Category: Astronomy

This structure, called the Outer Barrel Assembly, will surround and protect NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from stray light that could interfere with its observations. In this photo, engineers prepare the assembly for testing. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn A major component of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope just took a spin on the centrifuge…

A data visualization of the motions of galaxies in structures called basins of attraction. The Milky Way is the red dot. Credit: University of Hawai’i If you want to pinpoint your place in the universe, start with your cosmic address. You live on Earth->Solar System->Milky Way Galaxy->Local Cluster->Virgo Cluster->Virgo Supercluster->Laniakea. Thanks to new deep sky…

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy, NGC 4694. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the galaxy, NGC 4694. Most galaxies fall into one of two basic types. Spiral galaxies are young and energetic, filled with the gas needed to form new stars and sporting spiral…

The newly-discovered GS-NDG-9422 galaxy appears as a faint blur in this James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) image. It could help astronomers better understand galaxy evolution in the early Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alex Cameron (Oxford) The discovery of a “weird” and unprecedented galaxy in the early universe could “help us understand…

This multiwavelength image of the Cloverleaf ORC (odd radio circle) combines visible light observations from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Legacy Survey in white and yellow, X-rays from XMM-Newton in blue, and radio from ASKAP (the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder) in red. Credit: X. Zhang and M. Kluge (MPE), B. Koribalski (CSIRO) An…

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Olmsted (STScI) In a surprise finding, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt…

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 1954. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy IC 1954, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Horologium. It sports a glowing bar in its…

Ks-band image of Terzan 6. Credit: Gao et al., 2024. Using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomers have observed a globular cluster known as Terzan 6. They detected a new millisecond pulsar that is likely associated with this cluster. The finding was reported in a research paper published September 17 on the pre-print server arXiv….

Velocity streamlines within the reconstructed volume, with colored envelopes associated with the prominent nearby basins of attraction. The map and streamlines have been cropped to the region covered by Cosmicflows-4 data. The streamlines within a given basin converge onto the region of high concentration of galaxies. Credit: Daniel Pomarède A new study has mapped out…

Artist’s impression of a supernova. Supernovae bombarded Earth with radiation that has implications for the development of life on Earth. Credit: NASA When a massive star explodes as a supernova, it does more than release an extraordinary amount of energy. Supernovae explosions are responsible for creating some of the heavy elements, including iron, which is…