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Explanation: The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond. Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies this 5 million year old star cluster NGC 602. Surrounded by its birth shell of gas and dust, star cluster NGC 602 is featured in this stunning Hubble image, augmented in a rollover by images in the X-ray by the Chandra Observatory and in the infrared by Spitzer Telescope. Fantastic ridges and swept back gas strongly suggest that energetic radiation and shock waves from NGC 602's massive...

The position of a newly found dwarf galaxy (Virgo III) in the constellation Virgo (left) and its member stars (right; those circled in white). The member stars are concentrated inside the dashed line in the right panel NAOJ/Tohoku University ================================================================== For years, astronomers have worried about how to explain why the Milky Way has fewer satellite galaxies than the standard dark matter model predicts. This is called the “missing satellites problem.” In order to bring us closer to solving this problem, an international team of researchers used data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) to discover two...

NASA says that the astronauts sent to the International Space Station aboard Boeing's malfunctioning Starliner spacecraft are "not stranded in space." However, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams may be staying in orbit for a very long time. "Not stranded" is one of those phrases that can be stretched to cover a lot of situations. You can take the car to the local supermarket and if it breaks down, you aren't stranded because you can walk home in 15 minutes. On the other hand, if you're on a cross-country trip and throw a piston rod in some backwater mountain town, you...

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope released images of the Pillars of Creation — stunning effervescent clouds of interstellar dust and gas, the place where stars are born. Now, combining data from Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA has released a gorgeous 3D visualization of the cosmic structures in both visible and infrared light... For example, at the top of the central pillar, viewers can see an embedded infant protostar, which is bright red when seen in infrared light. Close to the top of the left pillar is a diagonal jet of material being ejected from a newborn...

Explanation: About 12 seconds into this video, something unusual happens. The Earth begins to rise. Never seen by humans before, the rise of the Earth over the limb of the Moon occurred about 55.5 years ago and surprised and amazed the crew of Apollo 8. The crew immediately scrambled to take still images of the stunning vista caused by Apollo 8's orbit around the Moon. The featured video is a modern reconstruction of the event as it would have looked were it recorded with a modern movie camera. The colorful orb of our Earth stood out as a familiar icon...

...The heart of our planet has been spinning unusually slowly for the past 14 years, new research confirms. And if this mysterious trend continues, it could potentially lengthen Earth's days — though the effects would likely be imperceptible to us.Earth's inner core is a roughly moon-size chunk of solid iron and nickel that lies more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) below our feet. It is surrounded by the outer core — a superhot layer of molten metals similar to those in the inner core — which is surrounded by a more solid sea of molten rock, known as the mantle,...

Explanation: Rising opposite the setting Sun, June's Full Moon occurred within about 28 hours of the solstice. The Moon stays close to the Sun's path along the ecliptic plane and so while the solstice Sun climbed high in daytime skies, June's Full Moon remained low that night as seen from northern latitudes. In fact, the Full Moon hugs the horizon in this June 21 rooftop night sky view from Bursa, Turkey, constructed from exposures made every 10 minutes between moonrise and moonset. In 2024 the Moon also reached a major lunar standstill, an extreme in the monthly north-south range of...

New insights into the function of the world's oldest analog computer, the famous Antikythera mechanism, have been made with help from an unlikely source: technology developed for the study of gravitational waves...Roughly the size of a shoebox, the device features an array of intricately tooled gears that are surprisingly complex for any innovation from the second century BCE. Over the decades, studies of the device have revealed that it likely functioned as a hand-operated computer that would have allowed its operator to predict the arrival of eclipses, as well as calculate the positions of planets over time.Fast forward to 2020,...

Explanation: Not a paradox, Comet 13P/Olbers is returning to the inner Solar System after 68 years. The periodic, Halley-type comet will reach its next perihelion or closest approach to the Sun on June 30 and has become a target for binocular viewing low in planet Earth's northern hemisphere night skies. But this sharp telescopic image of 13P is composed of stacked exposures made on the night of June 25. It easily reveals shifting details in the bright comet's torn and tattered ion tail buffeted by the wind from an active Sun, along with a broad, fanned-out dust tail and slightly...

Explanation: Jets of material blasting from newborn stars, are captured in this James Webb Space Telescope close-up of the Serpens Nebula. The powerful protostellar outflows are bipolar, twin jets spewing in opposite directions. Their directions are perpendicular to accretion disks formed around the spinning, collapsing stellar infants. In the NIRcam image, the reddish color represents emission from molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced as the jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust. The sharp image shows for the first time that individual outflows detected in the Serpens Nebula are generally aligned along the same direction. That result was expected,...

