This image provided by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Thursday May 4, 2006 shows a second red spot (lower l.) emerging on Jupiter. For the first time in history, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away. The storm is roughly one-half the diameter of its bigger and legendary cousin, the Great Red Spot. Researchers suggest that the new spot may be related to a possible major climate change in Jupiter's atmosphere.
This image provided by NASA shows a storm on Saturn, with a diameter similar in size to the distance from London to Cape Town.
This false-color composite image, released by NASA Sept. 23, 2010, is constructed from data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. It shows the glow of auroras streaking out about 600 miles from the cloud tops of Saturn's south polar region. The composite image was made from 65 individual observations by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on Nov. 1, 2008.
This wider view of Uranus reveals the planet's faint rings and several of its satellites. The area outside Uranus was enhanced in brightness to reveal the faint rings and satellites.
Saturn's north and south poles are ablaze in this Hubble image of the planet's auroras. The auroral display is caused by an energetic solar wind that sweeps over the planet, much like it does on Earth. But unlike Earth's auroras, Saturn's emit light seen only in the ultraviolet spectrum.
This image of Neptune was taken during the August 16 -17, 1989 flyby as Voyager 2 photographed the planet almost continuously. This picture shows two of the four cloud features tracked by the Voyager 2 cameras during a two-month period - the largest dark oval at left, and the smaller oval at lower right.
In this image released by NASA on Thursday, Dec. 16, 2004, Saturn's moon Dione is shown against the globe of Saturn as Cassini approached the icy moon for its close rendezvous on Dec. 14, 2004.
Whorls, streamers and eddies play in the banded atmosphere of a gas giant. Strong image enhancement renders unto Saturn's clouds a grainy texture not unlike sandstone. However, the loss in delicate smoothness is compensated for by an increase in discernible detail.
Voyager 2 sent back this stunning image of storms at work in Neptune's windy atmosphere in August 1989. This photograph of Neptune was reconstructed from two images taken by Voyager 2's narrow-angle camera, through the green and clear filters. The image shows three of the features that Voyager 2 photographed during its Neptune flyby. At the north (top) is the Great Dark Spot, accompanied by bright, white clouds that undergo rapid changes in appearance. To the south of the Great Dark Spot is the bright feature that Voyager scientists nicknamed "Scooter." Still farther south is the feature called "Dark Spot 2," which has a bright core.
This 1981 Voyager 2 image shows the vast Saturn ring system, as well as three small icy satellites and the shadow of a fourth. Saturn is the second largest planet in the Solar System. It has a volume about 760 times that of Earth. Like Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, it has no solid surface, but is instead an enormous sphere of gas which gradually compresses into fluid at great depths beneath the clouds. Most of the visible markings are formed in a layer of ammonia ice clouds, which form at a pressure level in Saturn's atmosphere that is comparable to sea-level atmospheric pressure on Earth.
This is an artist's concept of a gas giant planet orbiting a red dwarf K star. The planet has not been directly imaged, but its presence was detected in 2003 microlensing observations of a field star in our galaxy. Gravitational microlensing happens when a foreground star amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. Follow-up observations by Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 separated the light of the slightly offset foreground star from the background star. This allowed the host star to be identified as a red dwarf star located 19,000 light-years away.
This sequence of nine true-color, narrow-angle images shows the varying appearance of Jupiter as it rotated through more than a complete 360-degree turn. The smallest features seen in this sequence are no bigger than about 230 miles. Rotating more than twice as fast as Earth, Jupiter completes one rotation in about 10 hours. These images were taken on Oct. 22 and 23, 2000.
A serene orb of ice is set against the gentle pastel clouds of giant Saturn. Rhea transits the face of the gas giant, whose darkened rings and their planet-hugging shadows appear near upper right. Rhea is the second largest of Saturn's moons at 949 miles across.
This is an artist's concept of a gas giant planet orbiting the cool, red dwarf star Gliese 876, located 15 light-years away in the autumn constellation Aquarius. The planet was discovered in 1998. But new Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the star's wobble, caused by the gravitational tug of the planet, firmly establish the planet's mass as being no more than approximately twice that of Jupiter's.
Believe it or not, this extreme close-up of Saturn's swirling clouds was acquired from more than 620,000 miles from the gas giant planet. The rings' images are severely bent by atmospheric refraction as they pass behind the planet.
This false color mosaic shows a belt-zone boundary near Jupiter's equator. The images that make up the four quadrants of this mosaic were taken within a few minutes of each other. Light at each of Galileo's three near-infrared wavelengths is displayed here in the visible colors red, green and blue.
This is an artist's concept of a hypothetical 10-million-year-old star system. The bright blur at the center is a star much like our sun. The other orb in the image is a gas-giant planet like Jupiter. Wisps of white throughout the image represent traces of gas. Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found evidence showing that gas-giant planets either form within the first 10 million years of a sun-like star's life, or not at all.
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed hundreds of thousands of his cheering supporters in Istanbul saying, 'My patience has run out' with anti-government protests.
Turkey’s largest city was divided on Sunday by competing shows of force, between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who staged a mammoth rally of loyalists, and anti-government demonstrators, who clashed with police on Istanbul's streets once again to protest his rule.
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