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Explanation: Comet Lovejoy (C/2011 W3) survived its close encounter with the Sun earlier this month, taking its place among wonders of the southern skies just in time for Christmas. Seen here before sunrise from Paranal Observatory in Chile, the sungrazing comet's tails stretch far above the eastern horizon. Spanning over 20 degrees they rise alongside the plane of the our Milky Way galaxy. A breathtaking spectacle in itself, Lovejoy performs on this celestial stage with southern stars and nebulae, including the Large and Small Magellanic clouds right of the telescope dome, and the glow of zodiacal light along the left...

He was too weak to travel to California last week for the announcement of the mission's first big success -- the discovery of planet Kepler-22b, a rock with similarities to Earth and a sweet-spot distance from its star that creates temperatures and other conditions that could support life. "From what we have measured so far, we say water could exist. We don't say it's there," Koch said, tempering my excitement over when we get to meet our new neighbors... Doctors made the ALS diagnosis in March 2009, the same month a rocket carried the Kepler telescope into space to begin...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment," which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth. During this epoch, comets and other frosty objects that were flung from the outer solar system pummeled the inner planets. The barrage scarred our moon and produced large amounts of dust. Now Spitzer has spotted a band of dust around a nearby bright star in the northern sky called Eta Corvi that...

NASA has unveiled a flood of photos showing millions galaxies, stars and asteroids photographed by a prolific sky-mapping telescope that ended its mission earlier this year. For the first time, the space agency publicly released more than half of the 2.7 million images taken by its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope during its mission to map the entire sky. WISE launched in December 2009 and spent 14 months scanning the heavens in infrared light before shutting down this past February. The $320 million space telescope hunted for asteroids and comets, as well as more distant cosmic objects revealed by...

DARPA-developed Space Surveillance Telescope is supposed to see objects in deep space like no ground-based system before itYou can bet that if there are little red aliens running around on Mars or spaceships patrolling other planet in our solar system for that matter, a recently powered-up telescope built by the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might just be able to see them. The Air Force, which operates the DARPA-developed Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) says the telescope's design, featuring unique image-capturing technology known as a curved charge coupled device (CCD) system, as well as very wide field-of-view, large-aperture...

The first spacecraft ever to circle Mercury has beamed home the first-ever photo taken of the small rocky planet from orbit, showing a stark landscape peppered with craters. NASA's Messenger spacecraft snapped the new Mercury photo today (March 29) at 5:20 a.m. EDT (0920 GMT). The photo shows the stark gray landscape of southern Mercury, a view that is dominated by a huge impact crater. "This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system's innermost planet," Messenger mission scientists explained in a statement. The new Mercury photo shows a region around the south...

HONOLULU – Hawaii has moved a step closer to the construction of the world's largest telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea. The state Board of Land and Natural Resources unanimously approved the plan Friday. A consortium of California and Canadian universities had applied for a permit to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on conservation land.

An international team of astronomers led by Mary Williams from the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) has discovered a new stream of stars in our Milky Way: the "Aquarius Stream," named after the constellation of Aquarius. The stream of stars is a remnant of a smaller galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood, which has been pulled apart by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way about 700 million years ago. The discovery is a result of the measurement of the velocities of 250,000 stars with the RAVE Survey based at the Australian Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW,...

NASA is expected to announce a new discovery by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday (Jan. 26). The space agency has scheduled a teleconference with reporters for 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) on Wednesday to announce and discuss the finding, which will also be published that day in the journal Nature. "Astronomers have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits and have seen further back in time than ever before," NASA said in an announcement posted on its website today (Jan. 21). Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on the space agency's website, according to...

The world's largest neutrino telescope – made from a giant cube of ice at the South Pole – aimed at detecting subatomic particles traveling near the speed of light has been completed, researchers announced today (Dec. 20). http://www.livescience.com/environment/south-pole-neutrino-observatory-construction-finished-101220.html

Like exploding stars, black holes, dark matter? How about cosmic intrigue, deep space astronomy , or origins of the universe? Then you’re gonna love this. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are putting the finishing touches on a giant underground telescope buried beneath the South Pole to help understand said phenomenon.

