SOFIA recently completed a new set of observations of Venus to study the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere. Observing Venus was particularly challenging. Venus…
Everything we see in the universe is a snapshot of the past: As light takes its time to reach our telescopes, the system we’re observing…
NGC 7479 – also known as Caldwell 44 – is a barred spiral galaxy, with a bar-shaped center filled with stars, as is characteristic of…
Looking at the ionized carbon emission from Sagittarius B provides critical information about star formation in our own galaxy and beyond. Sagittarius, or Sgr B,…
UMD-led team used NASA’s SOFIA telescope to capture high-resolution details of a star nursery in the Milky Way. University of Maryland researchers created the first…
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, DLR, has been used extensively to look many objects…
In early 2016, an icy visitor from the edge of our solar system hurtled past Earth. It briefly became visible to stargazers as Comet Catalina…
What’s fueling the massive ejection of gas and dust out of the Cigar galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 82? We know that thousands of stars…
Not all appears as it would seem in the Whirlpool galaxy. One of the best-studied spiral galaxies and a delight to amateur astronomers, Messier 51, as…
The hungriest of black holes are thought to gobble up so much surrounding material they put an end to the life of their host galaxy….
NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that…
The area around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is dominated by gravity, but it’s not the only force…
When the New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto in 2015, one of the many fascinating features its images revealed was that this small, frigid world…
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, studies the universe with infrared light. That’s a range of wavelengths on the infrared spectrum, from those measuring…
Our Milky Way galaxy has an elegant spiral shape with long arms filled with stars, but exactly how it took this form has long puzzled…
One of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions in our galaxy, the Omega, or Swan, Nebula, came to resemble the shape resembling a swan’s…
SOFIA Reveals New View of Milky Way’s Center NASA has captured an extremely crisp infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Spanning…
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and our Milky Way is no exception. But many other galaxies have highly active black…