Category: Space and Astronomy

  • ‘Accidental Astronomy:’ A New Book Explores Everything In Space We Found By Accident

    ‘Accidental Astronomy:’ A New Book Explores Everything In Space We Found By Accident

    Chris Lintott tries to observe everything from asteroids zipping through the Solar System, to distant galaxies. The way the cosmos reveals its secrets is a story, he thinks, deserves an audience. Luck and scientific stumbles are the cornerstone of astronomy. Stories about lauded geniuses and prize winners are masks, he argues, hiding the more exciting…

  • NASA Is Launching a Dazzling Star Into Space—and It’s 100% Fake

    NASA Is Launching a Dazzling Star Into Space—and It’s 100% Fake

    Studying distant stars is difficult without absolute flux calibration points—stars that can help astronomers calibrate their instruments. So, NASA—along with George Mason University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology—is going to place an artificial star into geostationary orbit to help improve astronomical observations around the world. Known as the Landolt Space Mission, this…

  • How the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will survey space and time

    How the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will survey space and time

    The Vera C. Rubin Observatory at sunrise. Credit: Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/AURA/NSF/J. Fuentes When the Vera C. Rubin Observatory comes online, perhaps at full bore in 2025, this powerful and unique survey telescope, at high altitude in Chile, will survey the heavens in a new and unprecedented way.   Originally named the Large Synoptic Survey…

  • NASA Plans to Launch Artificial Star into Space

    NASA is set to launch an innovative artificial star into space, a mission designed to refine the accuracy of astronomical measurements. This groundbreaking project, named the Landolt mission, involves deploying a mini satellite equipped with lasers that will mimic the light from stars and other celestial objects, offering a new tool for astronomers to calibrate…

  • Piping Up at the Gates of Dawn

    Piping Up at the Gates of Dawn

    Since the James Webb Space Telescope began operating two years ago, astronomers have been using it to leapfrog one another millions of years into the past, back toward the moment they call cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were formed. Last month, an international team doing research as the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic…

  • Gaia space telescope helps astronomers image hidden objects around bright stars

    Gaia space telescope helps astronomers image hidden objects around bright stars

    Scientists have directly imaged eight dim objects accompanying very bright stars within the Gaia data catalog, including so-called “failed stars,” otherwise known as brown dwarfs.  The stars and their companions were originally identified from millions of stars in the Gaia catalog. They were considered ideal for follow-up investigations with the ground-based GRAVITY instrument, an advanced…

  • Celestial discovery: Astronomers watch a supermassive black hole awaken in real time

    Celestial discovery: Astronomers watch a supermassive black hole awaken in real time

    CNN — Astronomers are witnessing a never-before-seen spectacle in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. In late 2019, a team of astronomers took notice of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy named SDSS1335+0728, 300 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation. A sudden spike in the galaxy’s…

  • The best space and astronomy Google Doodles

    The best space and astronomy Google Doodles

    Anyone who has ever performed an internet search will most likely have encountered the phenomenon of the Google Doodle, a graphic or sometimes an animation at the top of the Google search page. These thought-provoking and often amusing illustrations celebrate anniversaries, events and individuals, among them a fair selection of astronomers, space missions, and astronomical…

  • 15 things kids should know about space travel

    15 things kids should know about space travel

    Neil Armstrong was the first man on the Moon — but only a few pictures from the crew’s cameras show him on his historic moonwalk. In one of them (above), he is visible as a reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s helmet. Credit: NASA Professional and amateur astronomers alike love to share facts about our amazing universe:…

  • Supermassive black hole roars to life before astronomers’ eyes in world-1st observations

    Supermassive black hole roars to life before astronomers’ eyes in world-1st observations

    For the first time ever, astronomers have witnessed the black hole at the center of a galaxy roaring to life in real time — and they’re not sure why it happened.  The awakening of the cosmic monster, which is a million times the mass of our sun and located 300 million light-years away inside the…