This artist’s concept shows planet KELT-9b orbiting its host star, KELT-9. It is the hottest gas giant planet discovered so far. / NASA, JPL-Caltech A newly discovered Jupiter-like world is so hot, it’s being vaporized by its own star. With a dayside temperature of more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,600 Kelvin), KELT-9b is a planet[…]
Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope of 1671 / The Royal Society, London By Thony Christie / 03.28.2017 Historian of Science On 11 January 1672, the Fellows of the British Royal Society were treated to a demonstration of Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope, which formed images with mirrors rather than with the lenses that had been used since[…]
Artist’s conception of two merging black holes, spinning in a nonaligned fashion. LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet) By Dr. Sean McWilliams / 06.01.2017 Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy West Virginia State University For the third time in a year and a half, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory has detected gravitational waves. Hypothesized by[…]
Working with image data from NASA’s Cassini mission, researchers have found evidence that Saturn’s moon Enceladus may have tipped over, reorienting itself so that terrain closer to its original equator was relocated to the poles. This phenomenon is known as true polar wander. / NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell University 05.30.2017 Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus may have[…]
A team of astronomers at The Ohio State University watched a star disappear and possibly become a black hole. Instead of becoming a black hole through the expected process of a supernova, the black hole candidate formed through a “failed supernova.” / Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Katrina Jackson “Massive fails” like this one in a[…]
Astronomers have made the first measurements of small-scale fluctuations in the cosmic web 2 billion years after the Big Bang. These measurements were conducted using a novel technique which relies on the light of quasars crossing the cosmic web along adjacent lines of sight. 04.29.2017 The most barren regions of the Universe are the far-flung[…]
Aristarchus’s 3rd-century BCE calculations on the relative sizes of (from left) the Sun, Earth and Moon, from a 10th-century CE Greek copy / Library of Congress Vatican Exhibit By Dr. Alan C. Bowen Historian Institute for Advanced Study Introduction In the interval from Aratus and Aristarchus of Samos (third century BCE) to Claudius Ptolemy[…]
The James Webb Space Telescope is pushed into the clean room of Building 32. Building 32 houses Chamber A, the thermal vacuum chamber where the telescope will have its final thermal vacuum testing. / Photo by Chris Gunn, NASA 05.07.2017 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas,[…]
Saturn and its rings backlit by the sun, which is blocked by the planet in this view. Encircling the planet and inner rings is the much more extended E-ring. NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute By Dr. Dan Reisenfeld / 04.21.2017 Professor of Physics and Astronomy The University of Montana Cassini is the most sophisticated space probe ever[…]
Artist’s impression of a quasar shining through a galaxy’s ‘super halo’ of hydrogen gas. A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF) By Dr. Jason Xavier Prochaska / 03.23.2017 Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics University of California, Santa Cruz How does a galaxy like our own Milky Way form? Until now there’s been a lot of inferring involved in answering[…]
Look ma, no gravity! / NASA By Andy Tay / 03.09.2017 PhD Candidate in Bioengineering University of California, Los Angeles There’s one force whose effects are so deeply entrenched in our everyday lives that we probably don’t think much about it at all: gravity. Gravity is the force that causes attraction between masses. It’s why[…]
Lecture by Dr. Joseph Silk at the Museum of London / 03.01.2017 Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy Gresham College It has been called the biggest problem in physics. The universe is accelerating thanks to an infinitesimal amount of negative energy. That sounds weird, but the key revelation of Einstein is that energy has mass.[…]
Astronomers have made the most detailed observation yet of an ultra-fast wind emanating from a Black Hole at a quarter of the speed of light. Using the European Space Agency (ESA)’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR telescopes, the scientists observed the phenomenon in an active galaxy known as IRAS 13224-3809. 03.01.2017 Outflowing gas is a common[…]
Artist’s impression of what the view might be like from the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. NASA/JPL-Caltech By Dr. David Rothery / 02.22.2017 Professor of Planetary Geosciences The Open University There have been many discoveries of potentially habitable planets orbiting stars other than our own over the last few years. Now things are getting even[…]
Astronomers are borrowing principles applied in biology and archaeology to build a family tree of the stars in the galaxy. By studying chemical signatures found in the stars, they are piecing together these evolutionary trees looking at how the stars formed and how they are connected to each other. The signatures act as a proxy[…]
