Astronomy

Astronomy

Gauging Star Birth: Spacecraft uses gamma rays as stellar tracer

Using radioactive material spewed into space by dying stars, astronomers have measured the star-formation rate in our galaxy over the past few million years.

Astronomy

A puny way to make planets

Brown dwarfs are failures in the star-making business, but new observations reveal that they may still succeed in growing planets.

Astronomy

Cosmic Expansion: Supernovas shed light on dark energy

A new study of light from supernovas provides additional hints that dark energy, the mysterious entity revving up the expansion of the universe, might be distributed uniformly throughout space and time.

Astronomy

Dark shadows

New radio telescope images of the center of the Milky Way make an even more compelling case that a supermassive black hole resides there.

Astronomy

Ring around the galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the largest number ever of elliptical galaxies with Einstein rings, a marker of gravitational lensing.

Astronomy

Images of a fiery youth

A faint, infrared glow captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope might be light from the universe's first stars.

Astronomy

Infrared telescope spies mountains of star creation

Viewing a star-making region in the infrared, the Spitzer Space Telescope has captured mountains of gas and dust being eroded by winds and radiation from a massive star, triggering waves of star birth.

Astronomy

Moon Zoom

Imagine riding a magic carpet around the moon and being able to zoom down to any point or appear magically at any location. NASA has developed software that allows you to interactively browse three-dimensional images of the moon, based on data obtained by the Clementine spacecraft. These Web pages provide information about downloading the software, […]

Astronomy

Spooky Sounds of Saturn

For Hallowe’en, tune in to eerie, bizarre sounds from the Saturnian system. These NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Web pages provide sound files based on magnetometer data from Cassini spacecraft observations of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, radar echoes from Titan’s surface, Saturn’s radio emissions, and more. Go to: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/sounds/

Astronomy

Crisis in the Cosmos?

Baby galaxies that hail from the early history of the cosmos but are full of old stars and are nearly as massive as the Milky Way is today may challenge the standard theory of galaxy formation.

Astronomy

Cosmic Ray Font: Supernova remnants rev up ions

High-resolution X-ray images of the Tycho supernova remnant offer new evidence that supernova shock waves generate most cosmic rays that bombard Earth.

Astronomy

Keeping Hubble from being hobbled

NASA late last month shut down one of the aging Hubble Space Telescope's three gyros in an effort to extend its life.