Hubble Helps Astronomers Solve 40 Year-Old Mystery
Astronomers finally have been able to solve a 40-year mystery thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope. For over four decades astronomers have been trying to find the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of hydrogen gas clouds that stretch almost halfway around our own Milky Way galaxy. The Magellanic Stream is connected to […]
Science Picture Blog
Glitch Jeopardizes Planet Hunter’s Mission
A malfunction could force an abrupt end to the Kepler Space Telescope’s planet-hunting mission. NASA received the unwelcome news last Sunday after discovering Kepler had malfunctioned and is currently operating in a self-protective “safe-mode” as it also did earlier this month. The US space agency made the news public this past Wednesday. It appears at […]
Hubble Spots Farthest Supernova Yet
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the farthest known supernova discovered to date. Nicknamed “SN Wilson,” after the American President Woodrow Wilson, scientists say supernova UDS10Wil, exploded more than 10 billion years ago, about 3.77 billion years after the Big Bang. SN Wilson is in a special class of exploding stars known as “Type Ia […]
Astronomers Discover Furthest Galaxy Ever
Scientists have discovered what could be the oldest, most distant galaxy in the universe, thanks to a unique combination of man-made and natural telescopes. The newly discovered galaxy, MACS0647-JD, was found by the Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH). It is about 13.3 billion light years, or 125,825,000,000,000,000,000,000 km, from Earth. Scientists are […]
Hubble Looks Into the Depths of Space and Time
The Hubble Space Telescope has given us the deepest view of space ever. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, it’s a composite of more than 2,000 photos taken by Hubble over 10 years. “The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. […]
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NASA Launches Online Game for Would-be Rocket Scientists
If you think you have what it takes to build a satellite, NASA has just introduced an online game that might appeal to you. With “Build It Yourself: Satellite!” the US space agency offers users the chance to act as engineers and astronomers who conceive and build their own special virtual satellite. “It’s fun to […]
NASA Checks Out Potentially Hazardous Asteroids
First, the good news. There are fewer asteroids near Earth than previously estimated. Now the bad news. A new NASA survey also finds there may be more than twice as many aligned with Earth’s orbit than thought, which could increase the odds of an asteroid coming close enough to us to cause concern. The findings […]