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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.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Astronomers solve temperature mystery of planetary atmospheres

University of Washington (UW) astronomers have found an atmospheric peculiarity Earth shares with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune is likely common to billions of planets, and knowing that may help in the search for potentially habitable worlds. ...

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Hidden details revealed in nearby starburst galaxy

Using the new high-frequency capabilities of the National Science Foundation’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, astronomers have captured never-before-seen details of the nearby starburst galaxy M82. These new data hi...

Rover results include first age measurement on Mars and help for human exploration

NASA’s Curiosity rover is providing vital insight about Mars’ past and current environments that will aid plans for future robotic and human missions. In a little more than a year on the Red Planet, the mobile Mars Science Laboratory has...

Monday, December 09, 2013

New neutrino cooling theory changes understanding of neutron stars’ surfaces

Massive X-ray superbursts near the surface of neutron stars are providing a unique window into the operation of fundamental forces of nature under extreme conditions. “Scientists are intrigued by what exactly powers these massive explosions, a...

Astronomers discover planet that shouldn’t be there

An international team of astronomers, led by a University of Arizona (UA) student, has discovered the most distant orbiting planet found to date around a single Sun-like star. It is the first exoplanet — a planet outside of our solar system &md...

Friday, December 06, 2013

Subaru Telescope's image captures the intricacy of Comet Lovejoy's tail

A team of astronomers from Stony Brook University in New York, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), and others used Suprime-Cam, Subaru Telescope’s wide-field, prime-focus camera, to capture an image of the intricate flow of C...

Glimpsing the infrastructure of a gamma-ray burst jet

A new study using observations from a novel instrument provides the best look to date at magnetic fields at the heart of gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic explosions in the universe. An international team of astronomers from Britain, Slovenia, and...

Thursday, December 05, 2013

Supernova blast provides clues to age of binary star system

Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed faint remnants of a supernova explosion and helped researchers determine that Circinus X-1 — an X-ray binary — is the youngest of this class of astronomical objects found to da...

Cassini spacecraft obtains best views of Saturn hexagon

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole. This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first t...

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Hubble traces subtle signals of water on hazy worlds

Using the powerful eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets. Astronomers have previously reported the presence of atmospheric water on a few e...

WISE spots possible massive black hole duo

Astronomers have spotted what appear to be two supermassive black holes at the heart of a remote galaxy, circling each other like dance partners. The incredibly rare sighting was made with the help of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ...

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

European Space Agency decides on next large mission concepts

At its meeting in Paris last week, the Science Program Committee of the European Space Agency (ESA) selected “The Hot and Energetic Universe” and “The Gravitational Universe” as the focus of the space agency’s next two l...

Do black holes come in size medium?

Black holes can be petite, with masses only about 10 times that of our Sun, or monstrous, boasting the equivalent in mass up to 10 billion Suns. Do black holes also come in size medium? NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is busy sc...

Monday, December 02, 2013

Extreme black hole is more luminous than astronomers thought possible

For decades, astronomers have puzzled over an odd source of X-ray light in an arm of the galaxy M101, just off the handle of the Big Dipper. The object, like other so-called ultraluminous X-ray sources, is a system made of a star and a black hole tha...

How stars move at the center of the galaxy

Two months ago, astronomers created a new 3-D map of stars at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, showing more clearly than ever the bulge at its core. Previous explanations suggested that the stars that form the bulge are in banana-like orbits,...

Comet ISON dies as it rounds the Sun

Comet ISON (4.5 billion B.C. – A.D. 2013) survived for more than 4.5 billion years in the frigid depths of the solar system, but it fizzled during its brief moment in the Sun on November 28. Through a combination of ISON’s delicate makeup...

Friday, November 29, 2013

Comet ISON may have survived

Continuing a history of surprising behavior, material from Comet ISON appeared on the other side of the Sun on the evening on November 28, 2013, despite not having been seen in observations during its closest approach to the Sun. As ISON appeared to ...

Comet ISON fizzles as it rounds the Sun

UPDATE: Comet ISON may have survived Comet ISON went around the sun on Nov. 28, 2013. Several solar observatories watched the comet throughout this closest approach to the sun, known as perihelion. While the fate of the comet is not yet established, ...