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Nasa news darkness12/14/2023 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.įor more detail on what is happening where in Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi, watch the video tour and read the press release. 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 young stars at the center of many of these disks are similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. The first anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. To the left of this star is a more wispy, indistinct region, like this star is also beginning to clear out space around itself like the one at the center of the dusty cave below. At the top center of the image, a star displays another, larger pinched dark shadow, this time vertically. The image’s largest jets of red material emanate from within this dark cloud, thick and displaying structure like the rough face of a cliff, glowing brighter at the edges. The dark shadow of the cloud appears pinched in the center, with light emerging in a triangle shape above and below the pinch, revealing the presence of a star inside the dark cloud. A dark cloud sits at the top of the arch of the glowing dust cave, with one streamer curling down the right-hand side. Smaller stars are scattered around the image. Above the arched top of the dust cave three groupings of stars with diffraction spikes are arranged. The dust of the cave structure becomes wispy toward eight o’clock, trailing off and allowing stars and distant galaxies to show through. Red dual opposing jets coming from young stars fill the darker top half of the image, while a glowing pale-yellow, cave-like structure is bottom center, tilted toward two o’clock, with a bright star at its center. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.įor more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit or. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Image scale is 86 miles (138 kilometers) per pixel. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 152 degrees. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 6 degrees above the ringplane. Scientists are interested in images in this sunward-facing ("high phase") geometry because the way that the rings scatter sunlight can tell us much about the ring particles' physical make-up. Here, the requirement to not over-expose Saturn's lit crescent reveals just how dark the rings actually become. Usually, when taking images of the rings in geometries like this, exposures times are increased to make the rings more visible. That’s because they tend to scatter light back toward its source - in this case, the Sun. Saturn’s main rings, seen here on their ''lit'' face, appear much darker than normal.
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