Astronomy & Space News

The sun's first rays begin illuminating Earth's atmosphere in this photograph from the International Space Station as it orbited 260 miles above the central United States. At far left, the city lights of Chicago, Illinois, are outlined by Lake Michigan. At far right, the city lights of the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area shine through the clouds.

A model of the Mariner-C spacecraft at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Lewis Research Center for a June 1964 Conference on New Technology. Mariner-C and Mariner-D were identical spacecraft designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to flyby Mars and photograph the Martian surface. Mariner-C was launched on November 4, 1964, but the payload shroud did not jettison properly and the spacecraft’s battery power did not function. The mission ended unsuccessfully two days later. Mariner-D was launched as designed on November 28, 1964 and became the first successful mission to Mars. It was the first time a planet was photographed from space. Mariner-D’s 21 photographs revealed an inhospitable and barren landscape. The two Mariner spacecraft were launched by Atlas-Agena-D rockets. Lewis had taken over management of the Agena Program in October 1962. There had been five failures and two partial failures in the 17 Agena launches before being taken over by NASA Lewis. Lewis, however, oversaw 28 successful Agena missions between 1962 and 1968, including several Rangers and the Mariner Venus '67.

The spectacular aurora borealis, or the “northern lights,” over Canada is sighted from the space station near the highest point of its orbital path. The station’s main solar arrays are seen in the left foreground.

A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration from Dec. 20, 2022. A long stream of hot gas on the right, coming from a star that was pulled apart by the black hole, feeds into the disk.

NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins (left) and Rick Mastracchio, both Expedition 38 flight engineers, pose for a photo with a Thanksgiving meal in the Unity node of the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut and Expedition 68 flight engineer Nicole Mann is pictured during a fit check of her spacesuit ahead of a planned spacewalk to upgrade the International Space Station's power generation system.

The NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s reveals a portion of the Milky Way’s dense core in a new light. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C (Sgr C) region, along with some as-yet unidentified features. A large region of ionized hydrogen, shown in cyan, contains intriguing needle-like structures that lack any uniform orientation.

Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr., attired in his Mercury pressure suit, poses for a photo on May 5, 1961, prior to his launch in a Mercury-Redstone 3 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on a suborbital mission – the first U.S. manned spaceflight.

NASA’s Space Launch System carrying the Orion spacecraft lifts off the pad at Launch Complex 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:47 a.m. EST on Nov. 16, 2022.

A 35mm camera, operated by astronaut William R. Pogue, Skylab 4 pilot, recorded this wide scene of his Skylab 4 crewmates on the other end of the orbital workshop. Astronauts Jerry P. Carr (right), commander, and Edward G. Gibson, science pilot, pose for the snapshot. Also in the frame are parts of three Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits, used on several EVA sessions during the third manning of the Skylab space station.

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility C-130 aircraft delivered the agency’s Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO) payload to McMurdo Station, Antarctica, on Oct. 28, 2023. The GUSTO mission will launch on a scientific balloon in December 2023.

In this photo from Nov. 9, 2023, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket illuminates the water as it launches at night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The 29th commercial resupply mission of the Cargo Dragon spacecraft brought new scientific research, technology demonstrations, crew supplies, and hardware to the International Space Station, including NASA’s Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) and Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE).

A sounding rocket launched from Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska, Nov. 8, 2023, carrying the DISSIPATION mission. The rocket launched into aurora and successfully captured data to understand how auroras heat the atmosphere and cause high-altitude winds.

Casey Denham, aerospace engineer with the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, works with tribal students during a STEM activity at the American Indian Engineering Sciences (AISES) National Conference in Spokane, Washington, Oct. 19-21, 2023.

The spiral galaxy IC 342, located about 11 million light-years from Earth, lies behind the crowded plane of the Milky Way: Dust, gas, and stars obscure it from our view. Euclid used its near-infrared instrument to peer through the dust and study it.

Astronomers have found a key new system of six transiting planets orbiting a bright star in a harmonic rhythm. This rare property enabled the team to determine the planetary orbits which initially appeared as an unsolvable riddle.

While life on Earth is relatively new, geologically speaking, the ingredients that combined to form it might be much older than once thought. The simplest amino acid, carbamic acid, could have formed alongside stars or planets within interstellar ices. The findings could be used to train deep space instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope to search for prebiotic molecules in distant, star-forming regions of the universe.

Cutting-edge computer simulations combined with theoretical calculations are helping astronomers better understand the origin of some of the universe's most energetic and mysterious light shows -- gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs. The new unified model confirms that some long-lasting GRBs are created in the aftermath of cosmic mergers that spawn an infant black hole surrounded by a giant disk of natal material.

In a remarkable discovery, astronomers have found a disc around a young star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy neighboring ours. It's the first time such a disc, identical to those forming planets in our own Milky Way, has ever been found outside our galaxy. The new observations reveal a massive young star, growing and accreting matter from its surroundings and forming a rotating disc.

Asteroid Phaethon, which is five kilometers in diameter, has been puzzling researchers for a long time. A comet-like tail is visible for a few days when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun during its orbit. However, the tails of comets are usually formed by vaporizing ice and carbon dioxide, which cannot explain this tail. The tail should be visible at Jupiter's distance from the Sun.

Researchers have discovered a new relationship between the Sun's magnetic field and its sunspot cycle, that can help predict when the peak in solar activity will occur. Their work indicates that the maximum intensity of solar cycle 25, the ongoing sunspot cycle, is imminent and likely to occur within a year.

