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"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
Why would clouds form a hexagon on Saturn? Nobody is sure. Originally discovered during the Voyager flybys of Saturn in the 1980s, nobody has ever seen anything like it anywhere else in the Solar System. If Saturn's South Pole wasn't strange enough with its rotating vortex, Saturn's North Pole might be considered even stranger. The bizarre cloud pattern is shown above in great detail by a recent image taken by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. This and similar images show the stability of the hexagon even 20+ years after Voyager. Movies of Saturn's North Pole show the cloud structure maintaining its hexagonal structure while rotating. Unlike individual clouds appearing like a hexagon on Earth, the Saturn cloud pattern appears to have six well defined sides of nearly equal length. Four Earths could fit inside the hexagon. Imaged from the side, the dark shadow of the Jovian planet is seen eclipsing part of its grand system of rings, partly visible on the upper right. Astrophysicists: Browse 550+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library APOD Public Talk: Feb. 21, Howard Astronomical League, Columbia, MD
Captured last week after sunset on a Chilean autumn night, an exceptional airglow floods this allsky view from Las Campanas Observatory. The airglow was so intense it diminished parts of the Milky Way as it arced horizon to horizon above the high Atacama desert. Originating at an altitude similar to aurorae, the luminous airglow is due to chemiluminescence, the production of light through chemical excitation. Commonly recorded in color by sensitive digital cameras, the airglow emission here is fiery in appearance. It is predominately from atmospheric oxygen atoms at extremely low densities and has often been present during southern hemisphere nights over the last few years. Like the Milky Way, on that dark night the strong airglow was very visible to the eye, but seen without color. Jupiter is the brightest celestial beacon though, standing opposite the Sun and near the central bulge of the Milky Way rising above the eastern (top) horizon. The Large and Small Magellanic clouds both shine through the airglow to the lower left of the galactic plane, toward the southern horizon.
Why doesn't the nearby galaxy create a gravitational lensing effect on the background galaxy? It does, but since both galaxies are so nearby, the angular shift is much smaller than the angular sizes of the galaxies themselves. The featured Hubble image of NGC 3314 shows two large spiral galaxies which happen to line up exactly. The foreground spiral NGC 3314a appears nearly face-on with its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. Against the glow of the background galaxy NGC 3314b, though, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust can also be seen tracing the nearer spiral's structure. Both galaxies appear on the edge of the Hydra Cluster of Galaxies, a cluster that is about 200 million light years away. Gravitational lens distortions are much easier to see when the lensing galaxy is smaller and further away. Then, the background galaxy may even be distorted into a ring around the nearer. Fast gravitational lens flashes due to stars in the foreground galaxy momentarily magnifying the light from stars in the background galaxy might one day be visible in future observing campaigns with high-resolution telescopes.
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