NASA's NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another—definitely a comet—might be seen with binoculars ...
Space Exploration
Dec 29, 2016
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405
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is the highest-ranked recommendation for a large space mission in the NRC 2010 decadal survey, New Worlds, New Horizons (NWNH) in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The WFIRST coronagraph ...
Astronomy
Nov 15, 2016
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13
Supermassive black holes, with their immense gravitational pull, are notoriously good at clearing out their immediate surroundings by eating nearby objects. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole, the ...
Astronomy
Sep 15, 2016
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Astronomers studying distant galaxies powered by monster black holes have uncovered an unexpected link between two very different wavelengths of the light they emit, the mid-infrared and gamma rays. The discovery, which was ...
Astronomy
Aug 24, 2016
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116
Alone on the cosmic road, far from any known celestial object, a young, independent star is going through a tremendous growth spurt.
Astronomy
Jul 27, 2016
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Two volunteer participants in an international citizen science project have had a rare galaxy cluster that they found named after them.
Astronomy
Jun 13, 2016
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417
In 2011, astronomers announced that our galaxy is likely teeming with free-floating planets. In fact, these lonely worlds, which sit quietly in the darkness of space without any companion planets or even a host sun, might ...
Astronomy
Apr 20, 2016
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A team of astronomers from Carnegie and the University of Western Ontario has discovered one of the youngest and brightest free-floating, planet-like objects within relatively close proximity to the Sun. The paper reporting ...
Astronomy
Apr 6, 2016
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333
NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013. ...
Space Exploration
Apr 6, 2016
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27
Using a set of coadded images taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and the University of Toronto in Canada, have provided new insights ...
