Astronomy

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope’s new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a [...]

Scientists have found evidence that another object has bombarded Jupiter, exactly 15 years after the first impacts by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 — a comet that had been seen to break into many pieces before the pieces hit Jupiter in 1994. First discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on July 19, the Pacific Ocean-sized [...]

The longest total solar eclipse during the 21st century, not to be surpassed until June 2132 has took place on 22 July 2009. It lasted a maximum of 6 minutes and 39 seconds off the coast of Southeast Asia,causing tourist interest in eastern China, Japan, India and Nepal. This was the second in the series [...]

Venus is the sixth largest planet. Its orbit is almost circular and varies only 1%. It has the most perfect orbit of all of the planets. It is the second planet from the sun. Also, Venus’ rotation is the slowest of all planets. It takes 243 Earth days for it to rotate. The center of [...]

A report published in the scientific journal Nature of results from the Cassini probe indicates the discovery of the existence of liquid water on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and with it the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Analysis of ice particles once thought to be emitted by geysers from the moon revealed the presence of sodium salt in [...]

When the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis released the Hubble Space Telescope to return to orbit, concluding the final astronaut mission to upgrade and repair Hubble, astronomy fans around the world rejoiced. Hubble, renewed and equipped with new cameras, would now return to its work of revealing the universe. But after the furor and high-profile [...]

Hubble Space Telescope has been launched by the shuttle Discovery in 1990. It released into an orbit 304 nautical miles above the Earth. Since then it’s circled Earth more than 97,000 times and provided more than 4,000 astronomers access to the stars not possible from inside Earth’s atmosphere. Hubble has helped answer some of science’s [...]

Over the past 19 years Hubble has taken dozens of exotic pictures of galaxies going “bump in the night” as they collide with each other and have a variety of close encounters of the galactic kind. Just when you thought these interactions couldn’t look any stranger, this image of a trio of galaxies, called Arp [...]

The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all. Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and [...]

NASA recently publish first images (or “first lights”, as astronomer says) taken from Kepler spacecraft. It is the mission specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars [...]