OBJECTS IN SPACE

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OBJECTS IN SPACE

• By,
• Jacob Emery

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Introduction

• We live in a solar system in the vast Milky Way
  Galaxy. The Sun is our central star, orbited by
  nine planets, and containing more than 100 moons,
  millions of rocky asteroids, and billions of icy
  comets and stars.

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Galaxies

• Scientists believe that the number of galaxies
  in the universe could be as few as 10 billion or
  as many as 100 billion.
• Astronomers categorize galaxies primarily by
  their shapes -- elliptical, spiral, and irregular.

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NGC 4242

• NGC 4242 is a very low surface brightness spiral
  galaxy in the constellation of Canes Venatici.
• It is estimated to be 27 million light years away!

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NGC 5792

• NGC 5792 is a spiral galaxy, the most common
  type.
• Images of this galaxy were taken at the Lowell
  Observatory.

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NGC 6946

• NGC 6946 is more than 15 million light-years
  away.
• NGC 6946 is a big spiral galaxy that looks a lot
  like our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
• Over the last century, astronomers have recorded
  six supernovae in the galaxy.

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NGC 3516

• NGC 3516 is one of Astronomers favorites. They
  keep turning their telescopes toward it because
  it is interesting and easy to study.
• NGC 3516 is near the Big Dipper.
• It's a spiral galaxy containing hundreds of
  billions of stars.
• It's about a hundred million light-years away --
  close as galaxies go.

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NGC 4731

• This very dim galaxy appears a bit bent out of
  shape due to the gravitational effect of its
  neighbor.
• NGC 4731 is an estimated distance of 65 million
  light years away.
• The background is mottled with galaxies perhaps
  hundreds of times more distant.

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Planets

• There are nine planets including Earth that orbit
  the Sun.
• Is our Solar System alone? Astronomers have
  discovered planets orbiting several other stars,
  but we have not found any Earth-like planets.
• The inner planets are made up of mostly rock and
  metal and the outer planets are mostly made of
  ice and gas.

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Saturn

• Saturn is the second largest planet.
• Saturn's rings are made of ice and rock.
• It spins so fast that it bulges at the equator,
  and stretches its clouds into bands that encircle
  the globe.
• Saturn has more than three dozen moons, and it's
  encircled by bright rings.
• This view was taken by the Hubble Telescope.

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Mercury

• Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun.
• It is slightly larger than Earth's Moon, and
  looks very much like the Moon, with craters
  scarring its rocky surface.
• Mercury flies along in its orbit at an average
  speed of 29 miles per second faster than any
  other planet!

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Venus

• Venus is the second planet from the Sun.
• It is the hottest world in the solar system.
• It has a thick atmosphere that heats its surface
  to almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 C).

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Jupiter

• Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar
  system.
• In fact, it is more massive than all the other
  planets and moons in our solar system combined.
• Its core may be as hot as 54,000 degrees
  Fahrenheit (30,000 C).

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Mars

• Mars is the fourth planet.
• Although Mars is smaller and colder than Earth,
  it is still quite similar to our planet.
• It has a thin atmosphere and polar ice caps, and
  dry riverbeds across its surface.
• Frozen or even liquid water may exist beneath the
  red Martian soil -- perhaps providing a home for
  living organisms.
• This was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Stars and Nebulas

• On a really dark night, you can see about 1000 to
  1500 stars.
• Stars form deep inside vast clouds of
  interstellar gas and dust called nebulae.
• The nearest star to Earth is the one we see every
  day the Sun. It is 93 million miles away.

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Red Rectangle Nebula

• A dying star lights up clouds of dust around it
  in this nebula.
• This old star began blowing its outer layers into
  space, one by one, about 14,000 years ago.
• Dust grains reflect light from the star, creating
  the nebula's layered look.
• Eventually, the star will lose all of its outer
  layers, exposing its hot core, which will cause
  vast clouds of gas around the star to glow like a
  neon bulb.
• Image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Fomalhaut

• This infrared image from the Spitzer Space
  Telescope hints that one or more planets may
  orbit Fomalhaut, a nearby bright star
• One side of the disk (at the bottom of the
  picture) is brighter than the other. This could
  indicate that a planet is hidden inside this
  portion of the disk, and its gravity is causing
  more of the dust grains to congregate around it.

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Supernova 1987A

• Supernova 1987A is a massive star in a nearby
  galaxy that blasted itself to bits.
• The ring around the exploded star spans about one
  light-year. It formed when the star expelled a
  shell of gas about 20,000 years before it
  exploded.
• Image from Hubble Space Telescope.

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M17 Nebula

• Clouds of hydrogen gas mix with small amounts of
  oxygen, sulfur, and other elements of a region of
  M17, a nebula that is giving birth to new stars.
• The nebula is about 5,500 light-years away.
• The energy of hot, young stars in the nebula
  causes the gas to glow.
• The different colors represent different
  elements.
• Image from Hubble Space Telescope.

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M22 Star Cluster

• The globular cluster M22 is just one of several
  bright star clusters visible in the constellation
  Sagittarius.
• M22 contains several hundred thousand stars
  packed into a region of space just a few dozen
  light-years in diameter.
• Its stars are some of the oldest in the galaxy,
  at more than 10 billion years.

