As SpaceX continues to launch aggressively—the company is aiming for 100 successful launches by 2023—it has become the source of “atmospheric holes” that have raised concerns among scientists. Astronomers have discovered a new phenomenon they call “the northern lights resulting from the fall of SpaceX rocket boosters.” These impacts temporarily...
Last year, Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard, announced that small metal balls recovered from the ocean may be the remains of an interstellar meteorite and may contain signs of alien technology. However, recent research points to a more likely origin for this find. In 2014, during an expedition off...
Our knowledge of the Universe is limited by the fact that we are inside a galaxy, which is filled with interstellar gas and dust. This is especially true in the central region of the Milky Way, which is known as the “Zone of Avoidance” due to the abundance of dust....
For a long time, astronomers have been faced with the mystery of the reason for the rarity of spiral galaxies, including our Milky Way – most of them are elliptical galaxies. A recent study using computer models found that the rarity of spiral galaxies is due to natural interactions between...
Scientists theorize that comets may have spread the organic ingredients necessary for the emergence of life on Earth. New research suggests that comets may also deliver these elements to exoplanets. During the formation of the solar system, the Earth was bombarded by asteroids, comets and other space objects. How the...
NGC 1566, also known as the Spanish Dancer galaxy, lies approximately 60 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Dorado. A new photo taken by the Hubble telescope reveals the galaxy’s disk in detail. NGC 1566 is a galaxy with two distinct spiral arms, each extending over 100,000 light-years....
M83, also known as NGC 5236, is a barred spiral galaxy located approximately 15 million light-years away. M83 is of particular interest to astronomers seeking to understand the process of star birth. Spiral galaxy M83 close-up. Two spiral arms extend horizontally from the core at the center and merge into...
Astronomers have captured the aftermath of the disaster – two giant icy planets collided, destroying each other and forming a donut-shaped cloud, red-hot. This was the first observation of the consequences of a planetary collision. The observations could shed light not only on destructive interplanetary collisions, but perhaps even how...
The average galaxy NGC 685 contains at least 100 million stars. About 58 million light-years from Earth, galaxy NGC 685 appears to be orbiting in the depths of space. The Hubble Space Telescope image, the last of six released as part of Hubble’s Galaxy Week, shows the galaxy with its...
According to recent research in astronomy, most large galaxies arose from the merger of small galaxies. This means that some star clusters currently in the Milky Way may have been inherited from absorbed galaxies, or even “stolen” from neighboring galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds. The first connections between these...
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two astronomical objects named after Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer whose crew was the first to circumnavigate the world. Magellan and his crew led an incredible journey and exploration, but they were also slave owners and killed indigenous...
The galaxy NGC 6951, which lies 78 million light-years from Earth, was captured in a new Hubble image created by the Wide Field Camera (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The image shows bright blue spiral arms, star clusters and a dark orange dust cloud. This new Hubble...
In 1840, a modest star in the southern hemisphere suddenly began to glow brighter. The star, previously a fifth magnitude, became so bright by 1843 that it became the second brightest star in the sky. This star, known as Eta Carinae (η Carinae, Eta Carinae), had previously changed its brightness,...
Nearly 1,000 light-years away lies a spinning neutron star so dense that one spoonful of its material weighs about the same as Mount Everest. This is the Vela pulsar. Astronomers study it with great interest. On October 5, scientists announced that data from the HESS High Energy Observatory in Namibia...
Using the radioactive iron isotope 60-Fe, a team of researchers from the University of Illinois was able to determine the approximate astronomical distances to the explosions of the Pliocene supernova SN Plio (3 million years ago) and the Miocene supernova SN Mio (7 million years ago). “Supernovae are a dramatic...
An Einstein ring is a rare type of gravitationally lensed object that was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravity of a massive object, such as a cluster of galaxies or a black hole, bends the space-time around it and light emitted by more...
