We Are StarStuff
Quasars, the brightest objects in the cosmos, could act as cosmic signposts, directing astronomers to elusive pairs of supermassive black holes.Though scientists are aware that supermassive black holes with masses of millions or even billions of times that of...
A knotty tail | Astronomy Magazine false product a-knotty-tail https://www.astronomy.com/picture-of-the-day/photo/a-knotty-tail/ A knotty tail | Astronomy Magazine Chris Schur from Payson, Arizona Comet 13P/Olbers reached perihelion (its closest approach to the...
Anytime astronomers talk of mapping the Milky Way I am always reminded how tricky the study of the Universe can be. After all, we live inside the Milky Way and working out what it looks like or mapping it from the inside is not the easiest of missions. It’s one...
On Saturday 29 June, thousands of visitors made their way to ESA’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT), as part of the very first ESA open day to be held in the UK. ECSAT is located at the Harwell Science and Innovation...
The space environment is harsh and full of extreme radiation. Scientists designing spacecraft and satellites need materials that can withstand these conditions.In a paper published in January 2024, my team of materials researchers demonstrated that a...
Friday, July 5Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not perfectly circular, such that our planet sits marginally farther from the Sun in July and closer to it in January. Today, Earth reaches aphelion, that farthest point from the Sun, at 1 A.M. EDT. At that time, we...
It looks like a distant ring with three sparkly jewels, but the Webb telescope’s (JWST) most recent image is really the view of a distant quasar lensed by a nearby elliptical galaxy. The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) looked at the faint apparition...
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured a rare, cloud-free image over the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira in the North Atlantic Ocean.Zoom in to explore this image at its full 10 m resolution or click on the circles to learn more.Lying off the northwest...
We won't have to wait much longer to see the most powerful rocket ever built take to the skies again, if all goes according to plan.That rocket, SpaceX's 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship, has flown four test flights to date. And number five should be just...
The summer Milky Way was photographed from a hilltop over the Modoc Plateau in California using ten 3-minute exposures and a Sigma Art 14mm lens. All photos were taken with a Nikon D750 DSLR, pre-processed in Adobe Bridge, and post-processed in Adobe Photoshop....