The last week saw a lot of impressive space photos, including the photos of jets swaying like seaweed in the sun's atmosphere, a river of stars flowing over the Mardi Khola Valley in the Himalaya, the crescent moon dipping into Earth's atmosphere, and so on.
The photo recently released by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows jets swaying like seaweed in the sun’s atmosphere. The jets made of material called spicules shooting up from the sun because of magnetic field ripples called Alfvén waves. By observing the motions of the jets, scientists were able to measure the energy being carried by the Alfvén waves.
This photo was taken on July 31 by a NASA astronaut named Ron Garan. The sliver of a crescent moon seems to be dipping into Earth's atmosphere as it was captured from the International Space Station. Astronauts can observe the moon set around sixteen times a day as they are in the station because it completes an orbit of Earth every one hour and 30 minutes.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is studying Vesta, the brightest asteroid in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has recently got a closeup photo of three craters named the Snowman on the northern hemisphere of this asteroid
The photo taken by Anton Jankovoy in Nepal shows a river of stars flowing over the Mardi Khola Valley in the Himalaya. The dense stellar band is the plane the Milky Way Galaxy, the home galaxy of the Solar System and Earth.
In the photo taken by the European Southern Observatory above, the Fine Ring nebula forms after a sun-like star dies, expanding into a red giant and leaving its outer gas layers and a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, which is covered by a shell of debris.
A piece of the space shuttle Columbia was found in Texas, US, thanks to drought conditions in the region. NASA has confirmed that the object is part of the shuttle, which was broken apart during reentry in February 2003.
A piece of the space shuttle Columbia
