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JWST helps spot smallest free-floating brown dwarf
An image of star cluster IC 348, captured by Webb’s NIRCam. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and K. Luhman (Penn State University) and C. Alves de Oliveira (European Space Agency) “One basic question you’ll find in every astronomy textbook is: What are the smallest stars [to exist in the universe]? That’s what we’re trying to…
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13 Things Space Tourists Should Know Before Traveling to Space, According to Astronauts
For most of human spaceflight history, those lucky enough to reach the stars were professional astronauts hired and trained by government agencies around the world. But since the early 2000s, when seven intrepid travelers paid millions to spend a few days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), space tourism has begun to take off. We’re…
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Live Updates: SpaceX Prepares to Launch Third Starship Flight
March 14, 2024, 9:15 a.m. ET Editing spaceflight news Starship on the launch tower, as a pair of jet planes pass by.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images For its third test flight, Starship aims to fly part of the way around the Earth, starting from SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica Village, Texas, and splashing…
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Dark Energy Camera captures record-breaking image of a dead star’s scattered remains
This billowing mass of dust filaments and gas tendrils stretching across 100 light-years of space like delicate lace is the Vela supernova remnant — scattered ashes of a star that exploded about 11,000 years ago. The image was acquired by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-Meter Telescope…
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Scientists find black hole spaghettifying star remarkably close to Earth
Astronomers have spotted the closest visible-light example yet of a supermassive black hole ripping apart and devouring a star. This star’s gory death can be blamed on a black hole with a mass equal to around one million suns; the event occurred in the active star-birthing galaxy NGC 3799, which is located about 160 million…
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Deep-space astronomy sensor peers into the heart of an atom
Scientists have taken an instrument originally designed to study huge celestial objects in the cosmos and repurposed it to investigate the world on an infinitely smaller scale. With this instrument, they managed to probe the heart of the atom. The team wanted to understand quantum-scale changes that occur within unstable atoms, and realized there’s a…
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Space One Rocket Explodes Seconds After Launch in Japan
The Japanese company hoped to become the country’s first private business to put a satellite into orbit. The failed launch was its inaugural flight. A plume of smoke rose over the launch site as the surrounding area caught fire.Kyodo, via Reuters The first rocket launched by the Japanese start-up Space One exploded seconds after takeoff…
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Best laptops for astronomers 2024: Link up telescopes and edit astrophotographs
Best laptops 2024: Jump Menu Whether you’re running cutting-edge astronomy software or the best photo editing apps like Adobe Photoshop, we’re here to help. The best laptop shouldn’t just look good but must run the most graphically intensive workloads without a hitch. They should also have a stunning, expansive display with accurate colors. Indeed, there…
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Why astronomers are worried about 2 major telescopes right now
There’s a bit of tension right now in the U.S. astronomy community and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it has to do with telescopes — extremely large telescopes, in fact. Here’s what’s going on. The National Science Foundation (NSF), a source of public funding that two powerful next-gen observatories have been banking on for financial support, is facing…
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The next chapter of lunar exploration could forever change the moon — and our relationship to it (op-ed)
Aparna Venkatesan is an astronomer and dark-sky advocate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of San Francisco. John Barentine is an astronomer, historian, author, science communicator, and founder of Dark Sky Consulting, LLC. For as long as there have been humans, the moon has been a calendar, ancestor, ritual, inspiration, and origin…