[Click on image for high resolution] Scientists have observed what they believe to be the most distant and oldest galaxy ever detected — a discovery which could provide insight into the nature of the universe in its infancy. “This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” Wei Zheng, the […]
Last week the robotic Dawn spacecraft ended its year-long mission to asteroid Vesta, becoming the first spacecraft ever to visit this far off world located between Mars and Jupiter, in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt. … Vesta shows evidence of being a leftover from the early years of our Solar System, a building block […]
[Click on image for high resolution] Giant elliptical galaxy M60 and spiral galaxy NGC 4647 do look like an odd couple in this sharp cosmic portrait from the Hubble Space Telescope. But they are found in a region of space where galaxies tend to gather, on the eastern side of the nearby Virgo Galaxy Cluster. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Curiosity is on the move across Mars — but where is it going? The car-sized rover’s path after 29 Martian days on the surface is shown on the above map. Curiosity is still almost 300 meters from its first major destination, though, a meeting of different types of terrain […]
The vast majority of stars in the Milky Way don’t go it alone — most have a companion, or even two or three. It stands to reason that life outside the solar system might have a sky less like our own and more like Tatooine, the Star Wars planet with a double sunset. Many binary […]
Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters. The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, […]
[Click on image for high resolution ] Rising at sunset, the gorgeous Full Moon of August 31 became the second Full Moon in a month. According to modern reckoning, that makes it a Blue Moon. In fact, parts of the Full Moon do look a little blue in this sharp lunar portrait. Taken just hours […]
PASADENA, Calif. — Posing for portraits for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, Saturn and its largest moon, Titan, show spectacular colors in a quartet of images being released today. One image captures the changing hues of Saturn’s northern and southern hemispheres as they pass from one season to the next. A wide-angle view in today’s package captures […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so colorful? … Fine dust illuminated from the front by starlight produces blue reflection nebulae. Gaseous clouds whose atoms are excited by ultraviolet starlight produce reddish emission nebulae. Backlit dust clouds block starlight and so appear dark. Antares, a red […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR FULL IMAGE] The idea of a giant tower that can carry us from Earth to outer space is legend, and it probably will be for a long time. But a company has successfully Kickstarted what they say is their first step to building one on the Moon. At $8,000, the project […]
