First came a rare solar eclipse, followed by the northern lights, fueled by a solar storm. The next celestial phenomenon will come next month, when skygazers can look forward to an alignment known as a "planetary parade."
Space Exploration
May 23, 2024
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When we look out to the stars, it is typically not a yearning for the distant depths of outer space that drives us. When we are looking out there, we are truly looking back at ourselves. We try to understand our place in ...
Planetary Sciences
Mar 16, 2024
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This densely populated group of stars is the globular cluster NGC 1841, which is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way galaxy that lies about 162,000 light-years away. Satellite galaxies ...
Astronomy
Mar 1, 2024
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Peering deep into the infancy of the universe, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently confirmed the discovery of the brightest and fastest growing quasar. Quasars are luminous objects in the ...
Astronomy
Feb 28, 2024
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A new study published in Nature Astronomy describes the most luminous object ever observed by astronomers. It is a black hole with a mass of 17 billion Suns, swallowing a greater amount of mass than the sun every single day.
Astronomy
Feb 25, 2024
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Our ancestors could look up and see the Milky Way—our galaxy—as a large band of white light stretching across the sky. Because of light pollution, that's no longer the case. One study estimated that 60% of Europeans and ...
Environment
Feb 21, 2024
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Scientists have now reported evidence of the true conditions in Hell, perhaps because no one has ever returned to tell the tale. Hell has been imagined as a supremely uncomfortable place, hot and hostile to bodily forms of ...
Astronomy
Feb 20, 2024
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Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances—in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to orbit their suns have no ...
Planetary Sciences
Feb 3, 2024
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It's easy to get swept up in the swirling starry arms of this intermediate spiral galaxy, NGC 4654, in the constellation Virgo. The galaxy has a bright center and is labeled "intermediate" because it has characteristics of ...
Astronomy
Oct 3, 2023
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The European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope (ESO's ELT) is a revolutionary ground-based telescope that will have a 39-meter main mirror and will be the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared ...
Astronomy
Jul 13, 2023
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