Top 5 NASA images in September: Saturn’s inner rings, Crab Nebula, protostar, galactic ’eyes’ and more

Space is not only mysterious but also holds secrets to many new objects and celestial phenomena, which amazes science enthusiasts. High-definition cameras and telescopes embedded in satellites sent by various space stations periodically help us discover new mysteries.

Be it the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Indian Space Research Organisation, European Space Agency or any other, they spend billions of dollars sending satellites into space and discovering new things for us to see.

Check these five spectacular NASA images from space posted on their Instagram handle, which keeps us updated with all the happenings in space.

Here are 5 images:

Saturn’s inner rings:

NASA, through its Cassini spacecraft, clicked Saturn’s inner rings on the planet’s night side. The southern hemisphere appears lit by sunlight reflecting off the rings, while the north portion shines much more feebly in the dim light that filters through the rings and is scattered on the top half of the planet.

In this image, the planet takes up the left side, while its rings glow in shades of gold along the right side. The rings appear dim nearest to the planet, gradually becoming bolder near the centre of the rings and fading out back into faint along the outer edges.

Newborn star – a protostar:

The image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows a light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust that looks a little like a caterpillar—a newborn star—a protostar.

Looking deeply, one can see that the stars form in large clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds, which are cold and clump up. Eventually, gravity causes some of these clumps to collapse. When this happens, friction causes the material to heat up, eventually creating a protostar. In the image, at the center is a long, bright blue cloud of gas and dust with a bright core.

Crab Nebula:

In the third, NASA, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, clicked an image of the eerie glow of a dead star, which exploded long ago in a supernova. The ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse and at the centre is the star's tell-tale heart, which beats with rhythmic precision.

Known as a neutron star, it has the same mass as the Sun, but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere only a few miles across. The tiny powerhouse is the bright star-like object in the center of the image.

Galactic 'eyes':

The fourth image has been clicked by Hubble Space Telescope that studied a bright pair of galactic “eyes” – which are really two colliding galaxies known as Arp 107. According to estimate, the Arp 107 is located about 465 million light-years away and the pair's merger will take around hundreds of millions of years to complete.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field:

The last image in the series is of the iconic Hubble Ultra Deep Field, taken by NASA and ESA. The image shows the black background of space, sprinkled with thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. The larger galaxy is spiral-shaped, while the other is spindle-shaped because the galaxy is seen edge-on. The smaller galaxy has a line that points to the words "supermassive black hole" which connects to a bright white spot in the middle of it.