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The sun emitting a mid-level solar flare
Credits: SDO/Nasa Photograph: Nasa
Credits: SDO/Nasa Photograph: Nasa

A spacewalk selfie, the Giant Squid Nebula and an origami solar array – in pictures

This article is more than 9 years old

This month’s roundup of the best space-related imagery in the known universe includes a dramatic solar flare, a cosmonaut’s selfie and an improbable marriage between technology and the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding

On 24 August a flare erupted from the sun, seen on the left edge of our home star in this image from Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (above). Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation, which can’t penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere to harm humans but can disrupt the layer through which GPS and communications signals travel. This one was classified as an M-class flare, 10 times weaker than the most intense type, known as X-class flares.

Credits: Hubble Space Telescope/Nasa/Esa

This is a ‘globular cluster’ – a ball of old stars orbiting their host galaxy. The cluster lies within our own Milky Way galaxy and new data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests it is about 12bn years old. All of its stars are the same age: stellar siblings that were all born at roughly the same time.

Credits: ISS/Nasa

A crew member on the International Space Station took this picture of the station’s solar array wings intersecting the thin skin of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Credits: ISS/Nasa

The European Space Agency released a timelapse video of the ISS flying through the aurora australis. In this still image, Achernar (just to the right of centre) is the brightest star in this southerly view. The orbital outpost was flying at an altitude of 420 kilometres above the Earth’s surface at 51.6 degrees south latitude and 110.3 degrees east longitude. Two solar array panels are partially visible.

Credits: ISS/Nasa

The space station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm prepares to release the Cygnus commercial cargo craft on 15 August, after it had spent a month docked to the orbital outpost.

Credits: ISS/Nasa

Gripped by the Japanese robotic arm, the CubeSat deployer (upper right) releases a pair of miniature satellites (bottom centre) on 20 August. The Planet Labs Dove satellites were carried to the space station aboard Cygnus.

Credits: ISS/Nasa

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev takes a selfie during a spacewalk. During the five-hour, 11-minute spacewalk, Artemyev and Alexander Skvortsov deployed a small science satellite, retrieved and installed experiment packages and inspected components on the exterior of the orbital laboratory.

Credits: Univ. of Arizona/JPL-Caltech/Nasa

In September 2016, Nasa will attempt to land a spacecraft on Mars that will probe the interior of the planet by listening for seismic signals – particularly following the violent impact of objects such as meteorites. Quite by chance, a potential landing site is already scarred by a fresh crater (blue). InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will be able to detect large impacts that are far from the lander and smaller impacts that are closer. This recent image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a distinctive crater indicating a very recent impact between 2008 and 2012. During the InSight mission, fresh craters spotted by orbiting cameras will be matched to seismic signals.

New Chandra data gives insight into the explosion that produced SN 2014J, one of the closest supernovas discovered in decades.
Credits: Chandra X-ray Observatory Center/Nasa

Nasa released new data from its Chandra X-ray Observatory that provides clues about what may have triggered one of the closest supernovas witnessed in decades. The type Ia supernova was detected on 21 January.

Credits: ATG medialab/Esa

Meanwhile, astronomers from Esa studying the same supernova said they’d found proof that it was caused by a white dwarf star reigniting and exploding. The space agency used its Integral observatory to detect gamma rays from the radioactive elements created during the explosion.

This sequence of artist’s impressions shows some of the steps leading up to and following the explosion. A white dwarf, containing up to 1.4 times the mass of the sun squeezed into a volume about the size of the Earth, leeches matter from a companion star (image 1). A belt of gas from the companion star builds up around the equator of the white dwarf (image 2). This belt detonates (image 3) and triggers the internal explosion that becomes the supernova (image 4). Material from the explosion expands (image 5) and eventually becomes transparent to gamma rays (image 6).

Picture of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 in 1989
Credits: JPL/Nasa

Twenty-five years since Voyager 2 took this picture of Neptune in August 1989, Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft crossed the planet’s orbit. The piano-sized New Horizons took eight years and eight months to reach Neptune’s orbit, nearly 2.75bn miles (4.4bn kilometres) from Earth. The spacecraft is en route to Pluto, scheduled to arrive on 14 July 2015.

Credits: Rosetta/Esa Photograph: esa/ESA

The European spacecraft Rosetta took this extraordinarily detailed picture of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 3 August from a distance of 177 miles (285 km). The image resolution is 5.3 metres/pixel. Rosetta is accompanying the comet as it falls towards the sun, and on 11 November will attempt to land a probe called Philae. Just 500 metres from the proposed landing site are pits that may be the sources of jets of gas and dust that will help form the comet’s characteristic tail.

Credits: G Beccari/ESO

This image shows two dramatic star-formation regions in the southern Milky Way. The one on the left is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located 20,000 light-years away in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of our galaxy. The other is a collection of glowing gas clouds known as NGC 3576 that lies only about half as far from Earth. The image was captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Credits: ESO

The VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this stunning image of the galaxy Messier 33, often called the Triangulum Galaxy. The galaxy is a cosmic stone’s throw from our own, about three million light-years away in the small northern constellation of Triangulum (The Triangle). It was observed by the French comet hunter Charles Messier in August 1764, but was probably first documented by the Sicilian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna around 100 years earlier.

Credits: University of Arizona/JPL-Caltech/Nasa

Chasma Boreale is a canyon 560 kilometres long that cuts through the northern polar ice cap of Mars. The canyon’s sides reveal layers resulting from the seasonal melting and deposition of ice and dust, so the past climate of the red planet may one day be revealed in these stripes – just like tree ring patterns and ice cores on Earth.

Credits: ING

This is the Giant Squid Nebula, captured by the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma in the Canaries. The squid-like apparition is very faint but spans some 2.5 full moons toward the constellation Cepheus in the Earth’s night sky. It is a planetary nebula – the gaseous shroud of a dying, sun-like star.

Credits: Hubble Space Telescope/NASA/ESA

This neat spiral galaxy, known as PGC 54493, is located in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent). It is part of a cluster that has been studied by astronomers exploring an intriguing phenomenon known as weak gravitational lensing. This is caused by the uneven distribution of matter – including invisible dark matter – throughout the universe, which distorts images of distant galaxies. Dark matter does not emit or absorb light or other forms of electromagnetic energy, but it accounts for some 27% of the total contents of the universe.

Photograph: Mark A. Philbrick/BYU/NASA

One day, we may get much of our electricity from orbiting solar arrays that beam energy wirelessly back to Earth via microwaves. The problem is folding up the arrays small enough to send into space, then unfurling them in orbit without jamming or snagging. Researchers at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, are finding solutions inspired by the ancient Japanese art of origami. They’ve designed a solar array that is 2.7 metres in diameter when folded up, but a whopping 25 metres across when unfolded. The one illustrated here is a 1/20th-scale prototype.

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