ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

I Wanna Fly Through This Gate to The Stars

Today’s APOD feature has just left me speechless. What is this astronomical beauty, this celestial rose, this heavenly gate I am staring at in this photo, taken after sunset on September 1, above the cold Chilean highlands? Those reddish petals are not clouds, but luminous glowing air, caused by chemiluminescence, as experts over at APOD … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

A Really Small Telescope Captured This Gorgeous Galaxy Image

Astronomers say this view of the Andromeda Galaxy is probably similar to what the Milky Way Galaxy would look like from outside. Like the Milky Way, Andromeda is a spiral galaxy, and it’s our nearest galactic neighbor in the cleverly-named Local Group. Of course, “near” in astronomical terms means about 2.5 million light years. But … Continued

Tech News

A Double Black Hole Powers a Brilliant Galactic Star Factory 

Six hundred million light years away, a pair of black holes spiral furiously about one another at the brilliant core of a starburst galaxy. Black holes are usually lone wolves, devouring light and matter at centers of their galaxies. But when galaxies collide, two black holes can in theory become locked in a gravitational embrace, … Continued

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What is Earth’s Average Temperature?

Earth is the only planet in our Solar System where life is known to exist. Note the use of the word “known,” which indicates that our knowledge of the Solar System is still in its infancy, and the search for life continues. However, from all observable indications, Earth is the only place in our Solar … Continued

Tech News

Twin Jet Nebula is a Marvelous Cosmic Butterfly

Deep space is a wonderland of strange and awe-inspiring sights, but few astronomical curiosities match the exquisite beauty of the Twin Jet Nebula, a dying, binary star that looks like a pair of iridescent butterfly wings. The image above, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and released to the public today, shows off the remarkable … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Hubble Captured a Cosmic Optical Illusion

The round, bright, yellow objects near the center of this Hubble image are part of a massive galaxy cluster. If you look closely, several blue galaxies seem to form a wide circle around the cluster, and they all look strangely similar. That’s because they’re actually reflections of the same galaxy. The smaller blue galaxy is … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

The James Webb Space Telescope Looks Like Gold Plated Space Origami

When it launches in October 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will become the largest optical telescope in space. With its 6.5 meter wide mirror, it will gather infrared light from up to 13.5 billion light years away, giving astronomers a look at the earliest moments of the universe. But the mirror is too big … Continued

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These Two Moons Smashed Together to Produce Saturn’s Unusual F Ring

A new theory proposes that Saturn’s outermost ring formed in the wake of an ancient collision between two icy satellites, and that similar collisions may account for comparable ringed structures around other planets. Saturn’s discrete F Ring is a narrow 62-mile (100-km) band located some 2,110 miles (3,400 km) away from the outer edge of … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

This is What a Galaxy Looks Like After A Cosmic Collision

Forgive this barred spiral galaxy if it looks a little messy. It’s the survivor of a galactic collision that bent and twisted the galaxy’s original shape, according to astronomers. This is NGC 428, and although it’s 48 million light years away from Earth, this Hubble image brings it much closer. It’s so detailed that you … Continued

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The Newly Proposed High Definition Space Telescope Makes Hubble Look Like a Toy

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be “in many ways a hundred times” more capable than Hubble, isn’t launching until 2018, but already astrophysicists are thinking about its successor. They’re calling it the High Definition Space Telescope (HDST). That’s it on the far right, towering over both its predecessors. Here’s Ramin Skibba reporting … Continued

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Watch the Best Simulation Yet of the New Horizons Pluto Flyby

Using data collected by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, Icelandic imaging wizard Björn Jónsson has produced a stunning animated visualization of the now historic Pluto flyby. The time covered in the simulated flyby is from 09:35 to 13:35 on July 14, 2015. The closest approach happened around 11:50. “Pluto’s atmosphere is included and should be fairly … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Here Are All the Planets You Can Now Vote to Name Online

Naming a planet used to be an honor reserved for the astronomer who discovered it, but these days, we’re finding too many to keep up. Now, the International Astronomical Union has opened the sacred process up to the internet, bless their brave souls. To date, there are more than 1,000 confirmed planets beyond our solar … Continued

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Newly Discovered “Baby Jupiter” is the Lightest Planet Ever Imaged by Telescope

Behold the lightest planet ever imaged by a telescope: an extremely young, Jovian-like planet that’s twice the size of Jupiter. Astronomers detected it through visible light, which is an extraordinary feat for a planet of this nature. Normally, exoplanets are indirectly detected when they pass in front of their host star. The temporary dimming of … Continued

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The Universe is Slowly Dying

Brace yourselves: winter is coming. And by winter I mean the slow heat-death of the Universe, and by brace yourselves I mean don’t get terribly concerned because the process will take a very, very, very long time. (But still, it’s coming.) Based on findings from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) project, which used seven … Continued

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How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth

It’s generally assumed that we will eventually find signs of life in the galaxy. But rarely do we consider searching for advanced civilizations that have destroyed themselves. Here’s how we could do it—and what the search for dead aliens could tell us about our own future. Typically, astrobiologists and SETI enthusiasts are in the business … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Saturn Looms Eerily in Infrared

Filters aren’t just for Instagram anymore; the Cassini orbiter snapped this wide-angle shot of Saturn using an infrared filter to help scientists get a better look at clouds in the gas giant’s atmosphere. The filter used in the shot is sensitive to the wavelengths of light reflected by methane. There’s not a lot of methane … Continued

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Yep, the Force of Gravity is the Same Throughout the Universe

A multi-decade analysis of a distant pulsar is affirming the longstanding notion that the gravitational constant—one of four fundamental forces of nature—is the same everywhere in the universe. “Gravity is the force that binds stars, planets, and galaxies together,” noted study co-author Scott Ransom from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. in a … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

The Little Gem Nebula Shines Like A Jewel

This gorgeous filtered image is a 6,000-year-old snapshot of a slowly dying star. When the star at the center of the Little Gem Nebula reached the end of its lifespan, it began ejecting its outer layers into space in glowing clouds of gas. Its stellar wind pushes the gas outward into this colorful bubble. The … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Watch a Spectacular Meteor Shower This Week

If you’d like to wish on a shooting star, this week is a great opportunity. The Perseid meteor shower will peak on Wednesday, August 12 and Thursday, August 13. Every year, Earth’s orbit around the Sun carries it through a cloud of dusty, rocky debris left in the wake of Comet Swift-Tuttle. When those particles … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Four Galaxies Share a Destructive Dance

These are the galaxies of Hickson Compact Group 87, about 400 million light years from Earth, as seen from the mountains of Chile. Just as the planets of our solar system orbit the Sun, and all the stars in our galaxy orbit the galaxy’s center, the galaxies of groups like HCG 87 orbit a common … Continued