With so much happening overhead and beyond, where can one turn for the latest information? You can start your own website and compile all of the discoveries, theories, research and other things that interest you. Well back in 1999, that is exactly what Fraser Cain did. Cain is the founder, curator, editor, now podcaster and…

What can young exoplanets teach us about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of researchers have made a first-time discovery of the youngest exoplanet, TIDYE-1b, which is estimated to be only 3 million years old. For comparison, scientists estimate that it…

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft as it approaches the International Space Station (ISS) on June 6. Credit: NASA In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing may shed its space business to focus on commercial aircraft and defense systems. This could be due in part to this summer’s test flight of its Starliner crew transport to…

Downsizing: about 325 people, representing roughly 5% of the lab’s employees, will be affected by the cuts (courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has announced another round of staff layoffs. The move, which began in mid-November, involves about 325 people, representing 5% of the lab’s employees. It follows layoffs in February of about 530…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…