Space

Spitzer Telescope First To Crack Open Light Of Faraway Worlds

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward bei ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 22 2007 - 1:11pm

The Celestial Whirligig

Comet McNaught, the Great Comet of 2007, has been delighting those who have seen it with the unaided eye as a spectacular display in the evening sky. Pushing ESO's New Technology Telescope to its limits, a team of European astronomers have obtained t ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 24 2007 - 9:53pm

Milky Way Black Hole May Be A Colossal 'particle Accelerator'

Scientists were startled when they discovered in 2004 that the center of our galaxy is emitting gamma rays with energies in the tens of trillions of electronvolts. Now astrophysicists at The University of Arizona, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Un ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2007 - 2:17pm

Chandra Examines Jupiter During New Horizons Approach

On February 28, 2007, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its ultimate journey to Pluto. This flyby gave scientists a unique opportunity to study Jupiter using the package of instruments available on New Horizons, w ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 1 2007 - 12:08pm

Rosetta Delivers Phobos Transit Animation And 'sees' Mars In Stereo

During Rosetta's recent Mars swingby, the OSIRIS cameras captured a series of images of Mars and of Phobos transiting Mars' disk. The OSIRIS team have produced a cool animated sequence and a 3D view of the Red Planet. The animated sequences (one ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 1 2007 - 10:51pm

Hubble Sees 'Comet Galaxy' Being Ripped Apart By Galaxy Cluster

There are many galaxies of different shapes and sizes around us today. Roughly half are gas-poor elliptical-shaped galaxies with little new star formation activity, and half are gas-rich spiral and irregular galaxies with high star formation activity. Obs ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 2 2007 - 12:16pm

Earth From Space: Larsen-B Ice Shelf On Thin Ice

The changing Larsen-B Ice Shelf captured by Envisat on 22 February 2007 with its Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). The Larsen Ice Shelf is a series of three shelves – A (the smallest), B and C (the largest) – that extend from north to south along ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 2 2007 - 1:05pm

The First 3-D Map Of The Universe

By analyzing the COSMOS field, the largest field of galaxies ever observed with the Hubble space telescope, an international team of scientists led by researchers from the California Institute of Technology (United States) and researchers from the associa ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 3 2007 - 10:20am

Lunar Eclipse

Tonight there will be a total lunar eclipse. The partial eclipse will begin at 21:30:04 UT and end  3½ hours later at 01:11:46 UT. The total eclipse lasts for about one hour; it begins at 22:43:49 UT and ends at 23:58:01 UT. The moment of greatest eclipse ...

Article - Anonymous - Mar 7 2007 - 1:12pm

Hubble Pans Across Heavens To Harvest 50,000 Evolving Galaxies

Several hundred images taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have been woven together into a rich tapestry of at least 50,000 galaxies. The Hubble view is yielding new clues about the universe's youth, from its "pre-teen" years to y ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 6 2007 - 10:29pm