Stunning Hubble Image of Spiral Galaxy Messier 100
This stunning spiral galaxy is Messier 100 in the constellation Coma Berenices, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — not for the first…
Astronomy
NELIOTA Project Views Flashes of Light Across the Surface of the Moon
Every few hours observing the Moon, ESA’s ‘NELIOTA’ project discovers a brilliant flash of light across its surface – the result of an object hurtling…
SPECULOOS Project Makes Its First Observations
The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory (SSO) has been successfully installed at the Paranal Observatory and has obtained its first engineering and calibration images — a process…
Fast-Growing White Dwarf Surprises Astronomers
Astronomers have detected a bright X-ray outburst from a star in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy almost 200,000 light years from Earth. A…
Astronomers Discover Helium Exoplanet in the Cygnus Constellation
Astronomers have discovered a distant planet with an abundance of helium in its atmosphere, which has swollen to resemble an inflated balloon. An international team…
Astronomers Find Unknown Treasure Trove of Planets Hiding in Dust
The first unbiased survey of protoplanetary disks surrounding young stars in the Taurus star-forming region turned up a higher-than-expected number of disks with features suggesting…
Scientists Find Nebular Gases Preserved in Deep-Mantle Neon
The Earth formed relatively quickly from the cloud of dust and gas around the sun, trapping water and gases in the planet’s mantle, according to…
LIGO Makes Vital Contribution to New Gravitational Wave Discoveries
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth have made vital contributions to the observations of four new gravitational waves, which were announced this weekend. The new…
Astronomers Reveal How Stellar Binaries Form
Most stars with the mass of the sun or larger have one or more companion stars, but when and how these multiple stars form is…
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Arrives at Asteroid Bennu
After traveling through space for more than two years and over two billion kilometers, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft arrived…
Juno Spacecraft Views ‘Dolphin’ in the Jovian Clouds
This series of images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft captures changing cloud formations across Jupiter’s southern hemisphere. A cloud in the shape of a dolphin appears…
Hubble Image of the Week – Clusters Within Clusters
This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), reveals thousands of globular clusters lying at the core of a galaxy…
GRAVITY Measures Environs of a Massive Black Hole Outside the Milky Way
Discovery is the first detailed observation of the environs of a massive black hole outside the Milky Way, say researchers from the GRAVITY group. In…
Fermi Traces the History of Starlight Across the Cosmos
Scientists using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have measured all the starlight produced over 90 percent of the universe’s history. The analysis, which…
ALMA Reveals Black Hole ‘Donuts’ Are Actually ‘Fountains’
Based on computer simulations and new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers have found that the rings of gas surrounding active supermassive…
NASA Will Provide Live Coverage of Spacecraft Arrival at Asteroid Bennu
NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its targeted asteroid, Bennu, on Monday, December 3 at approximately…
Hubble Uncovers Thousands of Star Clusters Scattered Among Galaxies
Gazing across 300 million light-years into a monstrous city of galaxies, astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to do a comprehensive census of some…
Astronomers Determine the Distance of the Cygnus Loop
The Cygnus Loop (also known as the Veil Nebula) is a supernova remnant, the detritus of the explosive death of a massive star about ten…