SOFIA Captures First Clear View of a Boiling Cosmic Cauldron Where Stars Are Born
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…
SOFIA
NASA’s Telescope on an Airplane – SOFIA – Offers New Way to Study Earth’s Atmosphere
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…
Comet Catalina’s Glowing Tail Indicates Comets Delivered Carbon to Rocky Planets
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…
Magnetic “Highway” Fuels Massive Ejection of Gas and Dust Out of the Cigar Galaxy
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…
HAWC+ Reveals Magnetic Chaos Hidden Within the Whirlpool Galaxy
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…
Galaxy Survives Black Hole’s Feast – “Goes Against All the Current Scientific Predictions”
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 Airborne Observatory Discovers Water on Sunlit Surface of Moon
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…
Magnetic Fields May Help Solve Mysteries at the Center of Our Galaxy That We Can’t Explain With Gravity
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…
NASA’s Telescope on an Airplane – SOFIA – Finds Clues Hidden in Pluto’s Haze
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…
SOFIA’s Infrared View of the Skies Uncovers Massive Newborn Stars and Celestial Magnetic Fields
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…
Shedding Light on a Galactic Mystery That Has Long Puzzled Scientists
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…
Uncovering the Secrets of the Swan Nebula From a Telescope Flying on a Boeing 747
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…
Telescope on Airplane Captures Never Seen Before Details of Our Milky Way Galaxy
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…
SOFIA Reveals What May Be Keeping Milky Way’s Black Hole Quiet
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…
Astronomers View Cosmic Light Show of Star Formation
When massive stars — many times larger than our Sun— are born, they shine hot and bright before eventually exploding as supernovas. They release so…
SOFIA Explores Supergalactic Wind, Provides Clues to Evolution of Galaxies
The Cigar Galaxy (M82) is famous for its extraordinary speed in making new stars, with stars being born 10 times faster than in the Milky…
SOFIA Reveals Clues to the Evolution of Universe
A compilation of scientific results from The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, reveal new clues to how stars form and galaxies evolve, and closer…
SOFIA Observations of Supernova 1987A Surprise Astronomers
Dust particles form as dying red giant stars throw off material and become part of interstellar clouds of various sizes, densities and temperatures. This cosmic…