Image: 'Enterprise' nebulae seen by Spitzer

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the TV series "Star Trek," which first aired September 8th,1966, a new infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope may remind fans of the historic show.

The Cosmic Distance Scale

(PhysOrg.com) -- In 1908, Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered that a class of stars called Cepheids have brightnesses that vary regularly with periods that are directly related to their intrinsic luminosities.

Image: Galactic wheel of life shines in infrared

It might look like a spoked wheel or even a "Chakram" weapon wielded by warriors like "Xena," from the fictional TV show, but this ringed galaxy is actually a vast place of stellar life. A newly released image from NASA's ...

TRAPPIST-1 is older than our solar system

If we want to know more about whether life could survive on a planet outside our solar system, it's important to know the age of its star. Young stars have frequent releases of high-energy radiation called flares that can ...

The dwarf planet Orcus

Since the early 2000s, more and more objects have been discovered in the outer solar system that resemble planets. However, until they are officially classified, the terms Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) and Trans-Neptunian Object ...

Astronomers measure wind speed on a brown dwarf

Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf—an object intermediate in mass ...

Most distant massive galaxy cluster identified

The early universe was a chaotic mess of gas and matter that only began to coalesce into distinct galaxies hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. It would take several billion more years for such galaxies to assemble ...

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