Watch NASA TV Coverage of the Launch of TESS
LIVE, 6:30 p.m. Eastern: NASA TV coverage of the launch of TESS, NASA’s new planet-hunting mission. Launch is targeted at 6:51 p.m. EDT. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet…
Astronomy
Unprecedented ‘Dissection’ of Twin Galaxies in Final Stages of Merging
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have completed an unprecedented “dissection” of twin galaxies in the final stages of merging. The new study, led…
Diamonds Provide Evidence of a Lost Planet That Once Roamed Our Solar System
Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar…
New Research Helps Explain Mercury’s Magnetic Tail
Theoretical physicists used simulations to explain the unusual readings collected in 2009 by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission. The origin…
Astrophysicists Test Theories of Gravity with Black Hole Shadows
Can we tell black holes apart? Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt answer this question by computing images of feeding non-Einsteinian black holes: At present it…
NASA’s Exploration Campaign: Back to the Moon and on to Mars
“The directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery. It marks a first step in returning American astronauts…
Astrophysicists Are Unlocking the Secrets to Dark Matter
University of Miami astrophysicist Nico Cappelluti studies the sky. An assistant professor in the Physics Department, Cappelluti is intrigued by the cosmic phenomena of super…
Hubble Image of the Week – Approaching the Universe’s Origins
This intriguing image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a massive galaxy cluster called PSZ2 G138.61-10.84, about six billion light-years away. Galaxies are not…
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Science Data Pipeline
A Science Pipeline to New Planet Discoveries NASA’s ongoing search for life in the universe produces a lot of data. The agency’s new planet-hunting mission,…
These Striking Star Images Will Brighten Your Day
This dramatic infrared image shows the nearby star formation region Monoceros R2, located some 2700 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn). The…
New Model Supports Connection Between Gamma Ray Bursts and Supernovae
A “core-collapse” supernova occurs when the iron core of a massive star collapses under the force of gravity and then rebounds, generating pressure waves and…
How Short-Period Binary Systems Eject Orbiting Worlds
Planets orbiting “short-period” binary stars, or stars locked in close orbital embrace, can be ejected off into space as a consequence of their host stars’…
Pluto’s Moon Charon Gets First Official Feature Names
Legendary explorers and visionaries, real and fictitious, are among those immortalized by the IAU in the first set of official surface-feature names for Pluto’s largest…
NASA Television to Air Launch of TESS Planet-Hunting Mission
On a mission to detect planets outside of our solar system, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:32…
Cosmic Gorilla Effect Could Prevent the Detection of Aliens
A well-known experiment with young people bouncing a ball showed that when an observer focuses on counting the passes, he does not detect if someone…
Astronomers Discover Fascinating Discs Around Young Stars
The SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile allows astronomers to suppress the brilliant light of nearby stars in order to obtain…
SDO Views Our Sun In Three Different Wavelengths
From March 20-23, 2018, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured three sequences of our Sun in three different extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. The resulting images illustrate how…
3D Juno Movie Reveals Cyclones and Anticyclones on Jupiter
In this animation the viewer is taken low over Jupiter’s north pole to illustrate the 3-D aspects of the region’s central cyclone and the eight…