The Merger That Led to the Formation of the Milky Way
ESA’s Gaia mission has made a major breakthrough in unraveling the formation history of the Milky Way. Instead of forming alone, our Galaxy merged with…
ESA’s Gaia mission has made a major breakthrough in unraveling the formation history of the Milky Way. Instead of forming alone, our Galaxy merged with…
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has gone silent, ending a historic mission that studied time capsules from the solar system’s earliest chapter. Dawn missed scheduled communications sessions…
This “super-resolution” view of asteroid Bennu was created using eight images obtained by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on October 29, 2018, from a distance of about…
Shadows on Earth can be mysterious and foreboding, but when they occur in space, they can convey information we otherwise could not know. In a…
Every Mars landing is a knuckle-whitening feat of engineering. But each attempt has its own quirks based on where a spacecraft is going and what…
ESO’s exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY instrument has added further evidence to the long-standing assumption that a supermassive black hole lurks in the center of the Milky…
Researchers have taught an artificial intelligence program used to recognize faces on Facebook to identify galaxies in deep space. The result is an AI bot…
After nine years in deep space collecting data that indicate our sky to be filled with billions of hidden planets – more planets even than…
Parker Solar Probe now holds the record for the closest approach to the Sun by a human-made object. The spacecraft passed the current record of…
Small planetary systems with multiple planets are not fans of heavy metal — think iron, not Iron Maiden — according to a new Yale University…
The young star Eta Carinae shines prominently in the skies of the southern hemisphere. Although located relatively far away from Earth (about seven thousand light-years…
Polarimetric investigation of a near-Earth asteroid Phaethon was carried out in December 2017 on its closest approach to the Earth. The study was conducted in…
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope doesn’t usually get much assistance from its celestial subjects — but to take this image, the telescope opted for teamwork…
In the early hours of September 7, NASA broke a world record. Less than 2 minutes after the launch of a 58-foot-tall (17.7-meter) Black Brant…
A swirling, oval white cloud in Jupiter’s South South Temperate Belt is captured in this image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Known as White Oval A5,…
Powerful gushers of energy from seething stars can sculpt eerie-looking figures with long, flowing veils of gas and dust. One striking example is “the Ghost…
The planets so far discovered across the Milky Way are a motley, teeming multitude: hot Jupiters, gas giants, small, rocky worlds, and mysterious planets larger…
FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has observed the active star-forming region NGC 2467 — sometimes referred to as the Skull and…