Einstein Ring Hubble Image: Cosmic Horseshoe seems to surround Red galaxy

A fortuitous alignment of celestial mechanics has given the Hubble Space Telescope an amazing view of some distant galaxies.

Here, one interesting red galaxy is encircled by a hazy blue horseshoe shape and contains about 10 times the mass of our Milky Way galaxy.

It's actually the blue horsehoe shape that has astronomers talking about this photo.

The horseshoe is actually a distant galaxy that has been magnified and warped into a nearly complete ring by the strong gravitational pull of the massive red galaxy in the foreground.

To see such a so-called Einstein Ring required the fortunate alignment of the foreground and background galaxies, making this object’s nickname "the Cosmic Horseshoe" particularly apt, NASA says.

NASA Gemini North Telescope Image: Jupiter's Ring Re-appears

This image is a composite of three color images taken on Nov. 18, 2010, by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

The composite image shows a belt that had previously vanished in Jupiter's atmosphere is now reappearing.

The three images used to make the composite were taken at three different parts of the infrared spectrum - 2.12 microns (blue), 1.69 microns (yellow) and 4.68 microns (red).

At 1.69 microns, scientists see sunlight reflected from Jupiter's main cloud deck - the same clouds they see in visible light.

At 2.12 microns, scientists see sunlight reflected from higher-altitude particles well above the main deck.

At 4.68 microns, scientists see thermal emission arising from the tops of Jupiter's clouds, with the hottest emissions coming from the deepest atmosphere and signifying regions with minimal overlying cloud cover.

The region just to the left of the center, inside the white box, shows the region of the South Equatorial Belt with an unusually bright spot, or outbreak.

One thing scientists were looking for in infrared was evidence that the darker material emerging to the west of the bright spot was the start of the clearing of the cloud deck.

The particles lofted by the initial outbreak are easily identified in yellow as high-altitude particles at the upper right, with a second outbreak to the lower left.

In the coming weeks, further outbreaks are expected to take place to the west (left) of those seen in this image, and the clear atmospheric regions will begin to fill this latitude band at the same time as the dark brown color typical of this region returns. Image credit:

NASA/JPL/UH/NIRI/Gemini/UC Berkeley

Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn's Ring Plane

Explanation: If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why.

Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear.

This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn's ring plane.

A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro. Pictured above, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result. Saturn's thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn's upper atmosphere appear in gold.

Since Saturn just passed its equinox, today the ring plane is pointed close to the Sun and the rings could not cast the high dark shadows seen across the top of this image, taken back in 2005. Moons appear as bumps in the rings.


Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA