Astronomy

Southwest Research Institute’s novel Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) instrument aboard NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft has successfully collected first-light data. IMAP launched in September to help researchers better understand the […]

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean Andes is one of the most powerful radio telescope facilities in the world. Researchers use it to study dark and distant regions of the universe in […]

After nearly 20 years on the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has snapped its 100,000th image of the surface with its HiRISE camera. Short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, HiRISE is the […]

Among the more puzzling cosmic phenomena discovered over the past few decades are brief and very bright flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that gradually fade away, leaving behind faint X-ray and radio emissions. With […]

When the most massive stars reach the ends of their lives, they blow up in spectacular supernova explosions, which seed the universe with heavy elements such as carbon and iron. Another type of explosion—the kilonova—occurs […]

After less than a year in orbit, the Southwest Research Institute-built PUNCH spacecraft have made major accomplishments, imaging the sun in context while tracking comets and enormous space weather events as they traveled through the […]

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have observed a rare type of exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, whose atmospheric composition challenges our understanding of how it formed.This post was originally published on […]

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the most unmistakable evidence yet that the powerful jets launched by newborn stars reliably record a star’s most violent growth episodes, confirming a long-standing model of how these […]

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere report the discovery of a new brown dwarf about 60 times more massive than Jupiter. The newfound substellar object, designated TOI-7019 b, is a brown […]

Our universe is filled with galaxies, in all directions as far as our instruments can see. Some researchers estimate that there are as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. At first glance, […]