All of the planets in our Solar System formed from a disk of dust and gas surrounding our home star—the Sun—about four and a half billion years ago. Many—maybe even most—of the stars we see in the sky have planets orbiting them, and they all probably formed the same way. But planetary formation is…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Ten Discoveries from SOFIA
(From NASA) Ten years ago, NASA’s telescope on an airplane, SOFIA (the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), first peered into the cosmos. Since the night of May 26, 2010, SOFIA’s observations of infrared light, invisible to the human eye, have made many scientific discoveries about the hidden universe.
The Glowing Shroud of a Newborn Star
Here’s another of my processed Hubble data images: it’s a look into the star-forming region “S106,” made from data captured in infrared wavelengths on Feb. 13, 2011. Here, a newborn star is in the process of blasting away a clear space while still surrounded by the cloud of dust and hydrogen gas it formed within.
Are There “Aliens” in our Solar System?
No, I don’t mean little grey men in hard candy-shaped ships, I mean natural objects that have origins from outside of our own Solar System—small worlds that formed around a different star. It’s entirely possible that objects can be ejected from a star system and find their way into orbit around another, or even gravitationally…
Take a Gander at Gassendi Crater
Here’s a view of lunar crater Gassendi I assembled from seven 70mm Hasselblad color film photographs captured by Apollo 16 in April 1972. The 3.6 billion-year-old Gassendi crater is 110 km (68 miles) wide and located on the edge of Mare Humorum. This view here is looking south.
Saturn Seen Through Titan’s Hazy Atmosphere
Here’s a view of the upper limb of Saturn seen through the atmosphere of its largest moon Titan. It’s a color-composite of images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on March 31, 2005 as it passed just 7,500 kilometers (4,660 miles) from Titan. Saturn was 1.2 million kilometers (745,000 miles) away from Cassini at the time.
First Look at the James Webb Space Telescope Folded in Fully Stowed Configuration
News from NASA: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been successfully folded and stowed into the same configuration it will have when loaded onto an Ariane 5 rocket for launch next year. Webb is NASA’s largest and most complex space science telescope ever built. Too big for any rocket available in its fully expanded…
I Took a Crack at the Egg Nebula
This is an interesting object: it’s called the Egg Nebula, a protoplanetary nebula located in our galaxy 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Here, an opaque cloud of dust and gas hides a central star that’s expelling its outer layers. Beams of the star’s light escape the cloud through holes, illuminating the layers. This…
Scientists Use Starlight to Probe Pluto’s Blue Sky
From a May 12, 2020 NASA article: When the New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto in 2015, one of the many fascinating features its images revealed was that this small, frigid world in the distant solar system has a hazy atmosphere. Now, new data helps explain how Pluto’s haze is formed from the faint light…
Stromatolites in the Nevada Desert…and Maybe Even on Mars?
I’m no paleontologist but I’ve long found stromatolites to be really interesting. They’re one of the earliest known forms of complex life on Earth. These layered mounds created over hundreds and thousands of years by cyanobacteria—basically “microbial reefs”— have existed on Earth for over 3.5 billion years. Today they can be found in active, living…
More Evidence for Plumes of Water on Jupiter’s Icy Moon Europa
All those worlds may be ours except Europa but that doesn’t make the ice-covered moon of Jupiter any less intriguing. Beneath Europa’s crisscrossed crust lies a tantalizing ocean somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 kilometers deep—which adds up to more liquid water than on the entire surface of the Earth. Liquid water plus a heat source(s) to keep it…
Phobos Will Eventually Become a Ring Around Mars
Phobos, Mars’ largest moon — although at just 16 miles wide still quite small — is slowly but steadily being torn apart by the gravitational pull of Mars… and it bears the scars to prove it. Long parallel grooves seen wrapping around the surface of Phobos are most likely stress fractures, visible evidence of the tidal forces…
Lights in the Dark 