Month: December 2018

  • NASA’s Osiris-Rex Arriving at Asteroid Bennu After a Two-Year Journey

    181101160303-01-wonders-of-the-universe-1101-exlarge-169Bennu, as seen on approach by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

    Over the next year, OSIRIS-REx will survey the asteroid using five scientific instruments on board the spacecraft. These instruments will help it determine a safe location from which to collect a small sample from Bennu's surface that will be returned to Earth in September 2023.
    "Bennu's low gravity provides a unique challenge for the mission," said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "At roughly 0.3 mile in diameter, Bennu will be the smallest object that any spacecraft has ever orbited."
    The sample from Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, could help scientists understand not only more about asteroids that could impact Earth but about how planets formed and life began.

  • Feeling blue

    Feeling blue

    This captivating image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 shows a lonely dwarf galaxy, a staggering 100 million light-years away from Earth. This image depicts the blue compact dwarf galaxy ESO 338-4, which can be found in the constellation of Corona Australis (the Southern Crown).

    Blue compact dwarf galaxies take their name from the intensely blue star-forming regions that are often found within their cores. One such region can be seen embedded in ESO 338-4, which is populated with bright young stars voraciously consuming hydrogen. These massive stars are doomed to a short existence, as despite their vast supplies of hydrogen fuel. The nuclear reactions in the cores of these stars will burn through these supplies in only millions of years — a mere blink of an eye in astronomical terms.

    The young blue stars nestled within a cloud of dust and gas in the centre of this image are the result of a recent galaxy merger between a wandering galaxy and ESO 388-4. This galactic interaction disrupted the clouds of gas and dust surrounding ESO 338-4 and led to the rapid formation of a new population of stars.

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