A FOCAL Mission into the Oort Cloud by Paul Gilster on November 15, 2010 After all this time, IÂ’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of massive objects in space as lenses, their distortion of spacetime offering the ability to see distant objects at huge magnification. On Friday we saw how the lensing effect caused by galactic clusters can be used to study dark energy. And consider the early results from the Herschel-ATLAS project, conducted by ESAÂ’s Herschel Space Observatory. Herschel is scanning large areas of the sky in far-infrared and sub-millimeter light. Many of its...

- NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference - NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 July 12 X-Ray Milky Way Credit: D. Wang (UMass) et al., CXC, NASA Explanation: If you had x-ray vision, the center regions of our Galaxy would not be hidden from view by the immense cosmic dust clouds opaque to visible light. Instead, the Milky Way toward Sagittarius might look something like this stunning mosaic of images from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. Pleasing to look at, the gorgeous...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 August 12 X-Rays from Stephan's Quintet Credit: X-ray: G.Trinchieri (INAF-Brera) et al., CXC, NASAOptical: Palomar Digital Sky Survey Explanation: Stephan's Quintet is a picturesque but clearly troubled grouping of galaxies about 300 million light-years away toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Spanning over 200,000 light-years at that distance, this composite false-color image illustrates the powerful nature of this multiple galaxy collision, showing x-ray data from the Chandra Observatory...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 February 3 X-Rays From Antennae Galaxies Credit: G. Fabbiano (CfA) et al., CXC, SAO, NASA Explanation: A bevy of black holes and neutron stars shine as bright, point-like sources against bubbles of million degree gas in this false-color x-ray image from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The striking picture spans about 80 thousand light-years across the central regions of two galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, locked in...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the largest data set yet of Jupiter's colorful lights called aurora, yielding a pretty picture that could help solve some mysteries about the phenomenon. The phenomenon is similar to the Northern Lights seen on Earth, thought on a much larger scale. "Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet," said Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. In a NASA statement today, Gladstone called the purple rings in a new colorized image "Northern Lights on steroids. They're hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth." Unlike Earth's auroras, Jupiter's...

Like gluttonous piranhas, supermassive black holes in young galaxy clusters gorge on bountiful gas until little fuel is left, and then they fade away, a new study suggests.Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers tallied the number of rapidly growing supermassive black holes, called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, in two populations of galaxy clusters. One group consisted of young-looking clusters located very far from Earth, and the other consisted of an older group located closer to us. The results of the survey, detailed in the July 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, showed that the more distant, younger clusters...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 12 Chandra Deep Field Credit: Riccardo Giacconi et al., JHU, AUI, NASA Explanation: Officially the Chandra Deep Field - South, this picture represents the deepest ever x-ray image of the Universe. One million seconds of accumulated exposure time with the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory went in to its making. Concentrating on a single, otherwise unremarkable patch of sky in the constellation Fornax, this x-ray image corresponds...

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-157 NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood. The news conference will originate from NASA Headquarters' television studio, 300 E St. SW in Washington and carried live on NASA TV. Media representatives may attend the conference, join by phone or ask questions from participating NASA locations. To RSVP or obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Trent Perrotto at: trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov by...

Displayed in all their exquisite detail, six spectacular galaxies are pictured more clearly that they ever have before. All of them are beautiful examples of spiral galaxies and were captured in images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The pictures were taken in infrared light, using the impressive power of the HAWK-I camera, and will help astronomers understand how the remarkable spiral patterns in galaxies form and evolve.-incredible-new-detail.html#ixzz13uAfNijg

NASA's next-generation space observatory promises to open new windows on the Universe — but its cost could close many more.It has to work — for astronomers, there is no plan B. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in 2014, is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and the key to almost every big question that astronomers hope to answer in the coming decades. Its promised ability to peer back through space and time to the formation of the first galaxies made it the top priority in the 2001 astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey, one of a...

