Huntsville AL (SPX) Oct 10, 2022
In the summer of 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released images from some of its earliest observations with the newly commissioned telescope. Almost instantaneously, these stunning images landed everywhere from the front pages of news outlets to larger-than-life displays in Times Square. Webb, however, will not pursue its exploration of the universe on its own. It is designed to w

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Oct 10, 2022
The first map of the 'galactic underworld' - a chart of the corpses of once massive suns that have since collapsed into black holes and neutron stars - has revealed a graveyard that stretches three times the height of the Milky Way, and that almost a third of the objects have been flung out from the galaxy altogether. "These compact remnants of dead stars show a fundamentally different dis

Tucson AZ (SPX) Oct 05, 2022
When the Chelyabinsk fireball exploded across Russian skies in 2013, it littered Earth with a relatively uncommon type of meteorite. What makes the Chelyabinsk meteorites and others like them special is their dark veins, created by a process called shock darkening. Yet, planetary scientists have been unable to pinpoint a nearby asteroid source of these kinds of meteorites - until now. In a

Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 06, 2022
Observations from the spacecraft's pass of the moon provided the first close-up in over two decades of this ocean world, resulting in remarkable imagery and unique science. The highest-resolution photo NASA's Juno mission has ever taken of a specific portion of Jupiter's moon Europa reveals a detailed view of a puzzling region of the moon's heavily fractured icy crust. The image cove

Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 07, 2022
A team at the Lab has invented new technologies that could be used by future missions to analyze liquid samples from watery worlds and look for signs of alien life. Are we alone in the universe? An answer to that age-old question has seemed tantalizingly within reach since the discovery of ice-encrusted moons in our solar system with potentially habitable subsurface oceans. But looking for

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Oct 05, 2022
New simulations show that truly Earth-like exoplanets with oceans and continents, and beaches along the boundaries, may be much more common around red dwarfs than previously expected. This means ongoing and future exoplanet survey missions can expect to find multiple Earth-analogs for further study before the end of the decade. The "habitable zone" is defined as the range of orbits around

Washington DC (SPX) Oct 07, 2022
By combining data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, researchers were able to trace light that was emitted by the large white elliptical galaxy on the left through the spiral galaxy on the right and identify the effects of interstellar dust in the spiral galaxy. This image of galaxy pair VV 191 includes near-infrared light from Webb, and ult

Boston MA (SPX) Oct 06, 2022
Nearly half the stars in our galaxy are solitary like the sun. The other half comprises stars that circle other stars, in pairs and multiples, with orbits so tight that some stellar systems could fit between Earth and the moon. Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have now discovered a stellar binary, or pair of stars, with an extremely short orbit, appearing to circle each other every 51 minu

Melbourne, Australia (SPX) Oct 06, 2022
The large-scale structure of the universe is traced by the distribution of galaxies. This 'cosmic web' consists of giant filamentary structures linking massive clusters of galaxies. The new study finds that galaxies with bigger bulges tend to spin perpendicular to the filaments in which they are embedded, while galaxies with smaller bulges tend to spin parallel to these filaments. "I

Turin, Italy (SPX) Oct 06, 2022
When NASA's DART spacecraft successfully hit the asteroid Dimorphos, the closest cameras that captured the impact were on LICIACube, a microsatellite built by Argotec. The next closest cameras were telescopes on Earth, 7 million miles away. Argotec Mission Control Centre in Turin, Italy, received the first pictures from LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids) a few hours af