Astronomers have discovered a galaxy that formed five times as many stars as the Milky Way just 2 billion years after the Big Bang — but then quickly quelled any further starbirth. Within the first several billion years of the universe, galaxies were growing like the newborns they were — turning gas into stars, sometimes […]
Japan Is Sending a Lander to Phobos
Sending a mission to moons of Mars has been on the wish list for mission planners and space enthusiasts for quite some time. For the past few years, however, a team of Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) engineers and scientists have been working on putting such a mission together. Now, JAXA announced this week that the […]
New Horizons May Have Solved Planet Formation Cold Case
Not that long ago, it seemed the glory days of NASA’s New Horizons mission were in the rearview mirror, left behind with its historic Pluto encounter in 2015. Then, early last year, the spacecraft streaked by Arrokoth, a bit of flotsam drifting through the Kuiper Belt—the diffuse ring of primitive icy bodies beyond Neptune, of which […]
What Exoplanet Is Closest to Earth?
AN artist’s conception of Proxima Centauri b as a rocky-like exoplanet, with Proxima Centauri and the Alpha Centauri binary system in the background. The actual appearance of the planet is unknown. (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser) Astronomers are finding new exoplanets nearly every day. But this particular answer probably won’t change, because astronomers have already found […]
Explore the Winter Hexagon Tonight
This expansive region of the sky is home to plenty of bright stars and deep-sky wonders. Stellarium, with additions With the February dark of the Moon upon us, we have a fine opportunity to enjoy some winter sights. Perhaps most appealing for naked-eye observers is an impressive collection of stellar luminaries. Face south at nightfall, […]
An Earth-sized planet may be igniting an aurora around a nearby red dwarf star
Over 4,100 exoplanets have been found, worlds orbiting other stars. A variety of methods has been used to discover them, including transits, radial velocity measurements, and even direct imaging (see the planets themselves in images). A team of astronomers has just announced they may have found a planet orbiting the red dwarf star GJ 1151, […]
A New Look at the ‘Pale Blue Dot’
The 30th anniversary of the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image of Earth, which took place on February 14, is an appropriate occasion for the newly updated image below, which brings the latest methods to bear on the data Voyager 1 presented us. Our planet takes up less than a single pixel and for that reason […]
How to build a Kuiper Belt Object: Arrokoth's two halves formed separately and slowly came together
On January 1, 2019 — just three and half years after it passed Pluto — the new Horizons spacecraft zipped past the Kuiper Belt Object called (at that time) 2014 MU69. We knew a little about it before the encounter, like that it traveled around the Sun in a fairly circular path 6.6 billion kilometers […]
Making a “Mega-Telescope” for Exoplanets
Title: First direct detection of an exoplanet by optical interferometry Authors: GRAVITY Collaboration: S. Lacour, M. Nowak, J. Wang, et. al. First Author’s Institution: LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, Universite PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Universite, Univ. Paris Diderot, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics Status: Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics [closed access] and arXiv [open access] TRAPPIST-1 […]
4 Cosmic Records That The James Webb Space Telescope Should Shatter
Sometime in 2021, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will launch, deploy, and begin science operations. The James Webb Space Telescope vs. Hubble in size (main) and vs. an array of other telescopes (inset) in terms of wavelength and sensitivity. It should be able to see the truly first galaxies, the earliest, most pristine stars, the […]