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The Big Picture: A far-away supernova split into four
Gravity can play a lot of tricks with light, and we're not just talking about black holes. Take this recent Hubble Space Telescope discovery from UC Berkeley's Patrick Kelly, for example: those four lights are actually a distant supernova magnified and split into four images by the gravitational lensing of a giant galaxy. Besides looking cool, the image promises to be a gold mine for astrophysics. The time delay between those four lights will let researchers study both the properties of the exploding star and the galaxy, including the presence of dark matter. The best part? Due to the light's unusual path, there's a good chance that scientists will get a "rerun" in a few years if they want to see it again. [Image credit: NASA/ESA/FrontierSN/GLASS/Frontier Fields]
The Big Picture: A young star poses for its close-up
The Hubble Space Telescope spots a lot of stars, but some of them are seemingly more eager to pose for snapshots than others. Take the star you see above, for example. That's V1331 Cyg, a young stellar object that's conveniently sending a jet of gas directly toward Hubble, providing a clear (and rather dramatic) view that isn't clouded by interstellar dust, like its neighbors. Astronomers don't mind that V1331 is hogging the spotlight, though -- this scene offers an ideal way to look for signs of planetary formation and other phenomena that would otherwise be hard to detect. This could be much, much more than a pretty picture if it helps scientists understand how stars grow up.
The Big Picture: The Congo's solar-powered traffic robocops
While Detroit waits for its Robocop statue, the Democratic Republic of Congo's one-upped The Motor City and installed a quintet of robots to keep an unblinking eye on any traffic-law violators. The Guardian reports that these solar-powered aluminum bipeds are armed with cameras to monitor the vehicle-piloting populace, and hand-mounted red and green lights to help regulate the bustling flow of city Kinshasa's some nine million residents. Each new, female-engineered unit runs $27,500 (cheaper than some SWAT 'bots), and the country hopes to add another 30 to the force in an expansion effort for monitoring its highways.
The Big Picture: HTC's Vive VR headset up close and personal
This is what HTC's Vive VR headset looks like in real life. It's not a dummy model; those sensors are fully functional. It's on my actual head. The first thing you may notice (if you don't, check the gallery below), is that it looks a little bigger than the Oculus Rift. Or at least, thanks to the height of the sensor-housing faceplate, it feels that way. Those sensors are also exposed, a bit like they were on Oculus' Crystal Cove prototype at CES 2014. Take a look around the headset from different angles, and you'll see that HTC may not have deviated from the current virtual reality design script too far, but at the same time, it doesn't feel entirely derivative. Can this thing blow our minds like we hope it will? Is the VR race now officially on (given, you know who's newest headset has just debuted too)? We'll let you know once HTC finally pours its Valve-powered VR content into our eyes later this week.
The Big Picture: Buzz Aldrin's vintage selfie from space
Back in November 1966, Buzz Aldrin took a self-picture that will blow all Caribbean vacation selfies out of the water. Aside from the fact that it doesn't have a duckface in it, the photo was taken in space during the Gemini 12 mission. This historical selfie is but one of the numerous images NASA has recently unearthed from its archives -- images it's slated to auction off at Dreweatts & Bloomsbury's in London's Mayfair sometime today. See, the agency used to release only a small number of images to the media back then, while the rest was sent to Manned Spacecraft Center researchers in Houston.
The Big Picture: The frozen US as seen from space
Wondering why February has been so mind-numbingly cold? Here's why. NASA's Terra research satellite took a snapshot on February 19th showing that much of the US has been draped in Arctic and Siberian air masses, painting the country white with snow. Even southern cities like Macon, Georgia dipped well below freezing, according to weather reports. While those conditions are (thankfully) going away, they made for a spectacular view from space -- not that you'll likely want to see it again.
