Week's Best Space Pictures: Celestial Booger, Mars Road Map, and Frozen Lakes
A runaway star leaves a slime trail, Curiosity follows a road map, and the Great Lakes enter a deep freeze in this week's best space pictures.
Young, hot stars light up the Orion nebula in the above false-color image, released February 20, based on infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
This nebula—located 1,500 light-years away from Earth—is a stellar nursery. It contains newly formed massive stars (bright white, center) in an area called the Trapezium Cluster. The nebula is also full of stars in the making (red).
This galaxy's name—MCG-03-04-014—doesn't roll off the tongue, but it's quite a sight in this Hubble image released on February 17.
MCG-03-04-014 belongs to a category of galaxies known as luminous infrared galaxies, so called because they shine brightly in the infrared spectrum. The reason for this particular galaxy's glow is still a mystery.
Some astronomers contend that a recent
