Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object’s light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years.
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The farthest and one …
In an unexpected reversal of fortune, NASA’s NanoSail-D spacecraft has unfurled a gleaming sheet of space-age fabric 650 km above Earth, becoming the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet.
“We’re solar sailing!” says NanoSail-D principal investigator Dean Alhorn of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. “This is a momentous achievement.”
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An artist’s concept of a solar sail …
Key components of the ESA-led Mercury mapper BepiColombo have been tested in a specially upgraded European space simulator. ESA’s Large Space Simulator is now the most powerful in the world and the only facility capable of reproducing Mercury’s hellish environment for a full-scale spacecraft.
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BepiColombo’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) in the Large Space Simulator at ESTEC, The Netherlands. The octagonal …
The sun has just experienced a storm—not of explosive flares and hot plasma, but of icy comets.
“The storm began on Dec 13th and ended on the 22nd,” says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. “During that time, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) detected 25 comets diving into the sun. It was crazy!”
Sundiving comets—a.k.a. … Read the rest of this article
Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.
Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed inside thunderstorms in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.
“These signals are the first direct … Read the rest of this article
Dr. Kirill Sokolovsky (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, Bonn) has requested the assistance of AAVSO observers to obtain optical photometry of the blazar-type quasars 3C 273 and 3C 279 during 2011. The observations obtained by AAVSO observers will be combined with multiwavelength observations – from … Read the rest of this article
The first scientific results from ESA’s Planck mission were released at a press briefing today in Paris. The findings focus on the coldest objects in the Universe, from within our Galaxy to the distant reaches of space.
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This image shows the location of the first six fields used to detect and study the Cosmic Infrared Background. The fields, named N1, |
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NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.
The discovery … Read the rest of this article
Dr. Michael David Hicks (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) contacted the AAVSO requesting precision photometry of three solar system objects in support of NASA’s DAWN mission to Vesta. These objects, called “Vestoids”, are near-Earth objects with similar reflectance spectra to Vesta itself, suggesting they may be fragments of … 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
(Northern Hemisphere) |
Aurora Oval
(Southern Hemisphere) |
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