Space

Jul 4th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, July 4 Mercury reaches its greatest eastern elongation (26°) from the Sun at 1 A.M. EDT this morning. You can view the tiny planet in the evening sky, still standing 8° high in the west 40 minutes after sunset and glowing at magnitude 0.5 in Cancer. The bright point of light can guide your way to the Beehive Cluster (M44), roughly 2° to the planet's northwest (upper right), visible in the same field of view as Mercury in ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - In March of this year, a refrigerator-sized spacecraft unfurled its solar panels 435 miles above Earth and pointed a wide-field space telescope toward the Milky Way's glittering plane. Its name is SPHEREx, short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer. The scientific appetite of the spacecraft is as sweeping as its title. Every six months, the observatory will scan the sky in 102 infrared channels – far beyond just a few colors. ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - , Phys.org As NASA's spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation. A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal . The pre-print is available on the server . As a proof-of-concept test, the researchers took advantage of the spacecraft's ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - In the vast expanse of the universe, the Milky Way Galaxy holds a special place in our hearts. It is our home, and after studying it for decades from our cosmic residence nestled within one of its majestic spiral arms, we know it better than any other galaxy. But how truly typical — or extraordinary — is the galaxy that cradles our existence? In other words, to what extent does it share its history with other galaxies scattered across the grand tapestry of the cosmos? Placing ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - A planet orbiting a young star far beyond our solar system is behaving in a strange way. Instead of just soaking up radiation from its star, this planet may actually be the one triggering powerful energy blasts. The stellar bursts are so intense, they strip away the planet's atmosphere bit by bit. Scientists think this could be the first time we've seen a planet play such a dangerous game with its host star. Stirring up deadly flares Until recently, this kind of interaction was just a theory. ... [Read More]

Jul 3rd, 2025 - A rare double explosion in space may rewrite supernova science. Astronomers peering into the Large Magellanic Cloud have caught a white-dwarf crime scene in the act of giving up its secrets about how it exploded…twice. The remnants, catalogued as SNR 0509-67.5 , are located approximately 160,000 light-years from Earth and measure roughly 23 light-years across, forming a glowing sphere that resembles a soap bubble drifting through space. It's the first time that astronomers have gained ... [Read More]

Jul 3rd, 2025 - Scientists with NASA's Lucy mission are finally wrapping up the process of refining the data gathered by the spacecraft's April 20 encounter with Donaldjohanson, an asteroid in our solar system's main asteroid belt. And it's, uh, as peanut-shaped as we first saw it.  Earlier this year, Lucy's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager snapped an image of Donaldjohansson while quickly swooping past it, at a distance of about 600 miles (960 kilometers), with the smallest visible features measuring ... [Read More]

Jul 3rd, 2025 - NASA has discovered a new interstellar comet that's currently located about 420 million miles away from Earth. The space agency spotted the quick-moving object with the Atlas telescope in Chile on Tuesday and confirmed it was a comet from another star system. The new interstellar comet's official name is 3I/ATLAS. It's officially the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system, and it poses no threat to Earth. The other two interstellar objects were 2I/Borisov, reported in ... [Read More]

Jul 2nd, 2025 - The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the clearest, deepest images yet of the Bullet Cluster, unveiling thousands of faint, distant galaxies and offering the most precise map of dark matter in this iconic colliding galaxy cluster. "With Webb 's observations, we carefully measured the mass of the Bullet Cluster with the largest lensing dataset to date, from the galaxy clusters' cores all the way out to their outskirts," said lead author Sangjun Cha, a PhD student at Yonsei University in ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - A second "new star" has unexpectedly appeared in the night sky, less than two weeks after a near-identical point of light first burst into view without warning . These never-before-seen "stars" are made of light coming from rare stellar explosions known as classical novas. Scientists believe this may be the first time in recorded history that more than one of these luminous outbursts have been visible with the naked eye at the same time. The first nova, dubbed V462 Lupi, was initially spotted ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - By Bang! Whiz! Pop! The universe is a happening place—full of exploding stars, erupting black holes , zipping asteroids, and much more. And astronomers have a brand-new, superpowerful eye with which to see the changing cosmos: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile . The Rubin Observatory released its first images last week , and they're stunning—vast, glittering star fields that show off the telescope's massive field of view and spectacularly deep vision. But two of the endeavor's ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - A new result from the molecular gas survey in the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy M83 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Telescope reveals a discovery of 10 high-velocity clouds composed of molecular gas, moving at velocities significantly different from M83's overall rotation, an indication that the influx of these gases—which help to form stars—are from outside the galaxy. This survey is led by Jin Koda, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in ... [Read More]

Jul 1st, 2025 - On July 1, 2004, the Cassini-Huygens mission , a collaborative undertaking by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency, successfully reached Saturn. The spacecraft had launched Oct. 15, 1997, and had received gravitational assists from flybys of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter. A 96-minute orbit-insertion burn slowed the spacecraft enough for it to be captured by Saturn's gravity, which enabled its long-term exploration of the planet and its moons. Cassini's arrival ... [Read More]

Jun 30th, 2025 - A mini solar telescope strapped to the side of the International Space Station (ISS) has captured its first images, revealing subtle changes in our home star's outer atmosphere that have never been seen before. NASA 's Coronal Diagnostic Experiment ( CODEX ) is a small solar telescope attached to the outside of the ISS. It is a coronagraph, meaning that it blocks out the solar disk to allow the telescope to focus on the sun's atmosphere, or corona, in unprecedented detail — mimicking the ... [Read More]

Jun 30th, 2025 - Around midday on June 13 last year, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange and exciting new object in space. Using a huge radio telescope, we spotted a blindingly fast flash of radio waves that appeared to be coming from somewhere inside our galaxy. After a year of research and analysis, we have  finally pinned down  the source of the signal — and it was even closer to home than we had ever expected. A surprise in the desert Our ... [Read More]

Jun 30th, 2025 - Images from the U.S. government's Vera C. Rubin Observatory unveiled last week provide a level of detail previously unseen, adding to the corpus of known space objects and representing the culmination of two decades of work and investment. They're also merely the beginning of the decade-long data stream. The new photos were taken in just over 10 hours of observation time at the Chile-based facility jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy. But when the ... [Read More]