Astrophysics Stories
Filters
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Returns to Science Operations
Updated, Dec. 8, 2023 NASA restored the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope to science operations Friday, Dec. 8. The telescope had paused science observations Nov. 23 due to an issue with one of its gyros. The spacecraft is in good health…
Amateur Astronomers Help Discover Cosmic Crash
Astronomers found what looks like a glowing cloud of dust from a massive planetary pile-up—and NASA volunteers helped make the discovery!
Hubble Celebrates 30th Anniversary of Servicing Mission 1
In the pre-dawn hours on Dec. 2, 1993, the space shuttle Endeavour launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a critical mission to repair NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble was designed to be serviced in space with components that…
Hubble Views a Double Cluster of Glowing Galaxies
This Hubble image features a massive cluster of brightly glowing galaxies, first identified as Abell 3192. Like all galaxy clusters, this one is suffused with hot gas that emits powerful X-rays, and it is enveloped in a halo of invisible dark matter.…
NASA’s Fermi Mission Nets 300 Gamma-Ray Pulsars … and Counting
A new catalog produced by a French-led international team of astronomers shows that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 294 gamma-ray-emitting pulsars, while another 34 suspects await confirmation. This is 27 times the number known before the mission launched…
Deformable Mirrors in Space: Key Technology to Directly Image Earth Twins
Finding and studying Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars is critical to understand whether we are alone in the universe. To study such planets and assess if they can sustain life, it is necessary to directly image them. However, these planets…
NASA’s Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of Milky Way
The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about…
Hubble Images Galaxy with an Explosive Past
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 941, which lies about 55 million light-years from Earth. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) collected the data that created this image. Beautiful NGC 941 is undoubtedly the main attraction in…
Backyard Worlds Volunteers Complete Ten Million Classifications in an Epic Search for New Objects Among the Nearest Stars
The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors projects invite members of the public to search images from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission to find new objects among the nearest stars.
NASA’s Hubble Measures the Size of the Nearest Transiting Earth-Sized Planet
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has measured the size of the nearest Earth-sized exoplanet that passes across the face of a neighboring star. This alignment, called a transit, opens the door to follow-on studies to see what kind of atmosphere, if…