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NASA’s Great Observatories Provide a Sparkly New View of the Small Magellanic...
This is just pretty! NASA's Great Observatories -- the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Infrared Telescope -- have combined forces to create this new image of the...
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How Spitzer’s Focus Changed To Strange New Worlds
After 10 years in space -- looking at so many galaxies and stars and other astronomy features -- the Spitzer Space Telescope is being deployed for new work: searching for alien worlds. The telescope...
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Space Telescopes Look Back 13.2 Billion Years and See Surprisingly Luminous...
What was the Universe like more than 13 billion years ago, just 500 million years after the big bang? New data from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes reveal some surprisingly bright galaxies...
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Runaway Star Shocks the Galaxy!
That might seem like a sensational headline worthy of a supermarket tabloid but, taken in context, it's exactly what's happening here! The bright blue star at the center of this image is a B-type...
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360 Degrees of Milky Way at Your Fingertips
Touring the Milky Way's a blast with this brand new 360-degree interactive panorama. More than 2 million infrared photos taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope were jigsawed into a 20-gigapixel...
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Supernova Sweeps Away Rubbish In New Composite Image
Shining 24,000 light-years from Earth is an expanding leftover of a supernova that is doing a great cleanup job in its neighborhood. As this new composite image from NASA reveals, G352.7-0.1 (G352 for...
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These Ultra-Black ‘Cosmic Clumps’ Will Give Birth To Powerful Stars
When gas and dust squeeze tightly enough together in space, no light can get through and the place is black as pitch. But this dusty cloud seen about 16,000 light-years away from us will eventually...
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Too WISE to be Fooled by Dust: Over 300 New Star Clusters Discovered
Brazilian astronomers have discovered some 300+ star clusters that were largely overlooked owing to sizable obscuration by dust. The astronomers, from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul,...
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Threatened Spitzer Telescope Gets NASA Nod For Extension, Subject To Congress...
After NASA recommended in May that Spitzer space telescope officials send in a revised budget or face possible termination of operations, in a turnaround, the agency's science mission directorate has...
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Alien Planet’s Clear Weather Could Show Way To ‘Super-Earth’ Atmospheres
In an encouraging find for habitability researchers, astronomers have detected molecules on the smallest planet ever -- a Neptune-sized planet about 120 light-years from Earth. The team behind the...
View ArticleStunning View of the Crab Nebula Just Got Five Times Better
Images of the Crab Nebula are always a treat because it has such intriguing and varied structure. Also, just knowing that this stellar explosion was witnessed and recorded by people on Earth more than...
View ArticlePlanet With Lava Oceans Also has an Atmosphere, Says New Study
A new study by scientists at NASA JPL has revealed that 55 Cancri e is not a lava planet after all, but actually has a thick, Earth-like atmosphere. The post Planet With Lava Oceans Also has an...
View ArticleAstronomers Image the Atmosphere of a Red Dwarf Planet for the First Time....
Using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers was able to study the surface of an exoplanet orbiting a nearby red dwarf star for the first time. The post Astronomers Image the...
View ArticleGood-bye Spitzer. We’ll Miss You But We Won’t Forget You.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has reached the end of its life. Its mission was to study objects in the infrared, and it excelled at that since it was launched in 2003. But every mission has an end,...
View ArticleThis is the Final Picture NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope
NASA has just released a mosaic of the California Nebula, which was created from the final images snapped by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The post This is the Final Picture NASA’s Spitzer Space...
View ArticleSupermassive Black Hole Orbits an Even More Massive Black Hole, Crashing...
Recent observations by the now-retired Spitzer mission have led to accurate predictions OJ 287, a blazar that contains a supermassive black hole orbited by another black hole. The post Supermassive...
View ArticleDo Hot Jupiters Form Close in, or Do They Migrate? A Newly-Discovered Planet...
The recent discovery of a very young gas giant could offer clues about how "Hot Jupiters" form and whether or not they migrate over time. The post Do Hot Jupiters Form Close in, or Do They Migrate? A...
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Citizen Scientists Discover a new Feature in Star Formation: “Yellowballs”
AI is often touted as being particularly good at finding patterns amongst reams of data. But humans also are extremely good at pattern recognition, especially when it comes to visual images. Citizen...
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Apparently, This Nebula Looks Like Godzilla. Do you see it?
We’ve written often about how pareidolia — the human tendency to see faces or other features in random images — works its magic across the cosmos. There’s the famous face on Mars, Bigfoot on Mars, and...
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Hubble has Characterized 25 Hot Jupiters. Here’s What we Know so far
Hot Jupiters are giant exoplanets – even more massive than Jupiter – but they orbit closer to their star than Mercury. When they were first discovered, hot Jupiters were considered oddballs, since we...
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