The Magellanic Clouds, the two largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, appear to be connected by a bridge stretching across 43,000 light years, according to an international team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of Cambridge. The discovery is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) and[…]
Portrait of William Shakespeare 1564-1616. Chromolithography after Hombres y Mujeres celebres 1877 / Barcelona Museum Lecture by Dr. Michael Rowan-Robinson, Museum of London / 11.30.2016 Emeritus Professor of Astronomy Gresham College ‘Shakespeare’s allusions to the planets are very often made astrologically. In but few instances are they made from a purely astronomical point of view’[…]
Lisle Police Department dashcam By Kathy Gill / 02.06.2017 Night owls in Illinois and Wisconsin were treated to an early morning meteor. Images from police dash cams, Nest cameras and other video cams. The things you see on Twitter! I took a peek before heading to bed, only to see that the National Weather Service[…]
NGC 1448, a galaxy with an active galactic nucleus hidden by gas and dust, is seen in this image. / Credits: Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey/NASA/JPL-Caltech 01.07.2017 Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that[…]
01.03.2017 NASA has selected a science mission that will allow astronomers to explore, for the first time, the hidden details of some of the most extreme and exotic astronomical objects, such as stellar and supermassive black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. Objects such as black holes can heat surrounding gases to more than a million[…]
Jupiter’s South Pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on August 27 2016. Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS, processed by R. Tkachenko By Dr. Leigh Fletcher / 12.05.2016 Royal Society Research Fellow University of Leicester There was much excitement when the Juno spacecraft successfully arrived at Jupiter in July, after a five-year journey through the solar system. A[…]
Earth’s limb at night, seen from the International Space Station, with air glow visual composited into the image. / NASA By Sarah Frazier / 12.14.2016 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientists from NASA and three universities have presented new discoveries about the way heat and energy move and manifest in the ionosphere, a region of[…]
Members of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program collect a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite from a glacial moraine at the base of Mt. Ward, Antarctica. / Christine Press Three federal entities, including NASA, are reaffirming their commitment to search for Antarctic meteorites, to help learn more about the primitive building blocks of the solar system[…]
11.09.2016 The moon is a familiar sight in our sky, brightening dark nights and reminding us of space exploration, past and present. But the upcoming supermoon — on Monday, Nov. 14 — will be especially “super” because it’s the closest full moon to Earth since 1948. We won’t see another supermoon like this until 2034.[…]
Astronomer and Radcliffe fellow Dimitrios Psaltis is working on black holes as part of the massive Event Horizon Telescope project that will point a number of Earth’s telescopes at the Milky Way’s black hole this spring. / By Jon Chase, Harvard Staff Photographer In effort to image black hole, a chance to rule on Einstein[…]
Enjoy the full moon’s glow. mstollenwerk By Dr. Christopher Palma / 11.08.2016 Senior Lecturer and Associate Department Head for Undergraduate Programs in Astronomy and Astrophysics Pennsylvania State University As an observational astronomer who teaches students about the behavior of the moon, I’m thankful for anything that inspires people to go out and look at the[…]
Wikimedia Commons 11.03.2016 Humans sometimes struggle to adjust to Daylight Saving Time, but just measuring the exact length of a Saturn day is one of the big challenges for scientists on NASA’s Cassini mission. Over more than a decade in Saturn orbit, Cassini’s instruments have wrestled with confusing measurements to determine the planet’s precise rotation rate.[…]
Computers weren’t always made of motherboards and CPUs. At one time, they were human! And at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, human computers were a talented team of women who went on to become some of the earliest computer programmers. In this photo from 1959, a human computer works with an early machine computer called the[…]
10.19.2016 After investigating the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet for a full Martian year, NASA’s MAVEN mission has determined that the escaping water does not always go gently into space. Sophisticated measurements made by a suite of instruments on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft revealed the ups and downs of[…]
This artist’s rendering shows NASA’s Juno spacecraft making one of its close passes over Jupiter. / Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech 10.14.2016 Mission managers for NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have decided to postpone the upcoming burn of its main rocket motor originally scheduled for Oct. 19. This burn, called the period reduction maneuver (PRM), was to reduce[…]