This image shows knots of cold, dense interstellar gas where new stars are forming. These Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules (frEGGs) were first seen in Hubble’s famous 1995 image of the Eagle Nebula. Because these lumps of gas are dark, they are... Continue Reading →
With the successful extension of Webb’s second sunshield mid-boom, the observatory has passed another critical deployment milestone. Webb’s sunshield now resembles its full, kite-shaped form in space. https://videopress.com/v/iAo2eYfg?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&autoPlay=true&preloadContent=metadata Engineers began to deploy the second (starboard) mid-boom at 6:31 p.m. EST... Continue Reading →
NASA's Parker Solar Probe reached the sun's extended solar atmosphere, known as the corona, and spent five hours there. The spacecraft is the first to enter the outer boundaries of our sun. "This marks the achievement of the primary objective... Continue Reading →
Light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year. How far can light travel in one minute? 11,160,000 miles.... Continue Reading →
Stars are born from clouds of gas and dust that collapse under their own gravitational attraction. As the cloud collapses, a dense, hot core forms and begins gathering dust and gas, creating an object called a “protostar.” This Hubble infrared... Continue Reading →
Why doesn't the nearby galaxy create a gravitational lensing effect on the background galaxy? It does, but since both galaxies are so nearby, the angular shift is much smaller than the angular sizes of the galaxies themselves. The featured Hubble image of NGC 3314 shows two large spiral galaxies... Continue Reading →
NGC 2438 is a planetary nebula, formed after the death of a Sun-like star. The medium-sized star would have expelled its outer layers of gas into space as it died, leaving behind a white-dwarf core. A halo of glowing gas... Continue Reading →
In June 2021, NASA received its first sample of asteroid Ryugu, which was returned to Earth in December 2020 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft. This is one of the first samples to leave Japan for preliminary investigation. As deputy leader of... Continue Reading →
It may look like a huge cosmic question mark, but the big question really is how does the bright gas and dark dust tell this nebula's history of star formation. At the edge of a giant molecular cloud toward the northern constellation Cepheus,... Continue Reading →
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