The lunar landscapes of Chile's Atacama Desert, which stretches for about 650 miles along the Pacific Ocean to the Peruvian Border, is generally considered the driest place on earth, wedged between the rain shadows of the Andes to the east and the coast ranges to the west, while the cold Humboldt Current off the coast suppresses evaporation from the ocean. There are places in the Atacama where there has been no recorded or
observed rainfall in the 400+ years since the Spaniards first arrived... Read Full Story
Many of the recent discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope have been
"named" with numbers. Gone are the poetic, mythic names like Milky Way
or Andromeda or Pegasus.
Let's have some fun and help NASA out and create names for these awesome celestial objects.
We'll select your best submissions and send them off to NASA headquarters.
What's your name for: Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427, which are passing perilously close to each other, but each is likely to survive the collision... Read Full Story
Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA);
Acknowledgment: D. Carter (LJMU) et al. and the Coma HST ACS Treasury Team
Explanation: Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still... Read Full Story
In the Heart of the Virgo Cluster
Credit & Copyright: Günter Kerschhuber (Gahberg Observatory)
Explanation: The Virgo Cluster of Galaxies is the closest cluster of galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy. The Virgo Cluster is so close that it spans more than 5 degrees on the sky - about 10 times the angle made by a full Moon. With its heart lying about 70 million light years distant, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest cluster of galaxies, contains over 2,000 galaxies, and has a noticeable... Read Full Story
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of a galaxy located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River, which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil – the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies.
Scientists have found that NGC 1132 resides in an enormous halo of dark
matter, comparable to the amount of... Read Full Story
