Space – Science World

This time-lapse video, assembled from a set of Hubble Space Telescope photos, reveals two asteroids orbiting each other that have comet-like features. The asteroid pair, called 2006 VW139/288P, was observed in September 2016, just before the asteroid made its closest approach to the Sun. (NASA, ESA, and J. DePasquale and Z. Levay (STScI))

60 Days in Bed For Science; Asteroid Belt Mystery Solved & Ice on Mercury?

September 22, 2017

Mystery Asteroid Belt Object Really a Binary Asteroid Back in 2011 a Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or PanSTARRS survey detected an object in the asteroid belt displaying comet-like activity. So along with being labeled an asteroid, when it was discovered five years earlier, scientists also gave it a comet designation. After analyzing […]

With this view, Cassini captured one of its last looks at Saturn and its main rings from a distance. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Goodbye Cassini; Shape-Shifting Bacteria; New Horizons Wakes Up

September 15, 2017

NASA Cassini Mission to Saturn Comes to Fiery End English Poet Geoffrey Chaucer once said, “all good things must come to an end”. And so it goes with NASA’s Cassini mission, which provided a close-up look of Saturn, its moons and famous rings over the last 13 years, came to a blazing end on September […]

Antibiotics and Immune System; Freshman “15”; Volcanoes Under Antarctic Ice

August 18, 2017

Antibiotics Found to Interfere With Immune System
Avoiding the “Freshman 15” Weight Gain
Scientists Track Sun Burst Through Solar System
Huge Volcanic Range Found Under Antarctic Ice
Astronomers Find 4 Earth-Like Planets Near Sun-Like Star

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 […]

#1 Cause of Death; More Sleep=Less Pain?; Look Younger – Don’t Smile

May 17, 2017

Cardiovascular Disease #1 Cause of World’s Deaths A new 25 year global study suggests cardiovascular diseases is now the cause of one third of all deaths throughout the world. The study reports that in 2015 nearly 18 million people worldwide died from this family of illnesses, which includes heart attack, congestive heart failure, coronary artery […]

An artist's illustration of the epsilon Eridani system showing Epsilon Eridani b, right foreground, a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting its parent star at the outside edge of an asteroid belt. In the background can be seen another narrow asteroid or comet belt plus an outermost belt similar in size to our solar system's Kuiper Belt. (NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook)

Solar System Mimics Ours; The Big Empty; Closest Human Relative?

May 3, 2017

Nearby Planetary System Mimics our Solar System A group of scientists using NASA’s airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy or SOFIA recently completed a study that confirmed their previous findings of a young and nearby planetary system. The researchers found that the system surrounding the star Epsilon Eridani, which is about 10.5 light years away […]

Category: Space