Picture This

The Magellanic Clouds and an interstellar filament

Portrayed in this image from ESA’s Planck satellite are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, dwarf galaxies that are among the nearest companions of our Milky Way. The Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years away, is the large red and orange blob close to the centre of the image. The Small Magellanic Cloud lies some 200,000 light-years from us.

News

IRIS and Hinode: a stellar research team

NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph satellite, or IRIS, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA)/NASA’s Hinode solar observatory, have just made a significant step towards understanding why the corona — the outermost, wispy layer of the Sun’s atmosphere — is hundreds of times hotter than the lower photosphere, which is the Sun’s visible surface.