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Comets

• Comets are a ball of frozen water and gases mixed
  with solid chunks of rock.
• There is a vast shell of comets that surrounds
  the solar system.
• Something disturbs the comet's orbit -- like the
  gravity of a passing star -- starting it on a
  long fall toward the Sun.
• As a comet approaches the Sun, some of its ice
  vaporizes, freeing particles of rock as well.
  This material forms a bright cloud around the
  comet. And some of the material is pushed into a
  long, glowing tail.

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Comet C/2001 Q4

• Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) streaks around the Sun in
  this recent image.
• The comet passed closest to Earth in early May.
• Image from the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak
  National Observatory in Arizona.

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Comet Wild 2

• Comet Wild 2 appears to glow in this image from
  the Stardust spacecraft, which flew past the
  comet in January.
• The dark part of the picture shows craters, pits,
  and bright spots on the surface.
• The bright rays around the comet show where gas
  and dust is blowing into space from "jets" on the
  comet's surface.
• It has a tail several million miles long.

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Comet Ikaya-Zhang

• Comet Ikeya-Zhang, was in its peak brightness
  this past February.
• This false-color image shows the comet's nucleus
  in white and blue, and a tail of electrically
  charged water molecules in red.

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Comet Borrelly

• Comet Borrelly slowly tumbles through space in
  this image.
• The comet's nucleus, which is a chunk of ice
  mixed with rock, measures about five miles long.
• Ice is vaporizing from the bright patch near the
  center of the nucleus, spraying a "jet" of gas
  and dust into space.
• Image from Deep Space 1.

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Comet Encke

• Since its discovery in 1786, Comet Encke has
  circled the Sun more than 60 times!
• Encke orbits the Sun once every 3.3 years -- more
  often than any other comet yet discovered.

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Moons

• Most of the planets in our solar system have
  moons planet-like bodies that orbit a bigger
  body.
• Earth has only one moon, but some planets have
  many Jupiter, for example, has 63 known moons.
• A planet and its moons actually revolve about
  each other.

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Titan Moon

• Titan is the largest moon of Saturn.
• Astronomers cannot see Titan's surface directly
  because a cold, hazy atmosphere envelopes the big
  moon.
• Image by the European Southern Observatory's Very
  Large Telescope in Chile.

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S/2001 U1

• S/2001 U1 is the 21st known moon of the planet
  Uranus.
• It is a small chunk of rock that follows an
  irregular orbit around the giant planet.

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Europa

• Warm ice bubbling to the surface creates reddish
  patches on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon
  Europa.
• A deep ocean of liquid water may exist beneath
  Europa's ice crust, perhaps providing a home for
  living organisms.
• NASA released the image, which combines two
  pictures from the Galileo spacecraft.

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Phobos

• American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the
  moons of Mars 125 years ago.
• Phobos, shown in this image from Mars Global
  Surveyor, is the larger moon.
• Its surface is covered with impact craters. The
  largest crater, at top left, is about six miles
  across and is named Stickney.

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Earths Moon

• The Moon probably formed very early in the
  history of the solar system when a large object
  -- perhaps several times the mass of Mars --
  slammed into Earth.
• Unlike Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere, and no
  water.
• The lunar surface is covered with craters, the
  scars from countless boulders -- some much bigger
  than mountains -- that struck it over billions of
  years ago.

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Asteroids

• The name "asteroid" comes from a Greek word that
  means "starlike." When seen through a telescope,
  an asteroid looks like a faint star.
• Asteroids are made up mostly of rock, often rich
  in iron and other metals, and perhaps some ice.

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Mathilde

• A close picture of Mathilde revealed the
  asteroids heavily crater surface.
• One of only 4 asteroids photographed up close.
• First scanned in 1997.

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Gaspra

• The surface of Gaspra, shown in a Galileo image,
  has been pitted by asteroid collisions. Grooves
  in its surface may have been caused by an impact
  that split Gaspra from a larger asteroid.
• Galileo found that Gaspra is about 22 by 14 by 12
  miles.
• It's covered with impact craters, which means
  it's taken a pounding as smaller asteroids
  slammed into it.

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433 Eros

• Images show the asteroid 433 Eros to have a
  21-mile-long solid body and a face pockmarked
  with craters.
• Observations show that Eros is left over from the
  formation of our solar system four and a half
  billion years ago.
• It hasn't been heated very much, so it's still
  the same jumbled up mixture of rock and metal as
  when it formed.

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Ceres

• Ceres was the first asteroid discovered back in
  1801.
• Ceres is only about a quarter of the size of our
  own Moon.
• The surface of Ceres consists of dark,
  carbon-rich rock mixed with a fair amount of
  water.
• The picture at right is a circular scar -- known
  as the Manicouagan crater left when an asteroid
  rammed into present-day Quebec about 200 million
  years ago.

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Pallas

• As first, Astrnomers thought Pallas was a planet,
  when it was discovered on March 28th, 1802.
• At right, This microscopic sample of zircon is
  one bit of evidence that a giant asteroid slammed
  into Earth about 3.5 billion years ago,
  triggering massive changes in the environment.
• Although there is no remaining impact crater, a
  team has found microscopic remains of the
  collision in Australia and Africa.

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Conclusion

• The more scientists discover, the more
  complicated our world seems. Earth is a warm,
  wet planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere the
  perfect place for life, but who knows what is yet
  to be discovered?

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Bibliography

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• http//imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/Images/news/ngc3516_b
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• http//www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n4731.h
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