The Big Picture: Rosetta gets up close and personal with a comet
Thought the Rosetta probe's earlier comet snapshots were special? They don't have a patch on its latest photo session. The ESA spacecraft went on its first dedicated close flyby of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko this weekend, and the images it captured have revealed a whole new level of detail. The picture you see above was taken a mere 5.5 miles above the comet's surface, and shows how the landscape varies wildly over short distances. You'll see everything from relatively smooth plains to fractured hills in a span of just 0.8 miles -- unlike a planet, there's no significant gravity (or many other factors, for that matter) to shape the terrain. Be sure to savor this imagery while you can, by the way. Rosetta's next goal is to get a long-range shot from 158 miles out, so you won't be getting more close-ups any time soon. [Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM]
The Big Picture: Private jets swarm out of Arizona after the Super Bowl
If you've just returned from a boutique hermitage in the middle of nowhere, you might have missed the fact that the Super Bowl has just finished. While most people, naturally, will be driving away from the University of Phoenix's stadium, a higher class of sports enthusiast will be taking a private jet back home. If you check into a flight tracking service like FlightAware right now, for instance, you'll see the sky over Arizona blocked out by a fleet of Gulfstreams and Cessnas. Judging by the map, there's going to be more than a few east coast-bound flights that'll run out of champagne in the not-too-distant future.
The Big Picture: Virtual Los Angeles' minimalist skyline
Hello darkness, my old friend. No the image above isn't a minimalist poster for the Jack Nicholson classic Chinatown on Etsy, it's what Grand Theft Auto V's version of Los Angeles looks like when the game's textures are stripped away, leaving just the architecture behind. It's part of a series dubbed los_santos.obj by Kim Laughton, and should you be in the far east, you can check it out at China's Monadigital. As a few of Kotaku's commenters point out, the pieces look just a bit like the indie adventure game Kentucky Route Zero. We're curious, though: What do you think? Monadigital's website was down last we checked, but Laughton's posted more from the series on her Tumblr page in case you're interested in seeing more.
The year in Big Pictures: 17 thought-provoking images from 2014
Whatever you were doing in 2014, there's a good chance you took a picture or two while you were doing it. Thanks to the ever-increasing quality of cameras in our phones, and the popularity of sites like Instagram and Pinterest, images are the de facto currency when it comes to immediate, lucid story telling. We all know the old adage about how many words one picture is worth. As such, we're pleased to bring you 17,000 words' worth of them right here, from some of the more unusual technological happenings that occurred in 2014.
The Big Picture: Catching an intense solar flare in action
It's no longer rare to hear reports of solar flares that could affect Earth, but seeing them in vivid detail? That's another matter. Thankfully, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recently captured a high-intensity X1.8 flare (80 percent more intense than an already huge X1 flare) in action. The pretty pyrotechnics you see above represent a subset of the ultraviolet light from the eruption, while the video below shows what it looked like in other wavelengths. And the kicker? As impressive as this may be, it's far from the largest example in recent memory -- that honor goes to a mammoth X28+ flare from 2003. These ejections aren't so enjoyable when they cause havoc with communications and navigation systems, but they at least make for a good light show.
The Big Picture: Building an electric 'armored' car out of wood
If you think the coffee table you've been building in your spare time is pretty sweet, just wait until you get a load of what Liu Fulong has been making. The Shengyang, China resident recently finished his own electric armored car after four months of work, despite having no formal training in automotive design. As you might guess from the photo above, the "armored" label is based more on appearance than functionality. That wooden body probably wouldn't stop many bullets, and the missiles are purely cosmetic. But hey, the car underneath works -- Liu can get around at a respectable 30MPH (faster than his previous 20MPH project), and he factored in crucial elements like lights, mirrors and spare tires. Is this safe? Probably not, but it's proof that you don't need to be a wealthy entrepreneur to build your own eco-friendly ride. [Image credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images]
The Big Picture: Galactic collision provides amazing X-ray light show
'Tis the season for holiday light shows, and two galaxies about 130 million light years from Earth got together to put on a display of their own. NGC 2207 and IC 2163, both part of the constellation Canis Major (the Great Dog), got cozy and the "ultraluminous X-ray sources" (ULXs) were on full display for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture. In this case, the light is created when matter is pulled from stars to a neutron star or black whole, generating X-rays during the heating process. What's pictured here is a composite image of the encounter with Chandra data in pink, details from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red and info from the Hubble Space telescope in red, green and blue (seen as blue, white, orange and brown). The interaction between galaxies also features "intense star formation" thanks to shock waves that spawn during the collision.
