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High School Astronomy Club leads girl scouts on a trip through the stars
WESTFIELD – The Girl Scout “Westies” Service Unit, which consists of eight troops from West Springfield and Westfield, attended an observing event just for them on Friday evening, Nov. 8, hosted by the Westfield High School Space and Astronomy Club. “We observed the moon, Saturn and a double star. Club members operated the telescope, gave…
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Barnard’s Star Finally Has a Planet, and Possibly More
For a century, exoplanet hunters have “discovered” planets around a nearby star, only to retract the claims. But the latest find is for real. Barnard’s Star is a dim, reddish ball of gas just six light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. It is the nearest stand-alone star to our sun, but with only…
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A Giant Leap for Astronomy: Telescope for NASA’s Roman Mission Complete
In this photo, optical engineer Bente Eegholm inspects the surface of the primary mirror for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) mirror is a major component of the Optical Telescope Assembly, which also contains nine additional mirrors and supporting structures and electronics. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip=" NASA NASA, the…
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Leonids Meteor Shower: When and How to Watch Its Peak
The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot. Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can observe only a fraction of astronomical phenomena with your naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one…
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James Webb Spots Massive ‘Red Monsters’—A Discovery That’s Shaking Astronomy to Its Core
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed a groundbreaking discovery: massive, dust-rich galaxies dubbed “red monsters” that challenge fundamental assumptions about the formation of galaxies in the early universe. Observed within the first billion years after the Big Bang, these galaxies appear as massive as the Milky Way but formed at a rate far…
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Life in the Multiverse: The Role of Dark Energy in Star Formation and Intelligence
How can we determine if intelligent life exists in our Universe, or maybe other universes? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society as an international team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Switzerland investigated how the universe’s expansion, which is hypothesized to be caused by…
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Historic Venus Flyby Sets Parker Solar Probe on Course for Sun’s Closest Approach
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has done an extraordinary job teaching us about our Sun while achieving record distances from the latter’s surface, coming within 4.51 million miles (7.26 million kilometers) on September 27, 2023. Now, the Parker Solar Probe is a month away from breaking this record, as it is slated to come within 3.8…
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Space
New Uranus research suggests what’s known about the planet could be wrong A solar wind event squashed the protective bubble around Uranus just before Voyager 2 flew by the planet in 1986, shifting how astronomers understood the mysterious world.
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Large, Bright Early Galaxies: A Win for Modified Gravity Over Dark Matter
How did the first galaxies after the Big Bang form and evolve? Were they small and attributed to dark matter or were they large and some other force attributed to their growth? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers challenged longstanding hypotheses that…
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Astronomers’ theory of galaxy formation may be upended
New research from Case Western Reserve University questions standard model The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter helped the earliest stars and galaxies…
