Gliese 710.

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A view of a small part of the sky as if you were staring at a star (centre) approaching nearly head on, and then as it passes by and away again. The motion can be likened to what an observer standing beside a road would see looking at an approaching car, and then swinging around to continue to follow it as it moves away. As a result, the objects in the background – in this case distant stars – become blurred as you move quickly to maintain a visual on the passing object. The focus of this animation is the star known as Gliese 710. It will have a close encounter with our Sun in 1.3 million years, passing within the Oort Cloud reservoir of comets in the outskirts of our Solar System. The star is predicted to pass within about 2.3 trillion kilometres, the equivalent of about 16 000 Earth–Sun distances. The star’s motion is set against a background of other moving stars and the visualisation covers, very quickly, the timeframe from about 1.1–1.5 million years in the future. The size of...

Mars in the New Year

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Malin Space Science Systems, MGS, JPL, NASA
Many will long remember where they were and what they were doing when the calendar rolled over to the year 2000.

On Mars, of course, that date was nothing special and the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft continued with business as usual - systematically recording images of the Red Planet from orbit.

In fact, this striking high-resolution picture was taken less than 7 hours after the new year began for planet Earth's "Universal Time" zone.

The area seen is about 3 kilometers across at a maximum resolution of 4.5 meters per pixel.

It shows a wonderful variety of surface features and textures in the Martian northern hemisphere region Nilosyrtis Mensae.

Mars in the New Year
Malin Space Science Systems, MGS, JPL, NASA