News Articles
Universe, Stars
May 30, 2018
If you’ve ever heard of the phrase two sides of the same coin, you know it means two things that at first appear to be unrelated are actually parts of the same thing. Now, a fundamental example can be found in the deep recesses of space in the form of a neutron star.
Universe, Stars
May 11, 2018
Scientists analyzing the first data from the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission have found two stars that revolve around each other every 38 minutes — about the time it takes to stream a TV drama. One of the stars in the system, called IGR J17062–6143 (J17062 for short), is... Read More
Universe, Stars
May 2, 2018
SpaceX's Dragon cargo spacecraft is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, May 5, west of Baja California, with more than 4,000 pounds of NASA cargo, science and technology demonstration samples from the International Space Station.
Universe, Stars
Apr 27, 2018
Seventeen years ago, astronomers witnessed a supernova go off 40 million light-years away in the galaxy called NGC 7424, located in the southern constellation Grus, the Crane. Now, in the fading afterglow of that explosion, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first image of a surviving... Read More
Universe, Stars
Apr 24, 2018
This colorful image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.
Universe, Stars
Apr 19, 2018
These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images compare two diverse views of the roiling heart of a vast stellar nursery, known as the Lagoon Nebula. The images, one taken in visible and the other in infrared light, celebrate Hubble’s 28th anniversary in space.
Universe, Stars
Apr 3, 2018
More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus is the farthest individual star ever seen. Normally, it would be much too faint to view, even with the world’s largest telescopes. But through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow,... Read More
Universe, Stars
Mar 13, 2018
Astronomers have put NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on an Indiana Jones-type quest to uncover an ancient "relic galaxy" in our own cosmic backyard. The very rare and odd assemblage of stars has remained essentially unchanged for the past 10 billion years. This wayward stellar island provides... Read More
Universe, Stars, Earth’s Space Environment
Mar 6, 2018
Imagine an object moving at super-sonic speed. This object, as it moves through a medium, causes the material in the medium to pile up, compress, and heat up. The result is a type of shock wave, known as a bow shock.
Universe, Stars
Feb 16, 2018
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster PLCK G004.5-19.5. It was discovered by the ESA Planck satellite through the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect — the distortion of the cosmic microwave background radiation in the direction of the galaxy cluster by high-energy electrons in... Read More
Universe, Stars
Jan 17, 2018
In 2014, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope found that this enormous galaxy cluster contains the mass of a staggering three million billion suns — so it’s little wonder that it has earned the nickname of “El Gordo” (“the Fat One” in Spanish)!
Universe, Stars
Jun 5, 2017
The NICER instrument which will explore neutron stars launched to the International Space Station.
Universe, Stars
Oct 7, 2016
In 1963, an astronomy student named Gail Smith working at an observatory in the Netherlands discovered something odd—a massive cloud of gas orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. Smith’s cloud contained enough gas to make 2 million stars the size of our sun, and it was moving through space at 700,000 mph... Read More
Universe, Stars
Aug 4, 2016
Some scientists ply their trade at lab benches, working with test tubes and Bunsen burners.
Others spend time in the backcountry, analyzing rocks and landforms.
But some astronomers… use stars as their laboratory
Universe, Stars
Apr 6, 2016
Newsflash: Assembly of the next great space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is now underway at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Launch target: 2018.
JWST is an infrared telescope, which means it will sense the heat of stars and galaxies millions and even billions of light... Read More
