Enlarge / Highest-resolution image of Centaurus A obtained with the Occasion Horizon Telescope on top of a color composite image of the entire galaxy. (credit: Radboud University/ESO/WFI/MPIfR//APEX/NASA/CXC/CfA/EHT/M. Janssen et al. ) The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made headlines in 2019 by capturing the very first direct image of a black hole at the center […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA ) NASA announced on Friday that it has switched to backup computing hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope, potentially ending over a month of uncertainty regarding the telescope’s future. The success came just two days after the agency indicated that it had narrowed down the source of the original fault. The iconic […]
(credit: NASA) Jupiter’s moon Europa, a large world with a vast sub-ice ocean, is thought to be one of the best candidates for hosting life elsewhere in the Solar System. NASA has considered sending a lander to the moon’s surface to see if its ice contains chemicals indicative of the presence of life, although that […]
Enlarge (credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) As we carefully map the stars of our Milky Way, we’re able to identify features that tell us of its history. These include local details, such as the stars that have passed through an area from which something would be able to detect Earth. And it includes far larger structures, […]
Enlarge (credit: NASA) On June 13, the Hubble Space Telescope took itself offline due to a fault in its payload computer, which manages its scientific instruments. Since then, NASA has been doing the sort of troubleshooting that might be familiar to many of us—with the added twist that the hardware is irreplaceable, in space, and […]
The successful gravitational-wave detections just keep coming for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which has now confirmed two separate “mixed” mergers between black holes and neutron stars, sending powerful gravitational waves rippling across spacetime. Those signals were detected last year by the collaboration, just 10 days apart. A year and a half later, the events officially constitute […]
Enlarge / This is what Earth looks like from within the Solar System. Imaging it from a different system entirely poses some challenges. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has primarily involved looking outward and searching nearby stars for signals that can’t be explained by known natural processes. But there has […]
Thanks to a new study conducted with ESO telescopes, we now know that Betelgeuse’s dip in brightness was the result of a “dusty veil” that formed from material that emerged from the star. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada. In December 2019, astronomers noticed a strange, dramatic dimming in the light from Betelgeuse, a bright red star in […]
Enlarge / Physicists report definitive evidence that auroras that light up the sky in the high latitudes are caused by electrons accelerated by a powerful electromagnetic force called Alfvén waves. (credit: Austin Montelius, University of Iowa) In August and September 1859, there was a major geomagnetic storm—aka, the Carrington Event, the largest ever recorded—that produced […]
Revisiting the aurora “dunes”: A time-lapse video recorded by a Scottish aurora borealis hobbyist Graeme Whipps was used to determine the speed of the phenomenon at over 200 m/s. Several years ago, amateur astronomers first spotted a rare type of aurora nicknamed “the dunes” because of its luminous, rolling wave patterns. Last year, astronomers proposed […]