Vũ Trụ Huyền Bí

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Mời quí anh chị thưởng lãm các hình ảnh đặc biệt trong không gian đã được ghi nhận bằng Viễn Vọng Kính Không Gian (Hubble Space Telescope) hoặc cơ quan NASA trong năm 2008.

1. Venus, Jupiter, Moon Smile on Earth

Thượng đế đã nở nụ cười xuống địa cầu vào ngày 1 tháng 12. Đây là một trong những tấm hình về không gian đăng trong National Geographic News được xem nhiều nhất năm 2008. Nét cười này là kết quả giao hội của các hành tinh Vệ nữ (Venus,) Mộc tinh (Jupiter) và Mặt trăng (Moon,) được chiếu sáng ở Manila thuộc Philippines. Những dân ở vùng châu Á đã thấy nụ cười, nhưng ở Mỹ thì chỉ nhìn thấy một hình tượng nhăn mặt.

—Photograph by Bullit Marquez/AP

2. First Picture of Alien Planet Orbiting Sunlike Star?

NASA scientists might have been yodeling for joy in March when they saw the first-ever picture of active landslides occurring on Mars.
Snapped by the Mars-orbiting HiRISE camera, billowing clouds of dust revealed the action at the base of a towering slope near the red planet's north pole.
"It's great to see something so dynamic on Mars," HiRISE team member Ingrid Daubar Spitale noted at the time. "A lot of what we see there hasn't changed for millions of years."

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

3. Gamma-Ray Burst Visible to Naked Eye

In March scientists detected an interstellar explosion so bright that it was briefly visible to the naked eye—from 7.5 billion light-years away.
Images captured by NASA's Swift satellite show two views of the unusual gamma-ray burst, an outpouring of high-energy radiation and particles thought to follow the collapse of a massive star.
The burst crushed the previous record holder for most distant object visible without assistance—the galaxy M33—by three orders of magnitude.

—Images courtesy NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, et al.

4. NEW JUPITER IMAGE: Sharpest View Ever From Earth

Jupiter looks sharp in the crispest whole-planet picture of the gas giant ever shot from Earth, released in October.
The picture was taken using a computer-assisted process that adjusts for distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere, allowing a ground-based telescope in Chile to snap shots rivaling those taken from space, astronomers said.
In Jupiter's case, the result shows features as small as 180 miles (300 kilometers) across.

—Image courtesy ESO

5. New Hi-Res Views of Mars's ''Fear'' Moon Unveiled

In April the Mars-orbiting HiRISE camera caught new high-resolution snapshots of Phobos, a Martian moon named for the Greek god of horror.
The tiny moon's most prominent feature is Stickney Crater, pictured above in false color. The impact that created Stickney is thought to have almost shattered the roughly 17-mile-wide (27-kilometer-wide) moon.

—Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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6. New Picture of the Pinwheel Galaxy

An image released by NASA in April shows baby stars taking shape in the Southern Pinwheel galaxy.

Embryonic stars were found to be growing in the galaxy's spindly arms (shown in red), rather than in its bright heart.

Scientists at the time described the find as "absolutely stunning," because it was believed that such outlying sections of galaxies lacked the necessary materials for star formation.

—Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/VLA/MPIA

7. New Supernova "Gumball" Picture

The remnant of a supernova, first seen from Earth more than a thousand years ago, hangs like a gumball in a composite image released by NASA in June.
The blast wave from the stellar explosion is still traveling at about 6 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) an hour, heating gases along its path that emit radiation as visible light.

—X-ray image courtesy NASA/CXC/Rutgers/G.Cassam-Chenao, J.Hughes et al.; radio image courtesy NRAO/AUI/NSF/GBT/VLA/Dyer, Maddalena & Cornwell; optical image courtesy Middlebury College/F.Winkler, NOAO/AURA/NSF/CTIO Schmidt & DSS

8. Black Hole Seen in Closest Look Ever

Ground-based radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, and California combined forces to examine the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Although by definition we can't see a black hole directly, we can see the bright region of radio emissions known as Sagittarius A* that's thought to be either a disk of matter swirling toward the black hole, or a high-speed jet of matter being ejected from it.
Astronomers who released the image in September noted that further study of Sagittarius A* should help us understand "what happens as matter is drawn near to the black hole and disappears forever."

—Image courtesy NASA, /CXC, MIT, F.K.Baganoff et al

9. First Picture of Alien Planet Orbiting Sunlike Star?

A faint dot above a blazing inferno is possibly the first direct view of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a sunlike star.
The infrared image, taken by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, was released in September. At the time astronomers weren't sure whether the body was a planet or a planetlike object, and it remains to be seen if it is truly orbiting the star.
Two months later independent teams announced the first infrared image of an alien multiplanet system, taken using a pair of ground-based telescopes, as well as the first visible-light picture of an extrasolar planet, snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope.

—Image courtesy Gemini Observatory

10. Supernova Creates "Ribbon" in Space

Like a ribbon trailing from a parade float, a streamer of hydrogen gas seems to waft across the stars in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Released in July, this festive shot of a supernova remnant was National Geographic News's tenth most viewed space photo of 2008.
Bright stripes within the ribbon—which is actually the shock wave from the stellar explosion—appear where the wave is moving edge-on to Hubble's line of sight.

—Image by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: W. Blair (Johns Hopkins University)

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008