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Explanation: Blasting outward from variable star KX Andromedae, these stunning bipolar jets are 19 light-years long. Recently discovered, they are revealed in unprecedented detail in this deep telescopic image centered on KX And and composed from over 692 hours of combined image data. In fact, KX And is spectroscopically found to be an interacting binary star system consisting of a bright, hot B-type star with a swollen cool giant star as its co-orbiting, close companion. The stellar material from the cool giant star is likely being transferred to the hot B-type star through an accretion disk, with spectacular symmetric jets...

Explanation: Tonight, if you can see the stars of the Big Dipper, then you can find comet Lemmon in your evening sky. After sunset, look for the faint but extended comet above your northwestern horizon -- but below the handle of the famous celestial kitchen utensil of the north. It might be easier to see this visitor to the inner Solar System through your camera phone, which is better at picking up faint objects. Either way, look for a fuzzy green 'star' with a tail, though probably not so long a tail as in this impressive snapshot taken over Seč...

At an off-the-record meeting held on November 21, 1962 with NASA Administrator James Webb, NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans, and Special Assistant to the President Jerome Wiesner, President Kennedy states clearly that his administration's priority is for the United States to land on the Moon before the Soviet Union. Listening In: JFK on Getting to the Moon (November 21, 1962) | 4:04 John F. Kennedy Library Foundation | 136K subscribers | 931,620 views | October 11, 2012

Explanation: An example of violence on a cosmic scale, enormous elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 lies about 75 million light-years away toward Fornax, the southern constellation of the Furnace. Investigating the startling sight, astronomers suspect the giant galaxy of colliding with smaller neighbor NGC 1317 seen just right of the large galaxy's center, producing far flung star streams in loops and shells. Light from their close encounter would have reached Earth some 100 million years ago. In the sharp telescopic image, the central regions of NGC 1316 and NGC 1317 appear separated by over 100,000 light-years. Complex dust lanes visible within...

Explanation: Where do comet tails come from? There are usually no obvious places on the nuclei of comets from which the jets that create comet tails emanate. One of the best images of emerging jets is shown in the featured picture, taken in 2015 by ESA's robotic Rosetta spacecraft that orbited Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Comet CG) from 2014 to 2016. The picture shows plumes of gas and dust escaping numerous places from Comet CG's nucleus as it neared the Sun and heated up. The comet has two prominent lobes, the larger one spanning about 4 kilometers, and a smaller 2.5-kilometer lobe...

Explanation: What would it look like to plunge into a monster black hole? This image from a supercomputer visualization shows the entire sky as seen from a simulated camera plunging toward a 4-million-solar-mass black hole, similar to the one at the center of our galaxy. The camera lies about 16 million kilometers from the black hole’s event horizon and is moving inward at 62% the speed of light. Thanks to gravity’s funhouse effects, the starry band of the Milky Way appears both as a compact loop at the top of this view and as a secondary image stretching across the...

Explanation: Put on your red/blue glasses and float next to asteroid 101955 Bennu. Shaped like a spinning toy top with boulders littering its rough surface, the tiny Solar System world is about one Empire State Building (less than 500 meters) across. Frames used to construct this 3D anaglyph were taken by PolyCam on the OSIRIS_REx spacecraft on December 3, 2018 from a distance of about 80 kilometers. With a sample from the asteroid's rocky surface on board, OSIRIS_REx departed Bennu's vicinity in May of 2021. The robotic spacecraft successfully returned the sample to its home world in September of 2023.

Explanation: What's happening in the center of nearby spiral galaxy M77? The face-on galaxy lies a mere 47 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Sea Monster (Cetus). At that estimated distance, this gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across. Also known as NGC 1068, its compact and very bright core is well studied by astronomers exploring the mysteries of supermassive black holes in active Seyfert galaxies. M77's active core glows bright at x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and radio wavelengths. The featured sharp image of M77 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows details...

Explanation: This asteroid has a moon. The robot spacecraft Galileo enroute to explore the Jovian system in 1993, encountered and photographed two asteroids during its long interplanetary voyage. The second minor planet it photographed, 243 Ida, was discovered to have a moon. The tiny moon, named Dactyl, is only about 1.6 kilometers across and seen as a small dot to the right in the image. In contrast, Ida is much larger, measuring about 60 kilometers long and 25 km wide. In fact, Dactyl is the first moon of an asteroid ever discovered. But now many asteroids are known to have...

