What Makes Up the Moon

In 1992, the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft made a pass by our planet’s closest companion, the moon. This mosaic of 53 images shows the different composition of rocks on the moon’s surface. Blue and orange colors represent lava flows, bright pink areas are highlands, and light blue colors indicate recent impact material with the youngest craters showing blue rays extending away from them.

Image: NASA/JPL

jetgreguar:

poinko:

theweekmagazine:

Jupiter may have “saved Earth from a devastating cosmic collision” on Monday when it took a hit from what may have been a massive asteroid, resulting in a 100-mile-wide fireball large enough to be caught on film from Earth.

This is the third time since 2009 observers have seen an impact flash on Jupiter’s surface, and some astronomers think the big planet’s gravitational pull serves as a sort of “cosmic shield” for the inner rings of planets — including Earth — “sweeping up incoming objects that would have a deadlier effect” if they were to crash into us. A few scientists think that without Jupiter’s protection, life on Earth wouldn’t have been able to develop.

Watch the collision on Jupiter

big ups to our man in the sky J-Up

yo you got our backs dog we get yours

props j-man

lessthanfloating:

discoverynews:

Discovery News chats with Caltech astronomer Mike Brown about the recent discovery of a fifth moon orbiting Pluto:

“It’s a really good reminder that you don’t have to be a planet to be interesting.”

yeah man pluto you own that moon, work that non-planetary status!

Nature is more than a scientist, an engineer… it’s an artist, in the grandest of scales.

godisntcoolenough:

A Milky Way Band
Credit & Copyright: John P. Gleason, Celestial Images

Explanation: Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above panorama of a northern band of the Milky Way’s disk covers 90 degrees and is a digitally created mosaic of several independent exposures. Scrolling right will display the rest of this spectacular picture. Visible are many bright stars, dark dust lanes, red emission nebulae, blue reflection nebulae, and clusters of stars. In addition to all this matter that we can see, astronomers suspect there exists even more dark matter that we cannot see.