First Detection of Helium in an Exoplanet Atmosphere
Scientists say for the first several hundred thousand years or so after the Big Bang, there were virtually only two elements in the universe, hydrogen, and helium. A hydrogen atom is made of only one proton and one electron, and a helium atom has two each of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Hydrogen and then helium are […]
Happy 26th Birthday Hubble Space Telescope!
Sunday, April 24, 2016 will mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the space shuttle Discovery mission STS-31. It was deployed from the shuttle’s payload bay the following day, April 25, 1990 Over its 26 years of service Hubble’s numerous discoveries and the breath-taking and detailed images it has […]
Astronomers Find a Bunch of ‘Monster Stars’ in Star Cluster
A group of astronomers probing a young star cluster within the ultraviolet section of the light spectrum just found a bunch of huge ‘monster stars.’ The R136 star cluster, located in the Tarantula Nebula, inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, is about 157,000 light years from Earth. They chose to explore in the ultraviolet range since there are […]
New Maps Reveal Red Spot Changes and Odd New Features on Jupiter
Scientists have created two new maps of Jupiter with data and images gathered over a nearly 21-hour period on January 19, 2015 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s high performance Wide Field Camera 3. The maps are a representation of two nearly continuous rotations of the Jovian planet. The maps and series of images will […]