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Explanation: It's only 50 light-years to 51 Pegasi. That star's position is indicated in this snapshot from August, taken on a hazy night with mostly brighter stars visible above the dome at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France. Twenty-six years ago, in October of 1995, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced a profound discovery made at the observatory. Using a precise spectrograph they had detected a planet orbiting 51 Peg, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. Mayor and Queloz had used the spectrograph to measure changes in the star's radial velocity, a regular wobble caused by the gravitational...

Explanation: This pretty starfield spans about three full moons (1.5 degrees) across the heroic northern constellation of Perseus. It holds the famous pair of open star clusters, h and Chi Persei. Also cataloged as NGC 869 (top) and NGC 884, both clusters are about 7,000 light-years away and contain stars much younger and hotter than the Sun. Separated by only a few hundred light-years, the clusters are both 13 million years young based on the ages of their individual stars, evidence that they were likely a product of the same star-forming region. Always a rewarding sight in binoculars, the Double...

Explanation: Slide your telescope just east of the Lagoon Nebula to find this alluring field of view in the rich starfields of the constellation Sagittarius toward the central Milky Way. Of course the Lagoon nebula is also known as M8, the eighth object listed in Charles Messier's famous catalog of bright nebulae and star clusters. Close on the sky but slightly fainter than M8, this complex of nebulae was left out of Messier's list though. It contains obscuring dust, striking red emission and blue reflection nebulae of star-forming region NGC 6559 at right. Like M8, NGC 6559 is located about...

Explanation: Where do the dark streams of dust in the Orion Nebula originate? This part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, M43, is the often imaged but rarely mentioned neighbor of the more famous M42. M42, seen in part to the upper right, includes many bright stars from the Trapezium star cluster. M43 is itself a star forming region that displays intricately-laced streams of dark dust -- although it is really composed mostly of glowing hydrogen gas. The entire Orion field is located about 1600 light years away. Opaque to visible light, the picturesque dark dust is created in the...

Explanation: Sunrise at the South Pole is different. Usually a welcome sight, it follows months of darkness -- and begins months of sunshine. At Earth's poles, it can take weeks for the Sun to rise, in contrast with hours at any mid-latitude location. Sunrise at a pole is caused by the tilt of the Earth as it orbits the Sun, not by the rotation of the Earth. Although at a pole, an airless Earth would first see first Sun at an equinox, the lensing effect of the Earth's atmosphere and the size of the solar disk causes the top of...

Explanation: These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as the "Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The featured...

Explanation: Sure, you can see the 2D rectangle of colors, but can you see deeper? Counting color patches in the featured image, you might estimate that the most information that this 2D digital image can hold is about 60 (horizontal) x 50(vertical) x 256 (possible colors) = 768,000 bits. However, the yet-unproven Holographic Principle states that, counter-intuitively, the information in a 2D panel can include all of the information in a 3D room that can be enclosed by the panel. The principle derives from the idea that the Planck length, the length scale where quantum mechanics begins to dominate classical...

Explanation: Posing as a brilliant evening star, Venus lies near the western horizon in this southern hemisphere, early spring, night skyscape. To create the composite view exposures tracking the sky and fixed for the foreground were taken on September 25 from Cascavel in southern Brazil. In view after sunset, Venus appears immersed in a cone of zodiacal light, sunlight scattered from dust along the Solar System's ecliptic plane. In fact from either hemisphere of planet Earth, zodiacal light is most visible after sunset near a spring equinox, (or before sunrise near an autumn equinox) when its luminous arc lies at...

NASA’s Meteor Watch confirmed sightings of at least five fireballs soaring through the evening sky over the US last Friday night. In a Facebook post, the Meteor Watch noted that there were at least 80 eyewitness accounts of a massive fireball soaring over the North Carolina coast, becoming visible at around 7:40 pm. The giant space rock eventually disintegrated after covering 26 miles through the upper atmosphere at an estimated 32,000 mph. It’s unclear from the Facebook post whether a single meteor broke up to form multiple smaller fireballs during its descent, or if multiple fireballs blazed through the upper...

Explanation: Dark markings and colorful clouds inhabit this stellar landscape. The deep and expansive view spans more than 30 full moons across crowded star fields toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard, the obscuring interstellar dust clouds seen toward the right include B59, B72, B77 and B78, part of the Ophiuchus molecular cloud complex a mere 450 light-years away. To the eye their combined shape suggests a pipe stem and bowl, and so the dark nebula's popular name is the Pipe Nebula. Three bright nebulae gathered on the...

hese experiments are designed to give agencies a better idea of how humans would interact and cope during a long space journey. The volunteer research subjects start their virtual journey to Phobos on October 1, in a ground-based habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Their home for the 45 days will be a small habitat called the Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA - with collected data informing the design of future missions to the Red Planet, expected to happen in the 2030s. HERA is a two-story, four-port cylindrical habitat unit with a total of 636 sq....

