October's Spellbinding Space Pictures
A simulation of ghostly gases swirling around a black hole.
(Inside Science) -- In its vast blackness, space holds glittering stars and a rich diversity of alien worlds, but it can hold more mysterious wonders as well. There are nebulas that resemble apparitions, black holes of terrifying depth, and the ghostly remnants of the early universe spread across time and space. This Halloween, enjoy a parade of spellbinding images that may haunt and captivate you.
This is a simulated image of mysterious gaseous swirls observed by the European Space Observatory's GRAVITY instrument. Using the instrument, scientists observed material, shown in the image as swirling gas, almost edging the event horizon of the supermassive black hole assumed to lurk at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is the first time material has been spotted so close to a black hole. (ESO/Gravity Consortium/L. Calçada)
Is that the ghostly figure of a woman wearing a dusty veil trailing behind her? Or the phantom of an old man with an upward pointing nose, wearing a blue wizard hat? The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this eerie photograph of the IC 63 Ghost Nebula, also known as "the Ghost of Cassiopeia," located 550 light-years away. (NASA/ESA/STScI)
Vast glowing orbs -- like hazy eyes or spectres -- seem to haunt the dark space in between galaxies in this image. The blue lights represent an unexpected abundance of Lyman-alpha emission discovered by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. This means that the sky invisibly glows with clouds of hydrogen from the early Universe. (ESA/Hubble/NASA)
In this image, a ravenous black hole distorts a supernova and its host galaxy, twisting their appearances through gravitational lensing. The supernova, on left, appears to shine brighter from this magnification. Black holes were once thought to be a major source of dark matter, but now physicists believe otherwise, as our universe would contain more of these magnified supernovas if that were the case. (Miguel Zumalacárregui)
The full moon, when viewed with radio waves, reveals a spectral reflection of the Milky Way. This green shadow could help astronomers unlock the secrets to how the first stars and galaxies shaped the early Universe. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)