The Big Picture: a closer look at live rodent nerve cells
What you're looking at up above isn't a crazy anaglyph 3D image. Well, at least not intentionally. It's actually the result of a decade-old tagging method that researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Italy are now using in live mice. The method, called SNAP-tagging, uses proteins that latch onto specific chemical structures and don't let go. To explore rodent nerves, researchers genetically engineered the mice to produce SNAP proteins and then injected the vermin with fluorescent probes that the proteins would attach to. This allows them to be followed through the body with a microscope. For example, in the picture above, the thick blue lines are hairs and the red bundles are nerves.
The Big Picture: measuring the 'Eye of Sauron' galaxy
The galaxy you see here (NGC 4151) may be best-known for looking a bit like the Eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings movies, but it's now much more important than that -- it may be the key to mapping the universe. Researchers at the Univerity of Southampton have developed a measurement technique that helped them gauge the distance of NGC 4151 (and possibly other galaxies) with greater precision than any previous method would allow. Instead of using the light from other galaxies as a rough yardstick, the team compared the physical size of the dust ring around NGC 4151's black hole against the apparent size taken from infrared readings. These relatively concrete pieces of information helped them narrow down the distance of the galaxy from a very broad range of 4 to 29 megaparsecs to 19, or about 62 million light years; even with 10 percent uncertainty, that's a vast improvement.
The Big Picture: cooling molten metal in space
Ever wonder what hot metal would be like if it weren't bound by containers, liquids... or even gravity? You're looking at it. The European Space Agency has developed an electromagnetic levitator that the International Space Station is using to see how molten metal cools when it's free of the constraints you typically find on Earth. This experiment isn't intended solely as eye candy, of course. The station crew will use a high-speed camera to record the cooling process and make note of how it affects material structures. If the tests prove fruitful, they could teach people on the ground how to forge metal alloys with greater strength, exotic patterns and other traits that are very hard to produce using modern day techniques.
The Big Picture: our clearest view yet of Europa, Jupiter's icy moon
It's going to be a long, long time before anyone gets to see Jupiter's moon Europa first-hand, but NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just provided the next best thing. It has released a "remastered" image of the icy celestial body that shows what it would look like to the naked eye. NASA's Galileo probe snapped the original photo mosaic (using near-infrared, green and violet filters) back in the 1990s, but they've been put through modern image processing techniques that simulate visible light wavelengths.
The Big Picture: giving birth to a solar system
While one hot topic regarding outer space lately is a work of science fiction, here's some fact to switch that up -- in case comets aren't really your bag. What you see above is the first result of the Alma telescope array set up in its near-final form, capturing the beginnings of a solar system that could be much like our own given enough time. HL Tauri is a star some 450 light years away that's surrounded by the dusty disc-shaped remains of star-birth, is around a million years old and already forming planets by the looks of things. As ESO reports, scientists say that this sole image will "revolutionize theories of planetary formation" because it means planets may actually, well, form, faster than previously expected. Even better? This image might give us a clearer idea of what our own solar system looked like in its early days.
The Big Picture: building a 3D-printed moon base
Did the European Space Agency's concept of a 3D-printed moon base seem too outlandish? Don't worry -- the institution has just posted a video (below) that sheds more light on the subject. The colonization mission would revolve around a robotic rover that converts moon dust into a 3D-printed protective layer for an inflatable habitat; after three months, the living space would be safe enough for human settlers. It'd even have windows to provide some natural lighting. This is just a research exercise at present -- it'll likely be years before the ESA can put a base like this on lunar soil. Still, it's clear that the agency's vision of extraterrestrial colonization is more than just a passing fancy.
The Big Picture: using a cellphone in this cathedral creates a laser show
Next to a movie theater, we're going to say a church, temple or mosque are among the last places that using a mobile device is deemed okay. Unless you're in France's Saint-Eustache cathedral, that is, where your mobile-made thoughts translate into bits of laser light that travel up the house of worship's columns and form constellations on the vaulted ceiling. The installation was noticed by Creator's Project, is called Shooting Thoughts and is the work of one Filipe Vilas-Boas. The above picture might be impressive, sure, but it's nowhere near as cool as seeing it in motion -- jump after the break for that.
