The Rosette Nebula is a quite large nebula and is located 3,000 light-years away.

This picture was taken in the light emitted by three elements of the ionized gas from the nebula. The red color comes from hydrogen, green from oxygen and blue from sulfur.

Image Credits: NASA

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An infrared space telescope, called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has discovered several dark asteroids close to Earth that could possibly be a threat to our planet. Those asteroids are very dark and reflect less than 10% of the sunlight they receive, which makes them extremely hard to spot with traditional telescopes. However they absorb a lot of the sunlight and heat up which makes them quite bright in infrared. That’s why WISE could detect them.

Near-Earth Object becomes visible in infrared

WISE, the new space telescope launched on December 14, 2009 is expected to discover as many as 1000 near-Earth asteroids. However according to current estimates the number of undiscovered dark asteroids capable of doing great damage if they hit Earth are over 10,000. READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

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Saturn has a lot of moons. Two of them are really odd, and bear a striking resemblance to the Death Star from the Star Wars movies. Mimas has a crater of approximately the same scale as the one on the Death Star. Iapetus also has large craters, but the resemblance lies in its equatorial ridge.

Mimas compared to the Death Star from Star Wars

Mimas’ Crater:

Mimas, the 20th largest moon in the solar system, has a huge crater Herschel named after the discoverer of the moon. The crater’s diameter is 130 km, which is almost a third of the moon’s own diameter. Herschel’s walls are over 5 km high and its central peak rises to up to 6 km. Some parts of the crater go as deep as 10 km. To show the crater’s scale, if there was one with the same scale on Earth, it would have been over 4,000 km in diameter, which would make it wider than Canada. The impact that created this crater must have nearly shattered Mimas. The shock must have been so strong that fractures have formed on the opposite side of the moon. READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

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This stunning picture of the Sombrero Galaxy in infrared was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Sombrero Galaxy, also known as M104, is 50,000 light years across which makes it one of the largest galaxies of the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. It is 28 million light years away from us.

Image Credits: NASA, Spitzer Space Telescope.

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An article was recently published by Scientific American, a very reputable science magazine, stating that evidence was found that life existed on Mars and was brought to Earth on a meteorite. The meteorite in question is called “Allan Hills 84001”. It was blasted from Mars by a huge meteorite impact 16 million years ago and crashed on Earth 13,000 years ago. It was only in 1996 that it was discovered in Antarctica. The meteorite appeared to contain some peculiar fossils. They being of biological nature was rapidly dismissed at the time. However, now scientists have re-examined them and concluded that they are indeed biological. They are fossils of ancient microscopic aliens!

Meteorite from Mars with biological fossils in it.

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