Night Sky Observer Space and Astronomy News

Hubble Detects Exoplanet With Glowing Water Atmosphere

Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence to date for a stratosphere on a planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet. A stratosphere is a layer of…

Fly Over Ceres With the Dawn Spacecraft

Occator Crater on Ceres is home to the brightest area on the entire dwarf planet. At 57 miles (92 kilometers) wide and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers)…

Tonight’s Sky for August 2017

In August, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the Perseid meteor shower, a partial lunar eclipse and more will be visible. “Tonight’s Sky” is…

Hunting for Asteroids

NASA is hunting for Near-Earth Objects, while also working on ways to defend Earth against them.… Read the rest of this article

June 30 Is International Asteroid Day

June 30 has been declared by the United Nations to be International Asteroid Day. To celebrate the day, there will be a 24-hour global telethon with…

Kepler Survey Catalog With Hundreds of New Planet Candidates Released by NASA

NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and…

A Stormy Stellar Nursery

This shot from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the…

Dark Energy May Not Be Needed to Explain the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe

Enigmatic ‘dark energy‘, thought to make up 68% of the universe, may not exist at all, according to a Hungarian-American team. The researchers believe that standard…

A New Look at Supernova 1987A

Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), blazed with…

NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, which has been in orbit around the gas giant since July 4, 2016, will remain in its current 53-day orbit for…