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4 of the weirdest objects in space
An image of the area surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, in X-ray and infrared light. X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al.; IR: NASA/STScI The universe is filled with bizarre objects. Then again, Earth is all we know. So what may seem wild and exotic to us is…
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Using the world’s three most powerful particle accelerators to reveal the space-time geometry of quark matter
A montage of reconstructed tracks from actual collision events and photographs of the respective detectors, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and at CERN. Credit: Montage made by Máté Csanád / Eötvös Loránd University. Original photos for the montage: STAR és PHENIX: Brookhaven National Laboratory and CMS és NA61: CERN Physicists from the Eötvös Loránd University…
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Scientists chart the stories of young stars — from being born to moving out
Scientists are building a better account of the lives of adolescent stars, starting from their births in collapsing clouds of cosmic gas and dust to the time they “fly the nest” and drift away from other young stars in their original clusters. Studying these stellar timelines will help scientists better determine the ages of stars…
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Redefining Astronomy With Tech: Investigating the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster – Innovation & Tech Today
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…
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Starring Role
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…
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Next-generation space telescopes could use deformable mirrors to image Earth-sized worlds
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…
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Amateur Astronomers Discover an Asteroid’s Moon
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…
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Amateur Astronomers Discover an Asteroid’s Moon
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…
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Spacelab 1: A Model for International Cooperation
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…
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Alien haze, cooked in a lab, clears view to distant water worlds
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…