deep space

Meet “Spikey,” a Possible Pair of Merging Supermassive Black Holes

10 February 2020 0

ift.tt/31JqHhL Space Meet “Spikey,” a Possible Pair of Merging Supermassive…

Faint Repetitions of an Extragalactic Burst

5 February 2020 0

ift.tt/2SyadFp FRB 121102, the first fast radio burst found to repeat, was also the first to be localized in the sky. [Gemini Observatory/AURA/NSF/NRC] FRB properties span a wide range, but one of the biggest distinguishing features has been repetition. While…

Scientists Spot the First Interstellar Visitor to Our Solar System

1 November 2017 0

New NASA research will make it easier to find the…

How Many Galaxies Are There in the Universe?

2 November 2016 0

ift.tt/2fazn8D VIDEO The wonderful thing about science is that it’s…

Physicists make it possible to 3D print your own baby universe

30 October 2016 0

Researchers have created a 3D printed cosmic microwave background —…

What Are Cosmic Voids?

19 October 2016 0

ift.tt/2eq3IP3 VIDEO Clearly I need to learn to be more…

The Universe’s Galaxy Population Just Grew Tenfold

16 October 2016 0

ift.tt/2dTqm83 Ever since human beings learned that the Milky Way…

How Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell Shaped Our Understanding of the Universe by Discovering Pulsars, Only to Be Excluded from the Nobel Prize

15 July 2016 0

ift.tt/29BKQv4 How a sole “scruffy signal” jokingly attributed to “little green men” forever changed our image of the cosmos. In July of 1967, the month of her twenty-fourth birthday, Northern Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. July 15, 1943) discovered…

Astronomers Have Captured the ‘Deepest’ View of the Orion Nebula to Date

12 July 2016 0

ift.tt/29KUle9 The Orion Nebula is such an active and brilliant hub of star formation that it can be seen with the naked eye from Earth, despite the fact that it lies 1,350 light years distant. Stretching a full 24 light…

First Detection of Water Clouds Outside Our Solar System

10 July 2016 0

ift.tt/29kOuNc Brown dwarfs – those not-quite-a-planet and not-quite-a-star objects – are intriguing oddities that are too low in mass to burn hydrogen, but are more massive than planets. They only emit a faint amount of light, so they are hard…

Hubble Captures the Beating Heart of the Crab Nebula

7 July 2016 0

Get larger image formats At the center of the Crab Nebula, located in the constellation Taurus, lies a celestial "beating heart" that is an example of extreme physics in space. The tiny object blasts out blistering pulses of radiation 30…

Sketching Celestial Observations

30 June 2016 0

Why, and how, you should sketch your observations through a telescope. A sketch of the Perseus Double Cluster, NGC 884 and NGC 869. D. Rennie In the late-1990s, I wrote an essay for a literary journal and cited two quotes:…

NGC 6814: Grand Design Spiral Galaxy from Hubble

25 June 2016 0

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2016 June 21 NGC 6814: Grand Design Spiral Galaxy…

Toward Gravitational Wave Astronomy

22 June 2016 0

The second detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) instruments reminds us how much we gain when we move beyond the visible light observations that for so many millennia determined what people thought of the universe.…