Explanation: How typical is our Solar System? Studying 3I/ATLAS, a comet just passing through, is providing clues. Confirmed previous interstellar visitors include an asteroid, a comet, a meteor, and a gas wind dominated by hydrogen and helium. Comet 3I/ATLAS appears relatively normal when compared to Solar System comets, therefore providing more evidence that our Solar System is a somewhat typical star system. For example, Comet 3I/ATLAS has a broadly similar chemical composition and ejected dust. The featured image was captured last week from Texas and shows a green coma, a wandering blue-tinted ion tail likely deflected by our Sun's wind,...

Explanation: Young suns still lie within dusty NGC 7129, some 3,000 light-years away toward the royal constellation Cepheus. While these stars are at a relatively tender age, only a few million years old, it is likely that our own Sun formed in a similar stellar nursery around five billion years ago. Notable in the sharp image are the lovely bluish dust clouds that reflect the youthful starlight. But the compact, deep red crescent shapes are also markers of energetic, young stellar objects. Known as Herbig-Haro objects, their shape and color are characteristic of glowing hydrogen gas shocked by jets streaming...

A century after its discovery, asteroid 433 Eros is back—gliding past Earth this weekend in a rare, mesmerizing show! The legendary asteroid 433 Eros, a rocky world that once transformed our understanding of near-Earth space, is making its long-awaited return. This weekend, skywatchers will get a rare chance to glimpse this celestial traveler as it makes a close approach to our planet. The event will be live-streamed globally, allowing enthusiasts to witness history in real time through virtualtelescope.eu. For astronomers and casual stargazers alike, it’s a rendezvous with one of the most storied objects in the solar system. A Historic...

Explanation: If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see? The featured color view from Titan gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon. The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens probe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C. The large light-toned rock below and left of center is only about 15 centimeters across...

Explanation: Yes, but can your sunset do this? Looking west from Tucson, Arizona, USA one day last month, the sunset sky looked strange when it briefly lit up with the plume of a rocket launched from California a few minutes earlier. Appearing at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so noticeable because it was backlit by the setting Sun. The Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered to low Earth orbit 28 Starlink communications satellites. The plume from the first stage is seen on the right, while the soaring...

Explanation: This is not a screen from a video game. Nestled below the treeline, the small mountain church does look like it might be hiding from Moon though. In the well-composed telephoto snapshot, taken on November 23, the church walls are partly reflecting light from terrestrial flood lights. Of course, the Moon is reflecting light from the Sun. At any given time the Sun illuminates fully half of the Moon's surface, also known as the lunar dayside, but on that night only a sliver of its sunlit surface was visible. About three days after New Moon, the Moon was in...

Explanation: Is there a monster in IC 1396? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. The only real monster here, however, is a bright young star too far from Earth to hurt us. Energetic light from this star is eating away the dust of the dark cometary globule near the top of the featured image. Jets and winds of particles emitted from this star are also pushing away ambient gas and dust. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively...

NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe will continue its almost half-century of service by delivering yet another milestone: by this time next year, it should have reached a distance of 1 light-day from Earth. Based on the most recent estimates, the revolutionary Voyager 1 space probe is expected to achieve the feat on November 15, 2026, continuing its reign as the farthest-travelled human-made object. After flying by Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, the spacecraft continued its journey into interstellar space. The Speed of Light Based on present-day physics, scientists know the speed of light is the greatest speed at which anything in...

Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was damaged on Thursday following the launch of a manned Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station, the Roscosmos space agency said. The Soyuz MS-28, which was carrying Russian cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, along with NASA astronaut Chris Williams, took off from Baikonur at 12:27 Moscow time and successfully docked with the ISS later in the day. “Damage to several elements of the launch pad was detected,” Roscosmos said hours after the crew arrived at the ISS. “An assessment of the condition of the launch complex is currently underway.” The space agency said...

Scientists say they have captured the first direct acoustic evidence of lightning on Mars — tiny crackling electrical discharges triggered by swirling dust devils and storms, picked up by a microphone on NASA’s Perseverance rover. A French-led team reported in the journal Nature that it found 55 episodes of what it calls “mini lightning” — brief, static-like sparks inches long — hidden in 28 hours of rover audio recorded over nearly four Earth years. The faint pops and crackles, barely audible amid howling wind and dust grains pinging the microphone, occurred almost exclusively during the Red Planet’s dustiest, windiest days....

Explanation: NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across, a cosmic bubble blown by winds from its central, massive star. This deep telescopic image includes narrowband image data, to isolate light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the nebula's detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. In fact, the...