BX442, a spiral galaxy from the depths of time

A Grand-Design Spiral Galaxy before its Time – Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Artist's rendering of galaxy BX442 and companion. Credit: Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics; Joe Bergeron

The bizarre case of the dusty disk disappeared

At about 450 light years from Earth, towards the southern constellation of Centaurus, there is a solar-type star with a name similar to a taxpayer number: TYC 8241 2652 1. Since 1983, thanks to  observations from NASA's IRAS infrared satellite, we knew that a warm disk of dust was orbiting around the ten million years old star: a kind of space coat, able to transform into infrared radiation, i.e. heat, the light received from the young star.

Artist's conceptualization of the dusty TYC 8241 2652 system as it might have appeared several years ago when it was emitting large amounts of excess infrared radiation. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook

You're beautiful, Vesta

When UCLA's Christopher T. Russell looks at the images of the protoplanet Vesta produced by NASA's Dawn mission, he talks about beauty as much as he talks about science.

South polar impacts on Vesta. The map indicates that the Vesta surface is not uniform, with a sharp contrast between the northern and southern regions. These data suggest that the region around the Rheasilvia basin is richer in diogenites than the equatorial regions. The north-south variation in minerals indicates that the deep crust exposed in the southern Rheasilvia region is dominated by pyroxene-rich, diogenitic material while the equatorial region seems to retain the most ancient eucrite-rich mineralogy. In this image, blue shows a richer concentration of diogenite minerals and yellow shows a richer concentration of eucrite minerals. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer collected the data used to create this mosaic image in August 2011, from an average altitude of about 1,700 miles or (2,700 kilometers). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/INAF/MPS/DLR/IDA