5 completely mind-bending images from space

5 completely mind-bending images from space


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SALT LAKE CITY — Space is just so completely gigantically huge. It's difficult to convey just how completely gigantically huge it really is.

Within that ridiculous hugeness there are plenty of objects floating around and generally being extremely incredible to look at.

Here are some of the best, along with some facts and figures so you can do some learning while you gaze at the wonder of what the universe has spit out, at least across the 29 gigaparsecs of it we can actually see:

1. The sun can be a harsh mistress, spewing out hot gasses, charged particles and always tons of heat. But occasionally the sun spits out something both beautiful and terrifing, like this coronal mass ejection from August 2012. Coronal mass ejections happen when opposing magnetic forces come together in the sun, forcing huge amounts of solar material out into the surrounding space.

2. The Crab Nebula has been a favorite of stargazers since it was first seen by Chinese, Indian and Arab astronomers in 1054 as a bright light that appeared in the sky. It was a star going supernova. It has since been observed millions of times, but none so spectacularly as in this photo taken by the Hubble Telescope.

3. The star at the center of the Eskimo Nebula is very much like our own sun, but the view is incredibly different. Discovered in 1787, original observers thought the star looked like a person's face surrounded by a parka.

4. Stephen's quintet sounds more like a work of chamber music than what it really is: A massive collision of galaxies that will eventually merge into one much larger galaxy over the next couple billion years. But the galaxy at the top left wasn't invited to the party. That's actually a foreground galaxy, some seven times closer to earth than the other four actually merging together. The image was taken by the Hubble Telescope.

5. Tornadoes on Earth can wreak havoc and cause major damage to both homes and infrastructure. But no one really thinks of dust devils as a threat. If we were on Mars, however, it would be a totally different story. This NASA image shows a Martian dust devil, half a mile wide and over 100 feet across, twisting across the martian surface.

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David Self Newlin

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