Wondering whether whether Dark Matter particles actually are produced inside a jet of standard model particles, led researchers to explore a new detector signature known as semi-visible jets, which scientists never looked at before.

Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles important telescope observations for the search of habitable worlds beyond the solar system.

In 1991, an experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Simply put, the particle should not exist. On May 27, 2021, the Telescope Array experiment detected the second-highest extreme-energy cosmic ray. The newly dubbed Amaterasu particle deepens the mystery of the origin, propagation and particle physics of rare, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

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 300 light-years from the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

A ground-breaking new discovery could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe.  Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars -- until now mainly thought to exist in double stars -- could in fact be 'triples'.  The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects -- a subset of B stars -- which are considered an important 'test bed' for developing theories on how stars evolve more generally. 

Researchers have discovered solar-wind hydrogen in lunar samples, which indicates that water on the surface of the Moon may provide a vital resource for future lunar bases and longer-range space exploration.

If you look at massive galaxies teeming with stars, you might be forgiven in thinking they are star factories, churning out brilliant balls of gas. But actually, less evolved dwarf galaxies have bigger regions of star factories, with higher rates of star formation. Now, University of Michigan researchers have discovered the reason underlying this: These galaxies enjoy a 10-million-year delay in blowing out the gas cluttering up their environments. Star-forming regions are able to hang on to their gas and dust, allowing more stars to coalesce and evolve. In these relatively pristine dwarf galaxies, massive stars--stars about 20 to 200 times the mass of our sun--collapse into black holes instead of exploding as supernovae. But in more evolved, polluted galaxies, like our Milky Way, they are more likely to explode, thereby generating a collective superwind. Gas and dust get blasted out of the galaxy, and star formation quickly stops.   

Our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a much larger formation, the local Supercluster structure, which contains several massive galaxy clusters and thousands of individual galaxies. Due to its pancake-like shape, which measures almost a billion light years across, it is also referred to as the Supergalactic Plane. Why is the vast supergalactic plane teeming with only one type of galaxies? This old cosmic puzzle may now have been solved.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, CECILIA Survey receives first data from galaxies forming two-to-three billion years after the Big Bang. By examining light from these 33 galaxies, researchers discovered their elemental composition and temperature. The ultra-deep spectrum revealed eight distinct elements: Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, argon and nickel. The teenage galaxies also were extremely hot, reaching temperatures higher than 13,350 degrees Celsius.

In September 2022, a distant dead star reawakened with a flash of light. The brilliant and powerful pulsing signal is about one billion light-years from Earth and was picked up by 15 different telescopes worldwide. It’s named AT2022tsd or the “Tasmanian devil”. Mysterious signals called Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOTS) are the suspected sourceContinue reading "‘Tasmanian devil’ rises from slumber with brilliant bursts of light"

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Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean desert have just achieved an impressive astronomical first: Imaging a planet-forming disk around a star in another galaxy. The results of their efforts were published Wednesday in a paper in Nature. The discovery will now allow astronomers to watch as the star, HH 1177,Continue reading "Astronomers discover disk around star in another galaxy for the 1st time ever"

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A newly discovered system of six planets circling a nearby Sun-like star may be the key to unlocking how planetary systems form. All between the size of Earth and Neptune, the worlds are orbiting in a so-called resonant chain — a configuration that it’s relatively rare to observe in nature, making the system a valuableContinue reading "‘Shocked and delighted’: Astronomers find six planets orbiting in resonance"

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For millennia, Full Moons have wielded a magnetic charm that has seized human hearts and minds. Across diverse cultures and eras, this consistent monthly event has been the inspiration behind innumerable myths, tales, traditions, and even agrarian activities. So, let’s delve deeper into the various types of Full Moon, see the calendar of Full moonsContinue reading "2023 Full Moon calendar: Dates, times, types, and names"

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Every so often, a comet, an icy visitor from deep in the outskirts of the solar system, comes hurtling toward the Sun on a long orbit, dazzling us with the apparition of its ghostly coma and long, shimmering tail. How do these comets get their names? It depends. Sometimes these visitors make only one passContinue reading "How do comets get their names?"

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Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, orbits in the outer solar system, about two billion miles (3.2 billion kilometers) from Earth. It is an enormous world – quadruple the diameter of Earth, with 15 times the mass and 63 times the volume. Unvisited by spacecraft for more than 35 years, Uranus inhabits one of the leastContinue reading "The many mysteries NASA can solve on a mission to Uranus"

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The universe is filled with bizarre objects. Then again, Earth is all we know. So what may seem wild and exotic to us is likely common throughout the cosmos. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that space is filled with many mysterious oddities that astronomers are just beginning to both discover and unravel.Continue reading "4 of the weirdest objects in space"

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Over a million asteroids are zipping around the Sun. Here’s what you should know about our distant neighbors.

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In this photograph captured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station on July 31, 2011, the oblique angle reveals the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, along with a thin crescent Moon illuminated by the Sun sitting below the horizon. NASA Earth Observatory These days, spacecraft are venturing into the final frontier at a record pace.Continue reading "The Kármán Line: Where space begins"

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From our earliest ancestors on the plains of Africa to astrology and finally to modern science, humans have always looked up to the sky. It’s easy to imagine that Sahelanthropus tchadensis, our earliest hominin ancestors thought to have walked upright, may have looked up at night 7 million years ago and wondered about the natureContinue reading "The awakening of astronomy: This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eicher"

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