Rocket team to discern if our star count should go way up

The universe contains a mind-boggling number of stars—but scientists' best estimates may be an undercount. A NASA-funded sounding rocket is launching with an improved instrument to look for evidence of extra stars that ...

Image: Hubble sweeps a messy star factory

This sprinkle of cosmic glitter is a blue compact dwarf galaxy known as Markarian 209. Galaxies of this type are blue-hued, compact in size, gas-rich, and low in heavy elements. They are often used by astronomers to study ...

Gaia spies two temporarily magnified stars

While scanning the sky to measure the position of over one billion stars in our Galaxy, ESA's Gaia satellite has detected two rare instances of stars whose light was temporarily boosted by other celestial objects passing ...

The cosmic infrared background

(Phys.org) -- The cosmic infrared background is the collective infrared radiation emitted by cosmic sources throughout the history of the universe, including sources inaccessible to current telescopes. The latter category, ...

SOFIA points telescope toward Pluto occultation

The Stratosphere Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft that makes celestial observations with its German-built 100-inch telescope. The telescope is enhanced to collect infrared radiation, ...

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