Credit: Sam O’Keefe/University of Missouri A team of international scientists, led by the University of Missouri’s Dr. Haojing Yan, used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to uncover 14 new transient objects within the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, 4.3 billion light years away. These transients, which appear as flickering lights in space, were recognized through…

It was an unusual sight in the College of Southern Nevada’s North Las Vegas campus parking lot. People gathered outside one warm October morning, the air buzzing with anticipation. The bustle revolved around the Dale Etheridge Planetarium, in the south wing of the campus, where an annular solar eclipse event brought hundreds of visitors during…

The Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph during assembly of the static optics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: Dr. Eduardo Bendek Observing distant objects is no easy task, thanks to our planet’s thick and fluffy atmosphere. As light passes through the upper reaches of our atmosphere, it is refracted and distorted, making it much harder to…

Asteroids often have moons, though we’ve only recently begun to record them en masse. This image shows the moonrise of a satellite emerging from behind asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh, as imaged by NASA’s Lucy mission.NASA / Goddard / SwRI / Johns Hopkins APL / NOIRLab When the small main-belt asteroid 5457 Queen’s was moving to eclipse…

Asteroids often have moons, though we’ve only recently begun to record them en masse. This image shows the moonrise of a satellite emerging from behind asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh, as imaged by NASA’s Lucy mission.NASA / Goddard / SwRI / Johns Hopkins APL / NOIRLab When the small main-belt asteroid 5457 Queen’s was moving to eclipse…

Forty years ago, in 1983, the Space Shuttle Columbia flew its first international spaceflight, STS-9. The mission included—for the first time—the European Space Agency’s Spacelab pressurized module and featured more than 70 experiments from American, Canadian, European, and Japanese scientists. Europeans were particularly proud of this “remarkable step” because “NASA, the most famous space agency…

An illustration of two water-rich exoplanets with hazy atmospheres. Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/Johns Hopkins University Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles observations by ground and space telescopes. The research offers new tools to study the atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets and…

On November 17, 2023, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing its internal system integration review, clearing the mission to start integrating the four observatories. Three of the four PUNCH spacecraft will include SwRI-developed Wide Field Imagers (pictured) optimized to image the solar wind. The dark baffles…

This image is from a simulation of two merging black holes. The upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory should be able to detect binary black holes before they merge. But the vexing problem of false positives needs a solution. Credit: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project When galaxies merge, we expect them to produce binary black holes (BBHs.)…

A new musical piece is based on this composite image of the center of the Milky Way. The bright spot on the right is hot gas in infrared light, marking the approximate location of the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. X-ray: NASA / CXC / SAO; Optical: NASA / STScI; IR: Spitzer NASA / JPL-Caltech The…