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Waltzing dwarfs

This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the Hubble Space Telescope. Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other. The observed system, Luhman 16AB, is only about six light-years away and is the third closest stellar system to Earth — after the triple star system Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Despite its proximity, Luhman 16AB was only discovered in 2013 by the astronomer Kevin Luhman. The two brown dwarfs that make up the system, Luhman 16A and Luhman 16B, orbit each other at a distance of only three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and so these observations are a showcase for Hubble’s precision and high resolution.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Bedin et al.

The lightest (i.e., least massive) known star, OTS 44 [3000 x 2400]

The planet Uranus. Taken on November 14th 2009 at 3:52 am. Using the 98 in Hooker telescope.

See intricate cloud patterns in the northern hemisphere of Jupiter in this new view taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

The color-enhanced image was taken on April 1 at 2:32 a.m. PST (5:32 a.m. EST), as Juno performed its twelfth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 7,659 miles (12,326 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a northern latitude of 50.2 degrees.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill

Space systems, some discarded ideas from a school asignment that I still really like

This first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.