This image, based on housekeeping data from ESA’s Gaia satellite, is no ordinary depiction of the heavens. While the image portrays the outline of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and of its neighbouring Magellanic Clouds, it was obtained in a rather unusual way.
As Gaia scans the sky to measure positions and velocities of a billion stars with unprecedented accuracy, … Read the rest of this article
While fireworks only last a short time here on Earth, a bundle of cosmic sparklers in a nearby cluster of stars will be going off for a very long time. NGC 1333 is a star cluster populated with many young stars that are less than 2 million years old — a blink of an eye in astronomical terms for stars … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered the largest and brightest set of rings from X-ray light echoes ever observed. These extraordinary rings, produced by an intense flare from a neutron star, provide astronomers a rare chance to determine how far across the Milky Way galaxy the star is from Earth.
The rings appear as circles around Circinus X-1, … Read the rest of this article
The intricate jumble depicted in this image from ESA’s Herschel space observatory shows the distribution of gas and dust in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a giant stellar nursery about 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, the Bull.
Launched in 2009, Herschel studied the sky at far-infrared wavelengths for almost four years, detecting the glow of cosmic dust in the … Read the rest of this article
Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the immense halo of gas enveloping the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest massive galactic neighbor, is about six times larger and 1,000 times more massive than previously measured. The dark, nearly invisible halo stretches about a million light-years from its host galaxy, halfway to our own Milky Way galaxy. This finding promises … Read the rest of this article
Peering into the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has spotted a mysterious glow of high-energy X-rays that, according to scientists, could be the “howls” of dead stars as they feed on stellar companions.
“We can see a completely new component of the center of our galaxy with NuSTAR’s images,” said Kerstin Perez of … Read the rest of this article
Launched in 1990, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 1.2 million observations of more than 38,000 celestial objects.
In its 25-year lifetime the telescope has made nearly 137,000 trips around our planet. Hubble has racked up plenty of frequent-flier miles – 3.4 billion.
An average of 829 gigabytes of Hubble data are added to the archive every month.… Read the rest of this article
I enjoy watching documentaries on a wide variety of topics. This visual medium is more concise than reading books but imparts a lot of information through two senses simultaneously – sight and hearing. Books, at best, can provide only static images whereas documentaries provide sweeping vistas, views from a distance as well as close-up, words in people’s own voices and … Read the rest of this article
New maps from ESA’s Planck satellite uncover the ‘polarised’ light from the early Universe across the entire sky, revealing that the first stars formed much later than previously thought.
The history of our Universe is a 13.8 billion-year tale that scientists endeavour to read by studying the planets, asteroids, comets and other objects in our Solar System, and gathering light … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers have observed the largest X-ray flare ever detected from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This event, detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, raises questions about the behavior of this giant black hole and its surrounding environment.
The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, … 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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