Home
/
News

News

Your online destination for news articles on planets, cosmology, NASA, space missions, and more. You’ll also find information on how to observe upcoming visible sky events such as meteor showers, solar and lunar eclipses, key planetary appearances, comets, and asteroids.

Friday, March 07, 2014

ALMA sees icy wreckage in nearby solar system

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have discovered the splattered remains of comets colliding around a nearby star. Researchers believe they are witnessing the total destruction of one of these icy bod...

Hubble witnesses an asteroid mysteriously disintegrating

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the never-before-seen breakup of an asteroid, which has fragmented into as many as 10 smaller pieces. Although fragile comet nuclei have been seen to fall apart as they approach the Sun, nothing li...

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Chandra and XMM-Newton provide direct measurement of distant black hole’s spin

Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton to show a supermassive black hole 6 billion light-years from Earth is spinning extremely rapidly. This first direct measurement of the...

Lava floods the ancient plains of Mars

Two distinct volcanic eruptions have flooded this area of Daedalia Planum with lava, flowing around an elevated fragment of ancient terrain. The European Space Agency’s Mars Express acquired the images November 28, 2013, toward the eastern bou...

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Spiral galaxy spills blood and guts

This new Hubble image shows spiral galaxy ESO 137-001, framed against a bright background as it moves through the heart of galaxy cluster Abell 3627. This cluster is violently ripping the spiral’s entrails out into space, leaving bright blue st...

Asteroid will safely pass closer than Moon today

As happens about 20 times a year with current detection capabilities, a known asteroid will safely pass Earth on Wednesday closer than the distance from Earth to the Moon. This asteroid, 2014 DX110, is estimated to be about 100 feet (30 meters) acr...

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Every red dwarf star has at least one planet

Three new planets classified as habitable-zone super-Earths are among eight new planets discovered orbiting nearby red dwarf stars by an international team of astronomers from the United Kingdom and Chile. The study identifies that virtually all red ...

Standard-candle supernovae are still standard, but why?

Sixteen years ago, two teams of supernova hunters, one led by Saul Perlmutter of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and the other by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, declare...

Monday, March 03, 2014

NEOWISE spies its first comet

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft has spotted a never-before-seen comet — its first such discovery since coming out of hibernation late last year. "We are so pleased to have discovered this froz...

Distant asteroid revealed to be a complex mini geological world

After eight years of observations, scientists from the SETI Institute have found an exotic orbit for the largest Trojan asteroid, (624) Hektor — the only one known to possess a moon. The formation of this system made of a dual primary and a sma...

Astronomy announces 2013 Out-of-this-world Award winner

Astronomy magazine has chosen the Louisville Astronomical Society (LAS) from Louisville, Kentucky, as the winner of its 2013 Out-of-this-world Award for outstanding public programming. The LAS’ many accomplishments helped it stand out from the ...

Friday, February 28, 2014

New fast and furious black hole found

A team of Australian and American astronomers has been studying nearby galaxy M83 and has found a new super-powered small black hole named MQ1, the first object of its kind to be studied in this much detail. Astronomers have found a few compact obje...

Closest, brightest supernova in decades is also a little weird

A bright supernova discovered only six weeks ago in a nearby galaxy is provoking new questions about the exploding stars that scientists use as their main yardstick for measuring the universe. Called SN 2014J, the glowing supernova was discovered by...

Astronomy selects 2014 Youth Essay Contest winner

The editors of Astronomy magazine have selected 17-year-old Sarah Chinski of Marion, Iowa, as the winner of Astronomy’s 2014 Youth Essay Contest. For her entry on what she loves best about astronomy, Sarah will receive an all-expenses-paid trip...

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Super-Earths may be dead worlds

In the last 20 years, the search for Earth-like planets around other stars has accelerated with the launch of missions like the Kepler space telescope. Using these and observatories on the ground, astronomers have found numerous worlds that at first ...

The Submillimeter Array telescope unveils how small cosmic seeds grow into big stars

New images from the Smithsonian’s Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope provide the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake Nebula. These images offer new insights into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars. Stretchin...

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Bullying black holes force galaxies to stay red and dead

The Herschel Space Observatory has discovered massive elliptical galaxies in the nearby universe containing plenty of cold gas, even though the galaxies fail to produce new stars. Comparison with other data suggests that while hot gas cools down in t...

NASA's Kepler mission announces 715 new worlds

NASA's Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system. Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost f...

The shocking behavior of a speedy star

Roguish runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way Galaxy. Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in this newly released image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. In...

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter

Although liquid water covers a majority of Earth’s surface, scientists are still searching for planets outside our solar system that contain water. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and several other institutions h...

With a deadly embrace, “spidery” pulsars consume their mates

Black widow spiders and their Australian cousins, known as redbacks, are notorious for their tainted love, expressed as an unsettling tendency to kill and devour their male partners. Astronomers have noted similar behavior between two rare breeds of ...

Monday, February 24, 2014

Subaru Telescope detects rare form of nitrogen in Comet ISON

A team of astronomers led by Yoshiharu Shinnaka and Hideyo Kawakita, both from Kyoto Sangyo University, successfully observed Comet ISON during its bright outburst in the middle of November 2013. Subaru Telescope’s High Dispersion Spectrograph ...

Astronomers spot record-breaking lunar impact

A meteorite with the mass of a small car crashed into the Moon last September, according to Spanish astronomers. The impact, the biggest seen to date, produced a bright flash and would have been easy to spot from Earth. The Moon lacks the atmosphere...