Five years ago today, on March 6, 2009, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope rocketed into the night skies above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to find planets around other stars, called exoplanets, in search of potentially habitable ...
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have discovered the splattered remains of comets colliding together around a nearby star; the researchers believe they are witnessing the total destruction ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics
Using one of the world's premier telescopes, University of Minnesota astrophysicists Evan Skillman and Kristen McQuinn have discovered a priceless relic of the Big Bang in the Milky Way's back yard. They are part of an international team ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Electronics
(Phys.org) —On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, witnessed its strongest solar flare since it launched in the summer of 2013. Solar flares are bursts of x-rays and light that stream out into space, ...
Tags: IRIS, Solar Flare, NASA, ATC
ESO's New Technology Telescope has been used to find the first evidence that asteroids can have a highly varied internal structure. By making measurements astronomers have found that different parts of the asteroid Itokawa have different ...
Tags: density measurements
(Phys.org) —NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed its first significant mission milestone for 2014—a Spacecraft Critical Design Review (SCDR) that examined the telescope's power, communications and pointing control ...
Tags: Telescope, Webb Space Telescope
To get an idea of how the early solar system may have formed, scientists often look to asteroids. These relics of rock and dust represent what today's planets may have been before they differentiated into bodies of core, mantle, and crust. ...
Tags: solar system, Jupiter, migration, Goldilocks
Scientists using the Herschel space observatory have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres. Plumes of water vapor are thought to shoot up periodically from Ceres ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Telescope
CCurrently, space based telescopes are limited by their size and weight, particularly regarding the mirror—using rockets for delivery is very restrictive—there are both size and cost issues involved. To possibly get around that ...
Tags: Consumer Electronics, Electronics, telescopes, Instruments, Meters
Astronomers have discovered a distant quasar illuminating a vast nebula of diffuse gas, revealing for the first time part of the network of filaments thought to connect galaxies in a cosmic web. Researchers at the University of California, ...
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The Kuiper belt—the region beyond the orbit of Neptune inhabited by a number of small bodies of rock and ice—hides many clues about the early days of the Solar System. According to the standard picture of Solar System formation, ...
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Astronomers have used ESO's HARPS planet hunter in Chile, along with other telescopes around the world, to discover three planets orbiting stars in the cluster Messier 67. Although more than one thousand planets outside the Solar System are ...
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The Kepler team today reports on four years of observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory targeting Kepler's exoplanet systems, announcing results this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. These observations, ...
Tags: Kepler team, W.M.Keck Observatory, exoplanet systems, observations
A stunning Hubble Space Telescope image of the colorful 30 Doradus Nebula, a giant star-forming region, is the focal point of an eBook on stellar evolution aimed at children with visual impairments, ages 10 to 12. The book is called "Reach ...
Tags: Hubble Space Telescope image, 30 Doradus Nebula, stellar evolution, eBook
Two new views from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, showcase the telescope's talent for spying objects near and far. One image shows the energized remains of a dead star, a structure nicknamed the "Hand of God" after ...
Tags: Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, dead star, Hand of God