You might want to file this under “nightmare fuel.” Yes this is a thing that actually happened on the International Space Station in 2006. But if you’re not already familiar with what’s going on here, it’s probably not what you think…
Space Telescope Named After Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s First Chief of Astronomy
From NASA on May 20, 2020: NASA is naming its next-generation space telescope currently under development, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe. The newly-named Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – or Roman…
A Dusty Twist Marks the Site of a New Planet’s Birth
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…
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.
Hubble’s View of a Supermassive Black Hole’s 5,000-Light-Year-Long Jet
Here’s a view of the twisted 5,000 light-year-long relativistic jet blasting into space from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87), located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The data comprising this image were acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope in January 2017 in optical and near-infrared…
5,000 Year-Old Light from the Depths of the Lagoon Nebula
Here’s the central “heart” of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8), a giant emission nebula and interstellar cloud inside our galaxy located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. This is a color-composite and mosaic of images captured by Hubble in visible-light wavelengths on Feb. 12, 2018. The massive stars embedded within the nebula give…
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.
