Space Telescopes News

August 20, 2016

Venus-Like Exoplanet With O2 Atmosphere?

Brown Dwarfs Reveal Exoplanets' Secrets

Some of Your Suntan Comes from Beyond Our Galaxy

New Galaxy Pair Seen Getting Closer to Earth

Latest Headlines

updated 11:42am EDT

NASA's Fermi Mission Expands Its Search for Dark Matter

Aug. 12, 2016 — Dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the material universe, continues to vex scientists, but three creative studies using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have helped whittle ... read more

Stellar Lab in Sagittarius

Aug. 10, 2016 — The small smattering of bright blue stars in a new ESO image is the perfect cosmic laboratory in which to study the life and death of stars. Known as Messier 18 this star ... read more

'GPS in Space': Bringing Autonomous Interplanetary Travel Closer to Reality

Aug. 4, 2016 — An accurate method for spacecraft navigation takes a leap forward today as new research reveals that a spacecraft's position in space in the direction of a particular pulsar can be calculated ... read more

Space Scientists Observe Io's Atmospheric Collapse During Eclipse

Aug. 2, 2016 — Astronomers have documented atmospheric changes on Io, Jupiter's volcanically active satellite, as the giant planet casts its shadow over the moon's surface during ... read more

Faintest Hisses from Space Reveal Famous Star's Past Life

Aug. 1, 2016 — Using a telescope in remote outback Australia, astronomers have peered into the past of a nearby star millions of years before its famous explosion.The research paints a ... read more

A Giant Stellar Void in the Milky Way

Aug. 1, 2016 — A major revision is required in our understanding of our Milky Way Galaxy according to an international team. Astronomers have found that there is a huge region around the ... read more

Is Earthly Life Premature from a Cosmic Perspective?

Aug. 1, 2016 — The universe is 13.8 billion years old, while our planet formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists think this time gap means that life on other planets could be ... read more

Chorus of Black Holes Radiates X-Rays

July 28, 2016 — The NuSTAR mission is identifying which black holes erupt with the highest-energy X-rays, report scientists. The results will ultimately help astronomers understand how the ... read more

Jupiter's Great Red Spot Heats Planet's Upper Atmosphere

July 27, 2016 — Researchers have discovered that Jupiter's Great Red Spot may provide the mysterious source of energy required to heat the planet's upper atmosphere to the unusually high ... read more

White Dwarf Lashes Red Dwarf With Mystery Ray

July 27, 2016 — Astronomers have discovered a new type of exotic binary star: in the system AR Scorpii a rapidly spinning white dwarf star is powering electrons up to almost the speed of ... read more

Sky-High Pic Du Midi Offers Tourists Stellar Views

China Is About Ready To Look For Aliens After Relocating 9,000 Humans

China to Hunt for Alien Life With Giant Telescope

Imagine What Two Telescopes in Space Will See — If Hubble Doesn't Break

New Worlds New Horizons: A Midterm Assessment

Aug. 15, 2016 — While scientists have made remarkable advancements in astronomy and astrophysics since the beginning of this decade -- notably the first detection of gravitational waves and the discovery of distant ... read more

Finding the Loneliest Young Star

July 27, 2016 — Alone on the cosmic road, far from any known celestial object, a young, independent star is going through a tremendous growth spurt. When a team of scientists examined infrared images of the same ... read more

Astronomers Uncover Hidden Stellar Birthplace

July 27, 2016 — Astronomers have uncovered a hidden stellar birthplace in a nearby spiral galaxy, using a telescope in Chile. The results show that the speed of star formation in the center of the galaxy - and other ... read more

NASA Team Begins Testing of a 'New-Fangled' Optic

July 26, 2016 — t's an age-old astronomical truth: To resolve smaller and smaller physical details of distant celestial objects, scientists need larger and larger light-collecting mirrors. This challenge is not ... read more

Light Shed on a Superluminous Supernova Which Appears to Have Exploded Twice

July 26, 2016 — An international group of researchers has used the GTC to observe a superluminous supernova almost from the moment it occurred. It has revealed surprising behaviour, because this supernova showed an ... read more

First Images from Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI)

July 26, 2016 — The Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI) on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) has obtained its first adaptive-optics closed-loop results, an important milestone in the development of this ... read more

Ancient Eye in the Sky

July 26, 2016 — Light from a distant galaxy can be strongly bent by the gravitational influence of a foreground galaxy. That effect is called strong gravitational lensing. Normally a single galaxy is lensed at a ... read more

Astronomers Discover Dizzying Spin of the Milky Way Galaxy's 'Halo'

July 25, 2016 — Astronomers have discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy's disk, which contains ... read more

Mars Rover's Laser Can Now Target Rocks All by Itself

July 21, 2016 — New software is enabling ChemCam, the laser spectrometer on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, to select rock targets autonomously -- the first time autonomous target selection is available for an ... read more

Space... the Final Frontier

July 21, 2016 — Fifty years ago Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise began their journey into space -- the final frontier. Now, as the newest Star Trek film hits cinemas, the NASA/ESA Hubble space ... read more

First Atmospheric Study of Earth-Sized Exoplanets Points to Possible Habitability

July 20, 2016 — Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have conducted the first search for atmospheres around temperate, Earth-sized planets beyond our solar system and found indications that increase ... read more

NASA's Kepler Confirms 100+ Exoplanets During Its K2 Mission

July 18, 2016 — Scientists report the largest haul of confirmed planets - tallying more than a hundred -- since NASA's Kepler space telescope switched from staring into one patch of sky to detecting planets ... read more

Warm Jupiters Not as Lonely as Expected

July 14, 2016 — After analyzing four years of Kepler space telescope observations, astronomers have given us our clearest understanding yet of a class of exoplanets called 'Warm Jupiters,' showing that ... read more

Robot Would Assemble Modular Telescope -- In Space

July 13, 2016 — A new concept in space telescope design uses a modular structure and an assembly robot to build an extremely large telescope in space, performing tasks in which astronaut fatigue would be a ... read more

NASA Eyes First-Ever Carbon-Nanotube Mirrors for CubeSat Telescope

July 12, 2016 — A lightweight telescope that a team of NASA scientists and engineers is developing specifically for CubeSat scientific investigations could become the first to carry a mirror made of carbon nanotubes ... read more

Black Hole Makes Material Wobble Around It

July 12, 2016 — The European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has proved the existence of a "gravitational vortex" around a black hole. The discovery, aided by NASA's ... read more

Deepest Ever Look Into Orion

July 12, 2016 — ESO's HAWK-I infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile has been used to peer deeper into the heart of Orion Nebula than ever before. The spectacular picture reveals about ... read more

'Frankenstein' Galaxy Surprises Astronomers

July 12, 2016 — About 250 million light-years away, there's a neighborhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy ... read more

Blue Is an Indicator of First Star's Supernova Explosions: More Than 13 Billion Years Old

July 12, 2016 — Astronomers have discovered that the color of supernovae during a specific phase could be an indicator for detecting the most distant and oldest supernovae in the Universe -- more than 13 billion ... read more

NASA Camera Catches Moon 'Photobombing' Earth

July 11, 2016 — For only the second time in a year, a NASA camera aboard the DSCOVR satellite captured a view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth. From its position between the sun and ... read more

Monday, August 15, 2016