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Astronomy's Greatest Hits, 2008

Biggest space discoveries of the year

• National Research Council Canada
• Gemini Observatory; Artwork by Lynette Cook
• 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF
• Paul Kalas/UC Berkeley; STScI
• NASA
• ESA/NASA/Geneva University Observatory
• NASA/JPL-Caltech/U. of Ariz./Texas A&M
• NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/U. of Ariz./Brown U.
• NASA
• NASA
• NASA
• David A. Hardy/UK ATC
• NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones
• NASA
• AP/NASA
• AP/NASA
• NASA-ESA

• Left: Infrared image of one planet orbiting HR 8799. Right: Isolated dots are planets; multicolored ball is residual light from HR 8799.
• Artist's conception of the HR 8799 system, in which the three planets orbit the star at distances similar to those of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
• Relative positions and orientations of the HR 8799 system, lower left, our own solar system, center, and the Milky Way's disk (the large flat circle).
• A Hubble Space Telescope image from 2006 of the debris belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. A planet, inset, is clearly visible.
• The full Eye-of-Sauron-like 2006 image of the dust disk surrounding Fomalhaut.
• An artist's impression of a scorching extrasolar planet looming close to its parent star in the background.
• A false-color image of the trench informally named 'La Mancha,' taken by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Surface Stereo Imager on Oct. 7, about a month before its signals were lost for good. The white area exposed just beneath the surface is probably water ice.
• Bright green areas in this image of the Martian surface show carbonate deposits,, which indicate the Red Planet may once have been suitable for life.
• Tracks left behind by a glacier on Mars.
• Mars' north polar ice cap, as spotted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
• An artist's impression of a black hole seen from directly 'above' the event horizon.
• An artist's conception of the two colliding galaxies of the 4C60.07 system, each with a massive black hole at its center.
• An artist's conception of a huge gamma-ray burst generated by a black hole being born, with material shot outward in a two-component jet (white and green beams).
• A composite image of Mercury. The blank patches are areas that were not imaged.
• Mercury seen in color by the MESSENGER space probe.
• A close-up of Mercury's surface, where volcanoes spew 'mysterious dark blue material.'
• A photo of a nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 100,000th orbit around the Earth.

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