These images, taken a year apart by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveal a shadow moving counterclockwise around a gas-and-dust disk encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The two images at the top, taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph,...
In this artist's conception, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has a bird's-eye view of the solar system. The circles represent the orbits of the major outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 visited the planets...
This artist's concept shows a pulsar, which is like a lighthouse, as its light appears in regular pulses as it rotates.Credits: SA/JPL-Caltech
Like anthropologists piecing together the human family tree, astronomers have found that a misfit "skeleton" of a star...
Artist rendition of interior compositions of planets around the stars Kepler 102 and Kepler 407. The picture shows what minerals are likely to occur several different depths. Kepler 102 is Earth-like, dominated by olivine minerals, whereas Kepler 407 is...
The six most common elements of life on Earth (including more than 97% of the mass of a human body) are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus. The colors in the spectra show dips, the size of which...
This is the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, made with over 7 million seconds of observing time with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/B.Luo et al.
An unparalleled image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory gives astronomers the best...
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/R. van Weeren et al; Optical: NAOJ/Subaru;
Astronomers have discovered a cosmic one-two punch unlike any ever seen before. Two of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe, a supermassive black hole, and the collision of giant galaxy...
This graphic shows all the cosmic light sources in the sky that are included in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), an online repository containing information on over 100 million galaxies.Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A team of researchers has compiled a special catalog...
The pulsar pictured here, which resides in the Messier 82 galaxy 12 million light-years away, sends out X-ray beams that pass Earth every 1.37 seconds. Scientists studying this object with NuSTAR originally thought it was a massive black hole,...
Pluto. "Penitentes" which are formed by erosion, are bowl-shaped depressions with spires around the edge, and are several meters high.Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Using a model similar to what meteorologists use to forecast weather on...
New research confirms the role Type Ia supernovae, like G299 pictured above, play in measuring universe expansion.Credit: Courtesy of NASA
How much light does a supernova shed on the history of universe?
New research by cosmologists at the University of Chicago...
