KEY POINTS
- NASA shared photos of the Sun and Saturn to celebrate the new year
- On Saturn, however, one year is about 29 Earth years
- The Hubble’s Twitter account also shared a photo of “celestial fireworks”
A new year has come again here on Earth. To celebrate, NASA shared some incredible snaps from the solar system.
A year is simply the time it takes for a planet to orbit its star. And for the Earth, we have reached the end of another 365 days of our revolution around the Sun.
To celebrate the arrival of 2023, NASA sent its greetings from the “star of the show,” sharing a stunning snap of the imposing Sun shining amid the blackness of space. In it, one can see bright swirls in oranges and reds as well as some powerful eruptions.
“You don’t look a day over 4.5 billion years,” NASA said in the tweet. “Happy New Year from the star of the show that makes all this possible. We begin a new orbit around our Sun, 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth.”
The agency also shared one of the incredible photos of Saturn to “ring in the new year.” It was one of the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the planet with its iconic rings against space.
“NASA Hubble took several photos of Saturn from 1996 to 2000, observing how its rings appear differently from our perspective as the gas giant makes its 29-year-long journey around the Sun,” NASA tweeted.
One can see the Saturn images taken by Hubble from 1996 to 2000 here.
Indeed, a new year is rather different on Saturn than it is on Earth. As NASA noted, the sixth planet in the solar system takes 29 Earth years to orbit the Sun, so it takes quite a while before a New Year’s celebration can be held on the gas giant.
Interestingly, the days on the planet are actually pretty short, lasting only about 10.7 hours for a single rotation on its axis. All the while, its dozens of moons and seven “spectacular” rings are in for the ride.
In a little bit of a bonus for the New Year, the Hubble Space Telescope’s official Twitter account also shared the photo that was voted by Twitter users as the favorite Hubble image from 2022. It’s of the supernova remnant DEM L 190, which incidentally looks rather like New Year’s Eve celebration fireworks.
“DEM L 190 is 160,000 light-years away, and made of the debris from a large star’s death,” it noted in a tweet, which came with the stunning photo of the “celestial fireworks.”
Now that the James Webb Space Telescope is ready for its scientific mission, it’s quite possible that we may just get to witness other such incredible photos of our solar system and the space beyond in the year ahead.
NASA/JPL
