Located 12 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, the Cigar galaxy is undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation called a starburst. The star formation is…
Category: Astronomy
Researchers Rewind the Clock to Calculate Age and Site of Supernova Blast
Astronomers are winding back the clock on the expanding remains of a nearby, exploded star. By using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, they retraced the speedy shrapnel from the blast to…
Roman Space Telescope Could Image 100 Hubble Ultra Deep Fields at Once
NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to photograph an area of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble with the same crisp sharpness. Among…
Planetary Sleuthing Finds Triple-Star World
Now, after a lengthy hunt that spanned many years and many telescopes, Ciardi said he has “resurrected KOI-5Ab from the dead.” Thanks to new observations from NASA’s second planet-hunting mission,…
Chandra Studies Extraordinary Magnetar
In 2020, astronomers added a new member to an exclusive family of exotic objects with the discovery of a magnetar. New observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory help support the…
Shaping a Spiral Galaxy
The magnetic fields align along the entire length of the massive spiral arms — 24,000 light years across (0.8 kiloparsecs) — implying that the gravitational forces that created the galaxy’s…
On the Hunt for a Missing Giant Black Hole
Despite searching with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that a distant black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion times…
A blazar in the early universe
The supersharp radio “vision” of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) has revealed previously unseen details in a jet of material ejected at three-quarters the speed of…
Viewing the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ tonight – the Great Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction
Jupiter and Saturn are about to have their closest conjunction in modern history. Don’t miss this once-in-a-millennium event. In an event that hasn’t occurred in 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn…
Jupiter and Saturn are converging for a rare “Great Conjunction” on the day of the winter solstice – December 21st
This particular Jupiter/Saturn “great conjunction” is extremely rare because of how close the two planets will look to one another and how easy it will be to see. Often, the…
