Brand New Views of a Universe That Gets Prettier With Age

Two months ago, NASA launched their Wide-field Infared Survey Explorer (WISE for short) 325 miles up from earth, where by design this probing telescope scans the sky for objects and matter that is typically hard to see: asteroids, comets, galaxies, as well as objects that might potentially pose a threat to our dear (if somewhat mismanaged) planet. Since then, it's sent back somewhere in the likes of 200,000 plus images, some of which NASA has recently been so kind as to publish for our astonishment. The images give us a new and comprehensively stunning perspective on the immensity of the Andromeda Galaxy, the burnt infared path of a comet hurling through space, as well as a bird's eye view of stellar chaos. We're so lucky (and arguably unworthy) to live in such an amazingly beautiful world that if you let it will ignite your curiosity and imagination all your life.

I could stare at this one for days; the detail is absolutely mind-boggling. You can actually see the dusty arms of the spiraling galaxy! The blue denotes new mature stars while red and yellow represent dust from large, newborn ones. Lovely. So lovely.


This one too. Well, all of them to be honest, but this one foremost. Quick story about this comet found first in 2007: after spending billions of years spinning around in one of the more cold spherical clouds within our solar system, it was suddenly knocked out of its orbit and sent loose in a new direction closer to the sun.