December's Sparkling Space Pictures
The Abell S1063 galaxy cluster, located 4 billion light-years away.
(Inside Science) -- This December, we have selected a festive variety of astronomical delights. Through the lenses of telescopes and the craft of artist illustrations, we can admire the wondrous qualities of light across the universe.
To celebrate the season, the Chandra X-ray Center released an assortment of images that include X-rays detected by the observatory. Each image showcases a collaboration between Chandra data and other telescopes, creating a selection of different stars and galaxies full of twinkling light. (NASA/CXC/SAO)
These are the telescopes of the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory, captured as they gaze out into the night sky over the Atacama Desert in Chile. This month, they made their first engineering and calibration images -- a process known as first light. In the new year, the observatory will be starting operations to begin planet-hunting. (ESO/ P. Horálek)
In this illustration, a dark blue stream of hydrogen gas billows off a Neptune-sized planet just 97 light-years away. Relative to its red dwarf star, the exoplanet is tiny. The radiation coming from the star heats up the planet so intensely that it loses hydrogen at an alarming rate. (STScI)
Astronomers have discovered a new method for detecting dark matter. In this photo of galaxy cluster Abell S1063, the huge mass of the cluster acts as a cosmic magnifying glass. Astronomers looked at intracluster light -- the very faint light in galaxy clusters -- which has a distribution identical to dark matter also calculated in the cluster. (NASA/ESA/M. Montes)
After travelling over 2 billion kilometers from Earth, NASA's OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft finally landed on the asteroid Bennu on Dec. 3. For the next two years, it will survey pebbles and dust to learn more about the role asteroids play in forming life. (NASA)
