With its sensitive infrared cameras and high-resolution spectrometer, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing new secrets about Jupiter’s Galilean satellites, in particular Ganymede, the largest moon, and Io,…
Category: Space
Water Discovered in Rocky Planet-Forming Zone Offers Clues on Habitability
James Webb Space Telescope observations find water for the first time in the inner disk around a young star with giant planets. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the MPIA-led…
Webb Snaps Highly Detailed Infrared Image of Actively Forming Stars
Young stars are rambunctious! NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the “antics” of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. To…
European wind-mapping satellite returned safely to Earth
Credit: ESA A European wind-mapping satellite has returned successfully to Earth following a delicate assisted return designed to minimize damage from flying debris, the European Space Agency said on Saturday.…
Two supermoons in August mean double the stargazing fun
A commercial airliner flies Northwest across Lake Michigan in front of the “Full Buck” supermoon, the first of four supermoons in 2023, July 3, 2023, in Chicago. The cosmos is…
Why Does Matter Exist? Roundness of Electrons May Hold Clues
JILA physicists make record-breaking measurement of a key electron property, related to the possible existence of all matter. In the first moments of our universe, countless numbers of protons, neutrons…
In Search of Other Worlds: How Exoplanets Form and Evolve
Assistant Professor Marta Bryan is studying the properties of exoplanets to better understand how our planet and species fit into the larger universe. It wasn’t that long ago that astronomers…
Astronomers shed new light on formation of mysterious fast radio bursts
The Chinese Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Credit: Bojun Wang, Jinchen Jiang & Qisheng Cui More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic…
Need to image an asteroid close up? There’s an AMIGO for that
Artist’s depiction of a fully inflated AMIGO. Credit: Schwatz et al. There are so many asteroids. Just in our own backyard, we’ve found over 30,000 Near Earth asteroids. Exploring them…
A gamma ray burst lasted so long it triggered a satellite twice
An artist’s depiction of a gamma-ray burst’s relativistic jet full of very-high-energy photons breaking out of a collapsing star. Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the…
