Hubble Image of the Week – Settling Into Old Age
NGC 3384, visible in this image, has many of the features characteristic of so-called elliptical galaxies. Such galaxies glow diffusely, are rounded in shape, display…
Astronomy
Astronomers Reveal Suppressed Star Formation in the Early Universe
Massive clusters of galaxies, some with more mass than a hundred Milky Way galaxies, have been detected from cosmic epochs as early as about three…
Spitzer Reveals Clues to How Ancient Galaxies Lit up the Universe
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a byproduct of the…
Mars Orbiter Reveals Why Martian Full Moon Looks Like Candy
For the first time, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has caught the Martian moon Phobos during a full moon phase. Each color in this new image…
Blue Supergiant Stars Shimmer Because of Waves on Their Surface
Blue supergiants are rock ‘n’ roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented,…
“Journey through an Exploded Star” 3D Interactive Experience
The Smithsonian today made available a new online interactive that allows users to explore a three-dimensional (3D) visualization of the remnants of a supernova, or…
NASA’s Dart Mission to Demonstrate Planetary Defense Technique
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – NASA’s first mission to demonstrate a planetary defense technique – will get one chance to hit its target,…
Hubble Image of the Week – Distant and Ancient
Dotted across the sky in the constellation of Pictor (The Painter’s Easel) is the galaxy cluster highlighted here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: SPT-CL…
Hubble Telescope Views Stunning Spiral Galaxy NGC 2903
Few of the universe’s residents are as iconic as the spiral galaxy. These limelight-hogging celestial objects combine whirling, pinwheeling arms with scatterings of sparkling stars,…
New Hubble Telescope View of the Evolving Universe
Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations from NASA’s…
Space Rock Hits the Moon at 61,000 Kilometers an Hour
Observers watching January’s total eclipse of the Moon saw a rare event, a short-lived flash as a meteorite hit the lunar surface. Spanish astronomers now…
Stardust Shines New Light on the Formation of the Solar System
The study of a tiny grain of stardust — older than our solar system — is shining new light on how planetary systems are formed….
Evidence of How a Dwarf Galaxy Contributes to Growth of the Milky Way
Small stellar systems like dwarf galaxies are suggested to be the main building blocks of our Galaxy. However, it is unclear how many and what…
New Model Reveals How Earth’s Moon Formed
For more than a century, scientists have squabbled over how the Earth’s moon formed. But researchers at Yale and in Japan say they may have…
Important Threshold Crossed in Mystery of the Universe’s Expansion Rate
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope say they have crossed an important threshold in revealing a discrepancy between the two key techniques for measuring the…
Hubble Telescope Image of the Week – Crowded Cluster
This sparkling burst of stars is Messier 75. It is a globular cluster: a spherical collection of stars bound together by gravity. Clusters like this…
Hubble Reveals Amazing New View of the Southern Crab Nebula
This incredible image of the hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula was taken to mark the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 29th anniversary in space. The nebula, created…
VERITAS Collaboration Measures Smallest Star Size to Date
Scientists in the VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) Collaboration have published a paper in Nature Astronomy journal detailing the results of their…