Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have completed their final inspection of a key element for the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: the primary mirror. This 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) mirror will collect and focus light from cosmic objects near and far, helping Roman capture stunning panoramas of space. “The Roman engineering […]
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds — a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,300 found so far thanks to NASA missions working in tandem with other […]
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities. But it’s hard […]
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the dwarf irregular galaxy ESO 490-017, roughly 12,000 light-years in diameter and some 23 million light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. The galaxy’s low surface brightness makes it appear as a faint, starry swarm behind brighter foreground stars that are easily recognized by their diffraction spikes. Numerous red, […]
Look closely at this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and you’ll see galaxies of various shapes and sizes clustered together toward the center-left of the image. A few foreground stars shine brightly and are easily distinguished by the spikes that appear to extend outward from each star. These spikes, called diffraction spikes, are the […]
An international team studying data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope concludes the mission detected a rare, unusually luminous supernova. The researchers say it likely received its power-up from a supermagnetized neutron star born in the stellar collapse that triggered the explosion.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy’s full face, while red, blue, and orange light from distant galaxies shines through its diffuse outer […]
NASA’s TESS has released its most complete view of the starry sky to date
Astronomers have long known that neutron stars, the crushed cores left behind after massive stars explode, should be scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. However, most of them are effectively invisible. A new study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics suggests NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could spot them anyway. Using detailed simulations of […]
In this new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the center of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (the Air Pump). As a nearby spiral galaxy, this target offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the cycle of stellar birth and death, […]