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Exploring the universe
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شعردانه
Exploring the universe
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After 14 years in orbit, our NEOWISE mission is ending on July 31. But before it specialized in hunting for near-Earth objects, it first scanned the entire infrared sky as WISE! To celebrate WISE's legacy, here's one of our favorite discoveries.
This 2010 image shows a hot, massive star called Zeta Ophiuchi plowing through a large cloud of dust and gas at a whopping 54,000 miles per hour! Why is it traveling so fast? Its companion, an even heftier star, exploded in a supernova, sending Zeta Ophiuchi zipping away.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Image description: The hot blue star Zeta Ophiuchi creates a striking bow shock in the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The dark backdrop is speckled with blue stars of varying sizes. Above one of the more prominent stars, near the center of the image, is a glowing curved shape with layers of wispy reddish-orange and yellow ribbons. Fainter green clouds ripple across nearly the entire image.
source: nasauniverse on instagram
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This time-lapse movie of the Crab Nebula, made from NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations, reveals wave-like structures expanding outward from the "heart" of an exploded star. The waves look like ripples in a pond. The heart is the crushed core of the exploded star, or supernova. Called a neutron star, it has about the same mass as the sun but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere that is only a few miles across and 100 billion times stronger than steel. This surviving relic is a tremendous dynamo, spinning 30 times a second. The rapidly spinning neutron star is visible in the image as the bright object just below center. The bright object to the left of the neutron star is a foreground or background star. The movie is assembled from 10 Hubble exposures taken between September and November 2005 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
NASA and ESA, Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University)
Dancing in the moonlight
We think the apple's rotten right to the core
