Focus: Space Channel Featured Story TOP

• share
• favorite_border

The Cartwheel Galaxy, a rare ring galaxy once shrouded in dust and mystery, has been unveiled by the imaging capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s high-precision instruments resolved individual stars and star-forming regions within the Cartwheel, and revealed the behavior of the black hole within its galactic center. These new details provide a renewed understanding of a galaxy in the midst of a slow transformation.

• share
• favorite_border

President Biden unveiled the image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, during a White House event on Monday, July 11. NASA and its partners will release a series of Webb's first full-color images and data, known as spectra, Tuesday, July 12th during a live NASA TV broadcast.

• share
• favorite_border

How often do stars live alone? For brown dwarfs — objects that straddle the boundary between the most massive planets and the smallest stars — astronomers need to uncover more examples of their companions to find out. Ace citizen scientist Frank Kiwy has done just that by using the Astro Data Lab science platform at NSF’s NOIRLab to discover 34 new ultracool dwarf binary systems in the Sun's neighborhood, nearly doubling the number of such systems known.

• share
• favorite_border

Nearly half of Sun-size stars are binary. According to University of Copenhagen research, planetary systems around binary stars may be very different from those around single stars. This points to new targets in the search for extraterrestrial life forms.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers led by physics professor Charles Gammie is part of a large international collaboration that unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

• share
• favorite_border

At simultaneous press conferences around the world, including at a National Science Foundation-sponsored press conference at the US National Press Club in Washington, D.C., astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes.

• share
• favorite_border

Astronomers using Hubble have found a companion star previously hidden in the glare of its partner’s supernova.

• share
• favorite_border

Europa is a prime candidate for life in our solar system, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades. But it’s enclosed by an icy shell that could be miles to tens of miles thick, making sampling it a daunting prospect. Now, increasing evidence reveals the ice shell may be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system – and site of potential habitability in its own right.

• share
• favorite_border

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang—the farthest individual star ever seen to date. The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2.

• share
• favorite_border

Astronomers using Hubble and Keck have identified two different cases of "mini-Neptune" planets that are losing their puffy atmospheres and likely transforming into super-Earths.

• share
• favorite_border

To understand galaxies, you have to understand how stars form. Over 100 researchers from around the world have collaborated to bring together observations of nearby spiral galaxies taken with the world’s most powerful radio, visible, and ultraviolet telescopes – and will soon add a full suite of high-resolution infrared images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. With this groundbreaking data set, astronomers will be able to study stars as they start to form within dark, dusty gas clouds, untangle when those infant stars blow away that gas and dust, and identify more mature stars that are puffing off layers of gas and dust – all for the first time in a diverse set of spiral galaxies.

• share
• favorite_border

An instrument made by scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics has helped verify that — for the first time in history — a spacecraft has entered the corona of the Sun.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists computationally simulated more than 200,000 hypothetical Earth-like worlds all in orbit of stars like our sun, and found that about 90% of these potentially habitable hypothetical worlds lacked partial surface ice like polar caps. When partial ice is present, ice belts — permanent surface ice along the equator — were more common than ice caps.

• share
• favorite_border

Hubble delivered a ringside seat to a supernova in the very earliest stage of exploding, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of the first moments of a star’s spectacular death.

• share
• favorite_border

Hubble Space Telescope observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa have revealed the presence of persistent water vapor — but mysteriously, only in one hemisphere.

• share
• favorite_border

A new Cornell study finds that next-generation telescopes used to see exoplanets could confuse Earth-like planets with other types of planets in the same solar system.

• share
• favorite_border

The innermost lane may typically be favored to win a race, but in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the winds in its outermost “lane” are taking the lead! Only Hubble can spot these trends: The observatory acts like a storm tracker for the giant planets in our solar system every year.

• share
• favorite_border

In this image, a remote galaxy is greatly magnified and distorted by the effects of gravitationally warped space. After its public release, astronomers used the picture to measure the galaxy's distance of 9.4 billion light-years. This places the galaxy at the peak epoch of star formation in cosmic evolution.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers measured the potassium isotope compositions of Martian meteorites in order to estimate the presence, distribution and abundance of volatile elements and compounds, including water, on Mars, finding that Mars has lost more potassium than Earth but retained more potassium than the Moon or the asteroid 4-Vesta; the results suggest that rocky planets with larger mass retain more volatile elements during planetary formation and that Mars and Mars-sized exoplanets fall below a size threshold necessary to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics.