Enlarge / The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled for launch later this decade and will observe planets and galaxies. (credit: GSFC/SVS) On Thursday, the National Academies of Science released the latest Decadal Survey that the astronomy industry uses to help guide funding decisions over the years between the current survey’s release and […]
Enlarge / The site of the X-ray source in the Whirlpool Galaxy. (credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/R. DiStefano, et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/Grendler ) It’s become clear that the Milky Way is full of planets. And the Milky Way is unremarkable compared to many other galaxies, which, in all likelihood, are also rich with exoplanets. But there’s a big […]
Enlarge / Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth aside from the Sun. (credit: ESA, Hubble, and NASA) Modern human society has been making it ever more challenging for astronomers to get their job done. While we’ve designated radio-quiet areas and dark skies initiatives, tensions have been heightened recently by the launch of broadband-Internet satellites, […]
Enlarge / The rocks of Kodiak Butte record a lot of the history of Jezero Crater. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS) Normally, it takes some time for NASA’s Mars rovers to return scientific data. The instruments need to be calibrated and commissioned, and the rover needs to move off from the landing site toward a bit of the […]
Enlarge / An electron micrograph of some of the volcanic material returned by the Chang’e 5 mission. (credit: Beijing SHRIMP Center, Institute of Geology, CAGS) Chang’e-5 represented a major step forward for China’s lunar program, as it was the first of the country’s missions to return samples to Earth. Now the results of dating the […]
Enlarge / Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant associated with a star’s supernova explosion in 1054 CE (credit: NASA/ESA/J. Hester & A. Loll (Arizona State University) In August 1181, astronomers within China and Japan witnessed a bright “guest star” in the night sky that we now know to […]
Enlarge / A model of the supernova exploding inside a torus of gas ejected years earlier. (credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF) One of the stranger features of our Universe is the existence of what you might call dual-core stars. Many stars exist as part of a multistar system, and in some cases, their orbits are extremely […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL ) The formation of a gas giant involves a race against time. Planets come into being as newly forming stars heat up, a process that quickly drives all the stray gas out of the planet-creating regions nearby. To create the gas giant, a large, rocky planet has to form prior to this […]
Enlarge / Astronomers continue to ponder the strange, dramatic dimming in the light from Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation, first observed in December 2019. (credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al. ) Back in June, we reported on a likely explanation for the strange, dramatic dimming of Betelgeuse , a bright red star […]
Enlarge / This artist’s impression shows L 98-59b, one of the planets in the L 98-59 system 35 light-years away. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser) Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been identified by large surveys like the Kepler mission or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). While these projects are great at spotting stars that […]