Gallery: Space Photos of the Week: Jupiter Gets a School Portrait
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/hubble-s-planetary-portrait-captures-new-changes-in-jupiter-s-great-red-spot">NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC), M. Wong (UC Berkeley), and G. Orton (JPL-Caltech)</a>01SPoW-Oct11-17-02
Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have produced new maps of Jupiter – the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets. Collecting these yearly images – essentially the planetary version of annual school picture days for children – will help current and future scientists see how these giant worlds change over time. The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/hubble-peers-into-the-heart-of-a-galactic-maelstrom">ESA/Hubble & NASA</a>02SPoW-Oct11-17-06
NGC 4639 is a beautiful example of a type of galaxy known as a barred spiral. It lies over 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo and is one of about 1,500 galaxies that make up the Virgo Cluster. NGC 4639 is a beautiful example of a type of galaxy known as a barred spiral. In this image, one can clearly see the bar running through the bright, round core of the galaxy. The galaxy’s spiral arms are sprinkled with bright regions of active star formation. Each of these tiny jewels is actually several hundred light-years across and contains hundreds or thousands of newly formed stars. But NGC 4639 also conceals a dark secret in its core — a massive black hole that is consuming the surrounding gas.
<a href="http://www.ipmu.jp/node/2300">NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team </a>03SPoW-Oct11-17-04
An example of a galaxy merger. The majority of stars have been believed to lie on a “main sequence,” where the larger a galaxy’s mass, the higher its efficiency to form new stars. However, every now and then a galaxy will display a burst of newly-formed stars that shine brighter than the rest. A collision between two large galaxies is usually the cause of such starburst phases, where the cold gas residing in the giant molecular clouds becomes the fuel for sustaining such high rates of star formation.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/coronal-hole-front-and-center"> NASA/SDO</a>04SPoW-Oct11-17-08
The dark area across the top of the sun in this image is a coronal hole, a region on the sun where the magnetic field is open to interplanetary space, sending coronal material speeding out in what is called a high-speed solar wind stream. The high-speed solar wind originating from this coronal hole, imaged here on Oct. 10, 2015, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, created a geomagnetic storm near Earth that resulted in several nights of auroras.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/comet-encke-a-solar-windsock-observed-by-nasa-s-stereo">ESA/NASA/SOHO</a>05SPoW-Oct11-17-07
A visualization of the constant outflow of material from the sun, known as the solar wind. There is no consensus on what powers the solar wind’s acceleration, its extreme variability, or its remarkably high temperatures.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1539/?lang">ESO</a>06SPoW-Oct11-17-01
Dark smudges almost block out a rich star field in this new image captured by the Wide Field Imager camera. The inky areas are small parts of a huge dark nebula known as the Coalsack, one of the most prominent objects of its kind visible to the unaided eye. Millions of years from now, chunks of the Coalsack will ignite, rather like its fossil fuel namesake, with the glow of many young stars.
<a href="http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/rawimagedetails/index.cfm?imageID=342275">NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute</a>07N00249426-crop
The 18-year-old Cassini spacecraft made its closest-ever flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus this week, delivering some spectacular images. [See a full gallery of them here.](https://www.wired.com/2015/10/check-out-these-awesome-images-of-enceladus-from-cassini/) This raw (uncalibrated, unvalidated) image was taken on October 14, 2015 and received on Earth on October 15, 2015.