A missing Moon rock originally gifted to the state of Louisiana by then-President Richard Nixon has been returned after a man in Florida found it sitting in an old box in his home. The man told CollectSPACE that he must have bought the rock, which vanished without a trace years ago, at some garage sale within the last 15 or so years — and that he never realized that he had bought such a priceless artifact. The vast majority of the lunar samples brought back during the Apollo missions remain sealed away by NASA. However, most of the nearly 200...

NASA does not plan to rename its new $10 billion technological marvel, the James Webb Space Telescope, despite concerns about it being named after former NASA administrator James Webb, who went along with government discrimination against gay and lesbian employees in the 1950s and 1960s. The space agency tells NPR it has investigated the matter and decided to keep the telescope's name as is, ahead of the long-awaited launch in December. "We have found no evidence at this time that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope," says NASA administrator Bill Nelson. The powerful telescope, often viewed...

Explanation: Gorgeous spiral galaxy M33 seems to have more than its fair share of glowing hydrogen gas. A prominent member of the local group of galaxies, M33 is also known as the Triangulum Galaxy and lies a mere 3 million light-years away. Sprawling along loose spiral arms that wind toward the core, M33's giant HII regions are some of the largest known stellar nurseries, sites of the formation of short-lived but very massive stars. Intense ultraviolet radiation from the luminous massive stars ionizes the surrounding hydrogen gas and ultimately produces the characteristic red glow. To highlight the HII regions in...

NASA has tested the functions of Lucy, the agency’s first spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, filled it with fuel, and is preparing to pack it into a capsule for launch Saturday, October 16, 2021. Named after characters in Greek mythology, these asteroids circle the Sun in two swarms, with one group leading ahead of Jupiter in its path, the other trailing behind it. Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit these asteroids. By studying these asteroids up close, scientists hope to hone their theories on how our solar system’s planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they...

Explanation: Have you ever seen a gigantic jet? They are extremely rare but tremendously powerful. Gigantic jets are a type of lightning discharge documented only this century that occur between some thunderstorms and the Earth's ionosphere high above them. Pictured above is the middle and top of one such jet caught last week by a lightning and meteor camera from Puerto Rico, USA. The jet traversed perhaps 70 kilometers in just under one second. Gigantic jets are much different from regular cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning. The bottoms of gigantic jets appear similar in appearance to another type cloud-to-above strike called...

The object, dubbed 2020 SO by astronomers, will come within "just" 31,605 miles of our planet at 3:50 a.m. ET on December 1, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS.) This is an "extremely close," albeit safe, approach... The object, which is estimated to measure between 15-33 feet across, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey based in Maui, Hawaii, on September 17, 2020. This find was confirmed two days later by the Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for the designation of minor bodies in the solar system. Initial observations suggested that the object was an asteroid....

...the item is now believed to be a rocket booster from NASA’s Surveyor 2 mission which crash landed on the Moon in 1966... Of course, there’s still a chance that 2020 SO is actually an asteroid, in which case it would be considered a minimoon while in direct orbit around the Earth. However, an old rocket booster finding would merely be considered ‘space junk’ and join the 57,000-plus pieces of human debris currently being tracked by various entities. One astronomer’s space ‘trash’ is a vintage space collector’s treasure? You decide. You can watch more on NASA’s Surveyor missions below:...

Explanation: Have you ever experienced a meteor shower? To help capture the wonder, a video was taken during the peak of the recent Perseid meteor shower above the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle, India, high up in the Himalayan mountains. Night descends as the video begins, with the central plane of our Milky Way Galaxy approaching from the left and Earth-orbiting satellites zipping by overhead. During the night, the flash of meteors that usually takes less than a second is artificially extended. The green glow of most meteors is typically caused by vaporizing nickel. As the video continues, Orion rises...

Explanation: Here is one of the most famous pictures from the Moon -- but digitally reversed. Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969 and soon thereafter many pictures were taken, including an iconic picture of Buzz Aldrin taken by Neil Armstrong. The original image captured not only the magnificent desolation of an unfamiliar world, but Armstrong himself reflected in Aldrin's curved visor. Enter modern digital technology. In the featured image, the spherical distortion from Aldrin's helmet has been reversed. The result is the famous picture -- but now featuring Armstrong himself from Aldrin's perspective. Even so, since Armstrong took...