraft: Is it dirty? Are the instruments holding up ok? The selfie can tell them.
The Bubble Nebula is one of the most awesome cool nebulas ever imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. These astral bodies are stellar nurseries, massive clouds of gas and dust that are responsible for creating stars. The Bubble Nebula in particular has this shape because a young star called SAO 20575 is blowing out so much stellar wind that it is shaping and pushing out the surrounding gas, creating this iconic and unique bubble shape.
It’s been a busy 12 months for space photo fans, and especially so for Jupiter junkies. Every 53 days, the Juno spacecraft swings around the planet, taking photos and amassing large amounts of data. This picture was taken when the spacecraft was only 4,000 miles from the top of the clouds, and look: That large white oval is an anticyclone, a common feature on Jupiter, but in the middle of the photo, near that red storm are little clusters of white high-altitude clouds. Scientists did not expect to see these on Jupiter and still are unsure what causes them. For now, they pose interesting scientific questions and at the very least make for some stunning photography.