Wednesday, Nov 12, 2025

Swirling storm clouds on Jupiter, volcanoes on its moon Io, and a dancing dust devil on Mars feature this week in our planetary pictures. Additionally, we have beautiful astronomical images from the Dark Energy Survey and JWST.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Monday, 3 November 2025

Io’s Pele Hemisphere

This global view of Jupiter's moon, Io, was obtained during the tenth orbit of Jupiter by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Io, which is slightly larger than Earth's moon, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.

In this enhanced color composite, deposits of sulfur dioxide frost appear in white and grey hues, while yellowish and brownish hues are probably due to other sulfurous materials. Bright red materials, such as the prominent ring surrounding Pele, and "black" spots with low brightness mark areas of recent volcanic activity and are usually associated with high temperatures and surface changes.

One of the most dramatic changes is the appearance of a new dark spot (located at the upper right edge of Pele), approximately 400 kilometers in diameter, which surrounds a volcanic center named Pillan Patera. The dark spot did not exist in images obtained 5 months earlier, but Galileo imaged a 120-kilometer-high plume erupting from this location during its ninth orbit.

Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Image processing: R. Colombari & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab).

Tuesday, 4 November 2025

The Unfurling Spiral Arms of NGC 3981

This unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Crater features a bright central core, where a supermassive black hole lies, surrounded by a disk of hot, young stars and spiral arms laced with streams of dust and more young stars. The irregular, outstretched shape of its arms is likely due to gravitational influence from an encounter with one of its galactic neighbors. NGC 3981 is a member of the NGC 4038 Group of galaxies, which also contains the well-known interacting Antennae Galaxies. The NGC 4038 Group is a small component of the Virgo Supercluster, the immense collection of galaxies that hosts our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The unfurling arms of NGC 3981 appear to dissolve right into the cosmos in this image captured by the DOE-built Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the U.S. National Science Foundation Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF NOIRLab.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin.

Wednesday, 5 November 2025

Dust Devil Dancing Across Mars

Dust devils are whirlwinds of dust that are blown across Mars’s surface. They are one way that dust gets lifted into the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere and transported from one place to another.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express tracked this dust devil across the Martian surface on 20 November 2018. The dust devil was one of 1039 found as part of new research published in Science Advances, which used 20 years of images from European Mars orbiters to use dust devils to trace strong surface winds on the Red Planet.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI).

Thursday, 6 November 2025

Rho Ophiuchi

The first anniversary image from NASA’s JWST displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from JWST's chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and illuminating molecular hydrogen, which is shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems.

The young stars at the center of many of these disks are similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller. The heftiest in this image is the star S1, which appears amid a glowing cave it is carving out with its stellar winds in the lower half of the image. The lighter-colored gas surrounding S1 consists of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a family of carbon-based molecules that are among the most common compounds found in space.

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Giulio Macrì.

Friday, 7 November 2025

Dance of the Storms

A beautiful picture of Jupiter taken by JunoCam onboard NASA's Juno spacecraft and processed by a citizen scientist. Numerous swirling storms are visible among the cloud tops, appearing in shades of white, tan, and blue.

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