Image of the Day: April 2013

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Eject You

ESA & NASA/SOHO

Monday, April 29, 2013: A blast of particles flew out of the sun to the right on April 18-19, 2013. A coronal mass ejection (CME), associated with a solar flare, sent the cloud out from an active region at the sun’s edge. A secondary blast pointed a little lower followed. This still frame from a video combines images from three instruments. Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the sun’s blast. The frames combine with C2 (red) and C3 (blue) coronagraph images from SOHO. (Coronagraph images block out the sun to observe the corona. The strut that holds the disk that occults the Sun in C3 creates the diagonal black line.)

— Tom Chao

Giant

Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/Coelum

Tuesday, April 30, 2013: At the heart of the Virgo cluster of galaxies lies this gargantuan galaxy, Messier 86. The Virgo cluster represents the nearest large condensation of matter in the local universe. The cluster contains thousands of galaxies, from dwarfs to giant ellipticals such as Messier 86, which harbors hundreds of billions of stars.

— Tom Chao

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Tom Chao
Tom Chao
Tom Chao has contributed to SPACE.com as a producer and writer since 2000. As a writer and editor, he has worked for the Voyager Company, Time Inc. New Media, HarperCollins and Worth Publishers. He has a bachelor’s degree in Cinema Production from the University of Southern California, and a master’s degree from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Tom on Google+.