astronomy – Science World

After launching the Iridium-2 mission on June 25, 2017, the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 is seen here returning and coming in for a landing on the “Just Read the Instructions” droneship that was positioned in the Pacific Ocean. (SpaceX, Flickr/Creative Commons)

Science Images – June, 2017

June 30, 2017

This sketch illustrates a family tree of exoplanets. Planets are born out of swirling disks of gas and dust called protoplanetary disks. (NASA/Kepler/Caltech (T. Pyle))

Kepler Discovers More Exoplanets / Scientists Classify Types of Planets

June 22, 2017

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission recently released what it calls the most comprehensive and detailed catalog of candidate exoplanets. Exoplanets or extrasolar planets are planetary bodies that exist outside of our solar system. The new and final Kepler catalog from data gathered from the spacecraft’s initial patch of sky view within the Cygnus constellation includes 219 […]

This animation shows the progression of NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) investigation for the mission's first three years following its restart in December 2013. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/PSI)

Einstein Proven Correct; Gravitational Waves Detected; Super Hot Planet

June 8, 2017

Einstein Theory Confirmed Again In his 1915 Theory of General Relativity, physicist Albert Einstein proposed that mass can bend space time. And he predicted that when a distant star’s light passed by a large object en route to the observer, the object’s gravity can bend and brighten the starlight like a magnifying lens. This effect, called […]

NASA plans to send a spacecraft to within 6.5 million kilometers of the sun's surface next summer. Here’s an artistic rendering of the Parker Solar Probe heading toward the Sun. On May 31, the spacecraft was named to honor astrophysics Eugene Parker who discovered the solar wind in 1958. (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory).

May 2017 – Science Images

June 1, 2017

A slice through largest-ever three-dimensional map of the Universe. Earth is at the left, and distances to galaxies and quasars are labelled by the lookback time to the objects (lookback time means how long the light from an object has been traveling to reach us here on Earth). The locations of quasars (galaxies with supermassive black holes) are shown by the red dots, and nearer galaxies mapped by SDSS are also shown (yellow). The right-hand edge of the map is the limit of the observable Universe, from which we see the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the light “left over” from the Big Bang. The bulk of the empty space in between the quasars and the edge of the observable universe are from the “dark ages”, prior to the formation of most stars, galaxies, or quasars. (Anand Raichoor, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and the SDSS collaboration)

Astronomers Create Largest 3D Map of the Universe

May 24, 2017

A team of astronomers working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) created the largest ever three-dimensional map of the universe. Released along with an accompanying study, the astronomers say the new map is the first to exclusively use the positions of quasars to chart the significant structures of the Universe. “Because quasars are so […]

Dark Matter Imaged; Shoe-String Theory; Metal in Mars Atmosphere

April 14, 2017

Dark Matter Filaments of Cosmic Web Imaged Two Canadian researchers say that they have constructed a composite image of dark matter filaments that make up what cosmologists call the cosmic web. Scientists have been finding evidence that our universe may be anything but random and that everything is actually organized and connected to each other […]

Researchers Doubt the Existence of Dark Energy

April 10, 2017

According to NASA, the universe is composed of three things. About 4.6% of it is normal (visible) matter, 24% is dark matter and the remaining 71.4% is made up of dark energy. In other words, hypothetically speaking, around 95% of everything in the universe can’t even be seen. Now a Hungarian and American team of […]

This artist’s concept depicts the early Martian environment (right) – believed to contain liquid water and a thicker atmosphere – versus the cold, dry environment seen at Mars today (left). (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

New Horizons Journey; Wrong Way Asteroid; Ring Around Mars?

April 4, 2017

New Horizons Halfway to Next Flyby Destination NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft provided scientists an amazing once in a lifetime look at the distant dwarf planet Pluto as it flew by it in July 2015. Along with spectacular images of Pluto the spacecraft also sent back those of Pluto’s five moons including high definition shots of […]

Engineer Volkmar Dohmen stands in front of a giant bank of xenon short-arc lamps at the DLR German national aeronautics and space research center in Germany. When switched on, what is being called the world’s largest artificial sun creates combined intensity that's 10,000x stronger than sun's light on Earth's surface and produces temperatures of around 2,982° Celsius. The photo was taken on 3/21/17 (AP)

March 2017 Science Images

March 31, 2017

Artist’s impression of a galaxy forming stars within powerful outflows of material blasted out from supermassive black holes at its core. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Astronomers Find Newborn Stars Near Supermassive Black Hole

March 27, 2017

A star being consumed by a black hole may seem quite common. But, news of stars being formed alongside a black hole could be something to notice! But that’s just what a UK-led group of astronomers say they recently discovered. While they were studying the ongoing collision of two galaxies, known jointly as IRAS F23128-5919, […]

Category: astronomy