Comets visible to the naked eye are a rare delicacy in the celestial smorgasbord of objects in the nighttime sky. Scientists estimate that the opportunity to see one of these icy dirtballs advertising their cosmic presence so brilliantly they can be seen without the aid of a telescope or binoculars happens only once every five to 10 years. That said, … Read the rest of this article
A newly discovered asteroid the size of a football field will cruise through Earth’s neighborhood this weekend (March 9th), just days after another space rock made an even closer approach to our planet.
The 330-foot-wide (100 meters) asteroid 2013 ET will miss Earth by 600,000 miles (960,000 kilometers) when it zips by on Saturday (March 9). The space rock flyby … Read the rest of this article
The universe is eerie enough without giving us an apparition of a 1980s video game alien attacker. This oddball-looking object is really a mirage created by the gravitational field of a foreground cluster of galaxies warping space and distorting the background images of more distant galaxies.
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The gravitational field surrounding this massive cluster of galaxies, Abell 68, acts as a …
Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4) is now inside the orbit of Mercury and it is brightening as it approaches the sun. Observers in the southern hemisphere say the comet can be seen with the naked eye even through city lights. Currently, it is about as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) (magnitude +2 to +3). The comet … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission has discovered a previously unknown third radiation belt around Earth, revealing the existence of unexpected structures and processes within these hazardous regions of space.
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On Nov. 9, 2012, NASA renamed the Radiation Belt Storm Probes to the Van Allen Probes. The probes, shown here in an artist’s rendition, will help scientists study two giant belts …
Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun.
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This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our …
Gravity is one of the fundamental forces of nature, its invisible grip governing our planet – from the rocks inside to the seas on the surface.
In this edition of Space, we begin our adventure in a massive cave in northern Italy, a space beneath the surface of the Earth that is so big it has an effect on the … Read the rest of this article
Peering deep into the vast stellar halo that envelops our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered tantalizing evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that are a relic of cannibalism by our Milky Way.
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This illustration shows the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, surrounded by a faint, extended halo of old …
The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission, JUICE, will carry a total of 11 scientific experiments to study the gas giant planet and its large ocean-bearing moons, ESA announced today.
Artist impression of JUICE, the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer mission, in the Jovian system. Image credit: ESA/AOES
JUICE is the first Large-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme. Planned for … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has relayed new images that confirm it has successfully obtained the first sample ever collected from the interior of a rock on another planet. No rover has ever drilled into a rock beyond Earth and collected a sample from its interior.
Transfer of the powdered-rock sample into an open scoop was visible for the first time … 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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