Group items tagged

Morocco in 2011, and report that it is a new type of Mars rock with an unusually high water content.[8][9][10] American researchers state that a gene associated with active personality traits is also linked to

Astronomers affiliated with the Kepler space observatory announce the discovery of KOI-172.02, an Earth-like exoplanet candidate which orbits a star similar to the Sun in the habitable zone

13 January – Massachusetts doctors invent a pill-sized medical scanner that can be safely swallowed by patients, allowing the esophagus to be more easily scanned for disease

Hubble Space Telescope

In 1990, the $2.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in space from the Space Shuttle Discovery into an orbit 381 miles above Earth. It was the first major orbiting observatory, named in honour of American astronomer, Edwin Powell Hubble. It was seven years behind schedule and nearly $2 billion over budget. In orbit, the 94.5-in primary mirror was found to be flawed, giving blurred images and reduced ability to see distant stars. However, correcting optics were successfully installed in 25 Dec 1993. The telescope 43-ft x 14-ft telescope now provides images with a clarity otherwise impossible due to the effect of the earth's atmosphere. Instrument packages capture across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Tiny telescopes in Arizona and South Africa have spotted a Saturn-like planet in orbit around a star about 700 light-years from Earth.

the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) and other ground-based tools spied the alien planet as it passed in front of its star

KELT-6b, can be seen from the surface of Earth for five hours as it transits

gap in the cloud? That could be a planet being born some 176 light-years away from Earth

small planet, only 6 to 28 times Earth’s mass.

This alien world, if we can confirm it, shouldn’t be there according to conventional planet-forming theory

A comet that shines as brightly as the stars of the Big Dipper could be heading our way in March

the Comet Pan-STARRS is expected to whiz by about 100 million miles from Earth, skimming the orbit of Mercury, early next month.

could fail to put on a dazzling show if it falls apart under the intense heat and gravitational pull of its plunge toward the sun

image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's face on June 5-6.

Hubble Space Telescope

Hubble cannot look at the sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth's moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet’s atmospheric makeup.

A jackpot of previously unknown black holes across the universe has been discovered by the infrared eyes of a prolific NASA sky-mapping telescope

astronomers are still poring through this celestrial trove for discoveries.

These black holes aren't the average tiny, dense objects created by the collapse of dead stars, but rather humongous "supermassive" black holes that have been caught feasting on matter falling into them

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our solar system that is smaller than our home planet. 

strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very near planet

new-planet candidate was found unexpectedly

new partnership between the European Space Agency and the Faulkes Telescope Project, which will encourage amateur astronomers to look for asteroids

providing educational opportunities that will allow students to discover potentially dangerous space rocks, too.

ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program is part of an international effort to be on the lookout for space hazards – not only asteroids but disruptive space weather and space debris objects in Earth orbit

Black holes powering distant quasars in the early Universe grazed on patches of gas or passing galaxies rather than glutting themselves in dramatic collisions according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes

A black hole doesn’t need much gas to satisfy its hunger and turn into a quasar

Quasars are distant and brilliant galactic powerhouses. These far-off objects are powered by black holes that glut themselves on captured material; this in turn heats the matter to millions of degrees making it super luminous

combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team

has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever detected.

Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old

The world’s newest and most powerful exoplanet imaging instrument

has captured its first-light infrared image of an exoplanet

which orbits

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet

known as Kepler-7b

Previous studies from Spitzer have resulted in temperature maps of planets orbiting other stars

An international team of astronomers

has discovered the most distantly orbiting planet found to date around a single, sun-like star

11 times Jupiter's mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has

spotted water vapor above the moon's frigid south polar region, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface

Scientists had previously detected evidence of an ocean under Europa's icy crust

A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind—as frosty as Earth's North Pole—has been discovered

Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun

Brown dwarfs start their lives like stars, as collapsing balls of gas, but they lack the mass to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight

On October 23, 2013,  astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey picked up a very faint asteroid with an unusual orbit more like a that of a comet than an asteroid

 At the time 2013 UQ4 was little  more than a stellar point with no evidence of a hazy coma or tail that would tag it as a comet

On May 7,

there’s still a year and a half’s worth of data in the pipeline that scientists will analyze to identify other candidate planets, and there will continue to be Kepler science discoveries for quite some time

There are two possible ways to salvage the spacecraft

they could try turning back on the reaction wheel that they shut off a year ago. It was putting metal on metal, and the friction was interfering with its operation