Swirling Magnetic Field around Our...

2024-04-01

What's happening to the big black hole in the center of our galaxy? It is sucking in matter from a swirling disk -- a disk that is magnetized, it has now been confirmed. Specifically, the black hole's accretion disk has recently been ...

Total Solar Eclipse Below the Bottom...

2024-03-31 Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador, Inst. of Physics in Opava) ; Acknowledgement: Xavier Jubier

In late 2021 there was a total solar eclipse visible only at the end of the Earth. To capture the unusual phenomenon, airplanes took flight below the clouded seascape of Southern Ocean. The featured image shows one relatively spectacular capture ...

Medieval Astronomy from Melk Abbey

2024-03-30 Library of Melk Abbey, Frag. 229

Discovered by accident, this manuscript page provides graphical insight to astronomy in medieval times, before the Renaissance and the influence of Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho de Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. The intriguing page is from ...

Galileo's Europa

2024-03-29

Looping through the Jovian system in the late 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft recorded stunning views of Europa and uncovered evidence that the moon's icy surface likely hides a deep, global ocean. Galileo's Europa image data has been ...

Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri

2024-03-28 Massimo Di Fusco

Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter. It's the largest and ...

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies

2024-03-27 Joe Hua

Almost every object in the featured photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured here is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own ...

Comet Pons-Brooks' Ion Tail

2024-03-26

Comet Pons-Brooks has quite a tail to tell. First discovered in 1385, this erupting dirty snowball loops back into our inner Solar System every 71 years and, this time, is starting to put on a show for deep camera exposures. In the featured ...

Sonified: The Jellyfish Nebula...

2024-03-25

What does a supernova remnant sound like? Although sound is a compression wave in matter and does not carry into empty space, interpretive sound can help listeners appreciate and understand a visual image of a supernova remnant in a new way. ...

Looking Back at an Eclipsed Earth

2024-03-24 CNES

Here is what the Earth looks like during a solar eclipse. The shadow of the Moon can be seen darkening part of Earth. This shadow moved across the Earth at nearly 2000 kilometers per hour. Only observers near the center of the dark circle see a ...

Ares 3 Landing Site: The Martian...

2024-03-23

This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would ...