NASA SDO Image: Jack-o-Lantern Sun

Image captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Credit: NASA/SDO

Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.

The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths at 171 and 193 Ångströms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance.

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NASA/SDO

Dawn Finds Possible Ancient Ocean Remnants at Ceres

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THE HITCHCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE LOCAL SUPERCLUSTER

Image: Virgo Supercluster. Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin The Virgo Supercluster is a region with a diameter of 33 megaparsecs (~1000 times larger the Milky Way's diameter) containing at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters.

ORBITAL PERIODS OF THE PLANETS

For orbital period generally we refer to the sidereal period, that is the temporal cycle that it takes an object to make a full orbit, relative to the stars. This is the orbital period in an inertial (non-rotating) frame of reference (365,25 days for the earth).

The Milky Way's rotation curve out to 100 kpc and its constraint on the Galactic mass distribution

Image: This annotated artist’s impression shows the Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy indicates the expected distribution of the mysterious dark matter. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada In a recent paper (Huang et al. 2016) the rotation curve (RC) of the Milky Way out to ~100kpc has been constructed using ~16,000 primary red clump giants (PRCGs) in the outer disk selected from the LSS-GAC and the SDSS-III/APOGEE survey, combined with ~5700 halo K giants (HKGs) selected from the SDSS/SEGUE survey.

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