Wednesday, January 25, 2006

A Picture is worth a thousand words!

I just opened up Internet Explorer, and as its default is www.msn.com, it opened that directly to a gorgeous picture of some earthlike planet of some far away star. Naturally I was intrigued.

As it turns out - the planet is infact about 5.5 times larger than earth, but on the cosmic scale still small enough to be considered earthlike. The vast majority of planes so far have been gas giants like Jupiter- no chance of finding our kind of life forms there.

They used a new method called "microlensing" which makes smaller planets easier to find- so I guess we can expect more of these in the future.


They were having people vote for their favourite astronomy pictures on MSN and these were some of mine


This one is of the star Monocerotis, taken by Hubble



This on was taken by the Spacecraft Cassini, and shows Saturn with its moon Dione


This is a view of the "Mountains of creation" in Cassiopeia where young stars are being born.
It was, by the way ,the one I voted for.

11 comments:

the Monk said...

amazing pics...the mountains of creation is my definitely the one I'd vote for too...

Sthupit Girl said...

really awesome pics... the mountains of creation is definately my favorite... and I'd vote for it too..

thanks for posting this...!

Unknown said...

Those pics are absolutely stunning!!!...."Microlensing" and "Mountains of Creation" were my favourites!

Shashi Iyer said...

yeah... my fav is also the mountain of creations

Vinesh said...

Awesome shots there..
Each time I look at such pictures... I feel really small..

Sid said...

simply u-n-b-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-e!!! wow...its tough to really understand the vast expanses of space...

nandini said...

@vinesh... yeah the sight overwhelms me as well.

Pradeep Nair said...

Everything about the space is so mysterious, so wonderful.!

Jayanth Madhav Barki said...

Superb pics...

Hey I came across your potter blog . Too good man...

Random Access said...

I love the beauty up there...brings a smile everytime to my face.

Btw, can we submit our fav pics? I have got quite a few! I dun really go to MSN :P

Random Access
The search has just begun !!!

Karthik Nagarajan said...

looks like you are into astronomy... check out this link
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_sc/eu_britain_new_planet