Saturn’s giant moon Titan hides behind a thick, smoggy atmosphere that’s well known to scientists as one of the most complex chemical environments in the solar system. It’s a productive “factory” cranking out hydrocarbons that rain down on Titan’s icy surface and cloak it in soot. With a brutally cold surface temperature of around minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 170 … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers are actively hunting a class of supermassive black holes throughout the universe called blazars thanks to data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The mission has revealed more than 200 blazars and has the potential to find thousands more.
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This artist’s concept shows a “feeding,” or active, supermassive black hole with a jet streaming outward at nearly …
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a cluster of galaxies in the initial stages of development. It is the most distant such grouping ever observed in the early universe.
In a random sky survey made in near-infrared light, Hubble found five tiny galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years away. They are among the brightest galaxies at that epoch … Read the rest of this article
The sun rotates at a respectable 2 kilometers per second, which may sound pretty fast. But according to a study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (arXiv:1111.0157v1), a star has been detected in 30 Doradus (a.k.a. the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light-years away) spinning at the breakneck speed of 600 kilometers per … Read the rest of this article
The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.
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The galaxy NGC 3115 is shown here in a …
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.
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This artist’s concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM …
New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Herschel’s view reveals the entire ring for the first time, and a strange kink that has astronomers scratching their heads.… Read the rest of this article
Galaxies once thought of as voracious tigers are more like grazing cows, according to a new study using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Astronomers have discovered that galaxies in the distant, early universe continuously ingested their star-making fuel over long periods of time. This goes against previous theories that the galaxies devoured their fuel in quick bursts after run-ins with other … Read the rest of this article
Tiny crystals of a green mineral called olivine are falling down like rain on a burgeoning star, according to observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope detected tiny green crystals, called olivine, thought to be raining down on a developing star. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Toledo
This is the first time such crystals have been observed in … Read the rest of this article
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
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