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‘Sunspot archipelago’ 15 times wider than Earth could soon bombard us with solar storms
One of the largest and most densely populated sunspot regions seen in more than a decade has appeared on the sun’s nearside to Earth — and has begun to unleash a barrage of solar storms that are shaking up our home star’s surface in a big way. The sunspots’ emergence could make it an interesting…
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The galaxy cluster El Gordo moves faster than you might think
In Aug. 2023, JWST captured an exquisitely detailed infrared image of El Gordo galaxy cluster. Two galaxy clusters colliding at a rate of millions of miles per hour make up El Gordo’s enormous mass. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured its first images in 2022, the scientific community was…
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ASU civil engineering student earns Outstanding Graduate recognition
November 22, 2023 Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of profiles of notable fall 2023 graduates. Aidan Carson’s journey into civil engineering started with his observation of a family friend’s surveying firm. Aidan Carson Download Full Image “I was inspired by his love for his work and thought I would see if civil…
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Watch SpaceX’s Starship explode in astronomer’s stunning telescope footage (video)
The second test flight of SpaceX’s Starship was a photogenic one. On Saturday (Nov. 18), the massive Starship rocket launched for the second time ever, lifting off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The Super Heavy booster of the 400-foot-tall (122 meters) rocket exploded shortly after stage separation, while the upper-stage Starship vehicle…
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How to spot this year’s Geminid meteor shower
Graeme Whipps/Shutterstock I RECENTLY learned that the field of radio astronomy essentially started with a meteor shower. It was December 1945, and physicist Bernard Lovell was in Cheshire, UK, searching for cosmic rays – high-energy particles that zip through space. He had obtained a radar detector left over from the British army after the second…
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Earth Receives Laser-Beamed Message From 10 Million Miles Away
Rahul Rao reports via Space.com: On Nov. 14, NASA picked up a laser signal fired from an instrument that launched with the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently more than 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) from Earth and heading toward a mysterious metal asteroid. (The spacecraft is at more than 40 times the average distance…
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The Milky Way’s stunning spiral structure appears to be an anomaly. But why?
If you were to spring from Earth so high you could glance down at the entire Milky Way, our home galaxy would look like a spinning pinwheel. In it, some 100 billion stars are sprinkled across some 100,000 light-years, accompanied by unfathomable amounts of gas and dust. Together, these galactic components swirl around in a…
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James Webb Space Telescope delivers stunning new view of heart of our galaxy
A new image released this week from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals a central portion of our Milky Way Galaxy in “unprecedented” detail, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute. It shows an estimated half a million stars. The image, taken with the telescopes’ near-infrared camera, or NIRCam, shows the Milky Way’s dense core…
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The Need For Spatially Resolved Observations Of PAHs In Protoplanetary Discs
Simulated spectra of the two PAH disc models for selected inclinations. The left panel shows the SED of a smooth PAH disc, and the bottom panel shows the disc with a 40 au PAH gap containing only 10 % PAHs in the gap compared to the smooth-disc model. Even though the strength of all PAH…
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The exoplanet explosion: This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eicher
This artist’s view shows the hot Jupiter exoplanet 51 Pegasi b, sometimes referred to as Bellerophon. This was the first exoplanet discovered around a Sun-like star and was found in 1995 by Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/Nick Risinger. It may be hard to imagine today, but just over 30 years ago, we…