Awed by a magnetar

Some 6.3 billion years ago, in a galaxy far from Earth, a monster star died with a colossal bang. In a few hours, it blasted out more than 500 times the energy the Sun will churn through in its lifetime. What could have powered such a gargantuan explosion? A rare and exotic celestial object known as a magnetar, says an international team of astrophysicists in a study published in Nature in July.

Source: Cosmos Magazine

Pluto: an enigma in close-up

This simulated flyover of Pluto’s Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains) and Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) was created from New Horizons closest-approach images. Norgay Montes have been informally named for Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Sputnik Planum is informally named for Earth’s first artificial satellite. The images were acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible.

Source: Cosmos

The end of space exploration?

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly close to Pluto this week. On the way it will take hundreds of observations before beginning the long, slow process of beaming gigabytes of data back to Earth.

New Horizons Timeline

Tropical lakes on Titan

The existence of oceans or lakes of liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan was predicted more than 20 years ago. But with a dense haze preventing a closer look it has not been possible to confirm their presence. Until the Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006, that is. Radar imaging data from the flyby, published in the journal Nature, provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid. Intensity in this colorized image is proportional to how much radar brightness is returned, or more specifically, the logarithm of the radar backscatter cross-section. The colors are not a representation of what the human eye would see. The lakes, darker than the surrounding terrain, are emphasized here by tinting regions of low backscatter in blue. Radar-brighter regions are shown in tan. Smallest details in this image are about 500 meters (1,640 feet) across. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS

Mobile Dunes on Mars

Martian dune systems are surprisingly active, overturning the view of Mars as a fairly static environment, with very low erosion rates, US scientists said.

This and the following images are partial views, with various zoom factors, from a dune field inside the summit caldera of Nili Patera, an ancient volcano on Mars, photographed by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (for every image in this page)