zabonky

" It's not often we get to see detached solar prominences, certainly not ones that sustain for this long. This time lapse is over the course of 1 hour compressed down into seconds. Super heated plasma is held in place, high above the chromosphere of the sun. Magnetically locked into place by unseen forces, waiting to be released. I also capture other areas of the sun, including a grouping of highly active sun spots that littered the face of the sun."

Cracks and Ridges on Europa

Palomar 12

Northern Lights

Planetary nebula HuBi 1 (left) and another planetary nebula Abell39 (right, 6800 light years away from our solar system). Abell39 is an archetypal, textbook case of a spherical nebula surrounding a bright central star (a white dwarf), its nebula composes of hydrogen-rich ionized gas. HuBi 1, its central star has undergone a “born-again” event ejecting metal-rich material into the old, hydrogen-rich nebula, has a double-shell structure - a hydrogen-rich outer shell and a nitrogen-rich inner shell. (HuBi 1 image adopted from Guerrero, Fang, Miller Bertolami, et al., 2018, Nature Astronomy, tmp, 112. Image credit for Abell39: The 3.5m WIYN Telescope, National Optical Astronomical Observatory, NSF. URL: https://www.noao.edu)

    The Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA-CSIC) in Spain, the Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and an International team comprising scientists from Argentina, Mexico and Germany have discovered the unusual evolution of the central star of a planetary nebula in our Milky Way. This extraordinary discovery sheds light on the future evolution, and more importantly, the ultimate fate of the Sun.

The discovery of a structurally ‘inside-out’ planetary nebula - the ionized material that surrounds a white dwarf - was just reported online in Nature Astronomy. This is also the eighth research paper produced by HKU LSR with its international collaborators in the Nature journals since 2017.

The research team believes this inverted ionization structure of the nebula is resulted from the central star undergoing a ‘born-again’ event, ejecting material from its surface and creating a shock that excites the nebular material.

Planetary nebulae are ionized clouds of gas formed by the hydrogen-rich envelopes of low- and intermediate-mass stars ejected at late evolutionary stages. As these stars age, they typically strip their outer layers, forming a 'wind’.

This beautiful image of the crescents of volcanic Io and more sedate Europa is a combination of two New Horizons images taken March 2, 2007, about two days after New Horizons made its closest approach to Jupiter.

Jupiter seen by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft

Jupiter's auroras animation

This photo of Saturn was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 22 October 2023, when the ringed planet was approximately 1365 million kilometres from Earth.