Tag Archives: ASTRONOMY

Astronomers spot a strange, first-of-its-kind asteroid near Jupiter

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There’s still plenty of opportunity for astronomers to discover strange new objects. Researchers using the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) have found (via Gizmodo) a Trojan asteroid, 2019 LD2, that not onl...

Astronomers may have witnessed a planet’s birth

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Scientists believe they have observed a planet being formed for the first time. In a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics today, a team of astronomers explain how they captured images of a young star, AB Aurigae, 520 light-years from Earth...

Watch a mile-long asteroid sling past the Earth tonight at 7 PM ET

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An asteroid will hit Earth -- it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.” Fortunately, the space rock known as 1998 OR2 won’t be crashing your quarantine party, but it’s still considered a potentially hazardous object since it will come within four million...

Scientists find an Earth-like planet hiding in old Kepler data

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The search for habitable exoplanets has made a discovery in an unexpected place: data that had supposedly been searched years ago. Scientists combing over early data from the Kepler space telescope have found an Earth-like planet, Kepler-1649c, burie...

Scientists visualize a black hole plasma jet in unprecedented detail

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At the center of most galaxies is a supermassive black hole. While many aspects of these objects remain mysterious, it’s clear that they gobble up immense amounts of energy and matter. This forms an accretion disc of plasma, but sometimes that plasma...

NASA decommissions Spitzer Space Telescope after 16 years of service

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NASA is flipping the switch on the Spitzer Space Telescope today. The observatory has made groundbreaking discoveries about the universe since its launch in 2003, from imaging some of the oldest stars in the universe to detecting the light reflected...

The Hayden Planetarium’s new show celebrates unmanned space probes

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The astronomy I learned as a kid was pretty limited — the Earth revolves around the Sun and, of course, the whole "My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" thing. Of course, that expression no longer applies because our understandin...

Discovery shows early galaxies could have very short lives

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You'd think that galaxies from the young universe would still be thriving, but that's not necessarily the case. Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute and the National Observatory of Japan have discovered the farthest known dying galaxy (that is, w...