Explanation: What's happening in the sky this unusual night? Most striking in the featured 4.5-hour 360-degree panoramic video, perhaps, is the pink and purple aurora. That's because this night, encompassing May 11, was famous for its auroral skies around the world. As the night progresses, auroral bands shimmer, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy rises, and stars shift as the Earth rotates beneath them. Captured here simultaneously is a rare red band running above the aurora: a SAR arc, seen to change only slightly. The flashing below the horizon is caused by passing cars, while the moving spots...

Suitable Occasion On Monday, NASA had to suddenly cut a planned spacewalk outside of the International Space Station short after astronaut Tracy Dyson discovered water squirting from her spacesuit and obscuring her visor with ice. Now, the astronauts are investigating what may have caused the leak, kicking off what NASA is calling a "spacewalk review" in a Tuesday update. "[Astronaut Mike] Barratt began Tuesday morning troubleshooting Dyson’s spacesuit and inspecting the suit’s components," NASA wrote, while Dyson "wrapped up her day swapping out a water resupply tank in the Destiny laboratory module." Oddly, the next spacewalk scheduled for next week...

Galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746, the foreground object that created the gravitational lens. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Bradley (STScI), A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the Cosmic Spring collaboration =============================================================================== Astronomers have discovered the most distant, and so the oldest, known stellar clusters. This is the first time astronomers have seen star clusters from before the first half a billion years of the Universe. The light of these gravitationally bound groups of stars comes to us from just 460 million years after the Big Bang. Two factors have been crucial to the discovery. The extremely keen infrared eye of...

Could Comet A3 become another Great Comet, or even simply reach naked-eye brightness? We'll find out in autumn 2024... Have you heard about Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) yet? Comet observers are all hoping for big things from comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) in autumn 2024. When it was discovered, it was hailed as a potential ‘comet of the century’ and calculations suggested it might become as bright as mag. -4! It’s now thought that at best A3 will reach mag. +0.4, a lot fainter but still much brighter than the last really bright comet, C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), which delighted sky-watchers in...

String theory scientists studying the behavior of high energy particles say they have stumbled upon a mathematical “hack” that revealed a whole new way to represent the irrational number Pi. While the research is purely theoretical, the duo behind the Pi hack says this kind of theoretical work holds rewarding potential. The researchers also believe their work could lead to a number of potential breakthroughs in the future, similar to how theoretical breakthroughs made by physicists nearly a hundred years ago resulted in technological advancements decades later. AFTER 4,000 YEARS, PI IS STILL A MYSTERY Defined as the ratio of...

Explanation: What is that strange brown ribbon on the sky? When observing the star cluster NGC 4372, observers frequently take note of an unusual dark streak nearby running about three degrees in length. The streak, actually a long molecular cloud, has become known as the Dark Doodad Nebula. (Doodad is slang for a thingy or a whatchamacallit.) Pictured here, the Dark Doodad Nebula sweeps across the center of a rich and colorful starfield. Its dark color comes from a high concentration of interstellar dust that preferentially scatters visible light. The globular star cluster NGC 4372 is visible as the fuzzy...

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps (center) is pictured assisting NASA astronauts Mike Barratt (left) and Tracy C. Dyson (right) inside the Quest airlock. Image Credit: NASA TV ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt were supposed to go on a spacewalk on Monday, June 24 – but a fault led to the expected 6-and-a-half-hour walk being cut down to just 31 minutes. There was a water leak from the service and cooling umbilical unit on Dyson’s spacesuit that was described on the live stream by Dyson as spreading water "everywhere" in the airlock. The pair had already switched to...

China's lunar probe has returned to Earth with the first ever samples from the Moon's unexplored far side. The Chang'e-6 landed in the Inner Mongolia desert on Tuesday, after a nearly two-month long mission which was fraught with risks. Scientists are eagerly awaiting the Chang’e-6 as the samples could answer key questions about how planets are formed. China is the only country to have landed on the far side of the Moon, having done so before in 2019. The far side - which faces away from Earth - is technically challenging to reach due to its distance, and its difficult...

A rock core in a sample tube, with Martian atmosphere in its “headspace.” Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS The Perseverance rover has been toiling on the Martian surface for over three years, collecting rock samples that will eventually be brought to Earth if all goes according to plan. But the rover has also picked up hitchhikers, in the form of traces of Martian atmosphere that are squeezed into the “headspace” of the sample tubes. That’s very exciting for atmospheric scientists, who so far have only studied Mars’ air remotely, whether from orbiters characterizing the planet from on high or from rovers delivering readouts...

Explanation: What if we could see back to the beginning of the universe? We could see galaxies forming. But what did galaxies look like back then? These questions took a step forward recently with the release of the analysis of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image that included the most distant object yet discovered. Most galaxies formed at about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, but some formed earlier. Pictured in the inset box is JADES-GS-z14-0, a faint smudge of a galaxy that formed only 300 million years after the universe started. In technical terms, this galaxy lies...