A new NASA spacecraft called Pandora is awaiting launch ahead of its journey to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, and their stars. Along for the ride are two shoebox-sized satellites called BlackCAT (Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope) and SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat), as NASA innovates with ambitious science […]
After combing through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s archive of sweeping extragalactic cosmic fields, a small team of astronomers at the University of Missouri says they have identified a sample of galaxies that have a previously unseen combination of features. Principal investigator Haojing Yan compares the discovery to an infamous oddball in another branch of […]
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted two rare kinds of dust in the dwarf galaxy Sextans A, one of the most chemically primitive galaxies near the Milky Way. The finding of metallic iron dust and silicon carbide (SiC) produced by aging stars, along with tiny clumps of carbon-based molecules, shows that even […]
By Michael Allen For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer) to study a white dwarf star. Using IXPE’s unique X-ray polarization capability, astronomers examined a star called the intermediate polar EX Hydrae, unlocking the geometry of energetic binary systems. In 2024, IXPE spent nearly one week focused on EX Hydrae, a […]
Using new observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, astronomers tracked the influence of a recently discovered companion star, Siwarha, on the gas around Betelgeuse. The research, from scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), reveals a trail of dense gas swirling through Betelgeuse’s vast, extended atmosphere, shedding light […]
A team using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object — a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud considered a “relic” or remnant of early galaxy formation. Nicknamed “Cloud-9,” this is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the universe — a finding that furthers the understanding of galaxy formation, […]
Celebrate the New Year with the “Champagne Cluster,” a galaxy cluster seen in this new image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes. Astronomers discovered this galaxy cluster Dec. 31, 2020. The date, combined with the bubble-like appearance of the galaxies and the superheated gas seen with Chandra observations (represented in purple), inspired the […]