A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space. For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet. more at Telegraph.co.UK

Imagine building a car chassis without a blueprint or even a list of recommended construction materials. In a sense, that's precisely what a team of engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., did when they designed a one-of-a-kind structure that is one of 9 key new technology systems of the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM). Just as a chassis supports the engine and other components in a car, the ISIM will hold four highly sensitive instruments, electronics, and other shared instrument systems flying on the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's next flagship observatory. From scratch —...

Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun.

NASA announced some preliminary results of studies by its Kepler probe on June 15: the probe's camera chips had pointed out 706 potential planets in its first 43 days of operation. Though NASA has been issuing cautionary comments, this is thrilling. These are in addition to five planets that were announced earlier by the project, places where life seems extremely unlikely.

NASA is expected to make an announcement Thursday on the progress of its Kepler spacecraft, which has been staring at one patch of space for evidence of other worlds. The space agency has scheduled an afternoon teleconference with reporters to announce the results from Kepler, which include the "discovery of an intriguing planetary system," NASA officials said Monday.

ON THE night of 30 June 2005, the sky high above La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands crackled with streaks of blue light too faint for humans to see. Atop the Roque de los Muchachos, the highest point of the island, though, a powerful magic eye was waiting and watching. MAGIC - the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope - scans the sky each night for high-energy photons from the distant cosmos. Most nights, nothing remarkable comes. But every now and again, a brief flash of energetic light bears witness to the violent convulsions of a faraway galaxy. What MAGIC...

SCIENTISTS are celebrating the discovery of more than 700 suspected new planets - including up to 140 similar in size to Earth - in just six weeks of using a powerful new space observatory. Early results from NASA’s Kepler Mission, a small satellite observing deep space, suggested planets like Earth were far more common than previously thought.

This is the moment that Planck was conceived for,” says ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood. “We’re not giving the answer. We are opening the door to an Eldorado where scientists can seek the nuggets that will lead to deeper understanding of how our Universe came to be and how it works now. The image itself and its remarkable quality is a tribute to the engineers who built and have operated Planck. Now the scientific harvest must begin.” From the closest portions of the Milky Way to the furthest reaches of space and time, the new all-sky...

If a planet-destroying asteroid is headed for Earth, scientists now have a much better chance of spotting it. From its perch atop Hawaii’s dormant Haleakala volcano, the PS1 telescope, which boasts the world's largest digital camera, has begun full-time operations, snapping hundreds of high-resolution photos each day as it scans the sky for space rocks and strange stellar phenomena. PS1 is the first of several telescopes planned as part of the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS. The telescope will map near-Earth asteroids ranging in size from 984 feet (300 meters)—big enough to cause major regional destruction...

The Kepler spacecraft has found over 750 candidates for extrasolar planets, and that is just from data collected in the first 43 days of the spacecraft's observations. "This is the biggest release of candidate planets that has ever happened," said William Borucki, Kepler's lead scientist. "The number of candidate planets is actually greater than all the planets that have been discovered in the last 15 years." This is an astounding amount of potential exoplanets from data taken during such a short period of time, however Borucki added that they expect only about 50% of these candidates to actually turn...

The Kepler space telescope seeking Earth-like planets in a far-off region of the Milky Way has discovered more than 700 planetary "candidates" - some that just might be the right size and in the right places for life to be possible.

Scientists in the Netherlands unveiled the largest radiotelescope in the world on Saturday, saying it was capable of detecting faint signals from almost as far back as the Big Bang. The LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) consists of 25,000 small antennas measuring between 50 centimetres and two metres across, instead of a traditional large dish, said Femke Boekhorst of the Netherlands Radioastronomy Institute. It is based near the northeastern Dutch town of Assen, but the antennas are spread out across the rest of the Netherlands and also in Germany, Sweden, France and Britain. "Today we have launched the biggest radiotelescope in...

From deep space, cosmic rays come fast and pack a heck of a punch. They may also carry clues to the most vexing mysteries in the universe. Nothing on the tree-less plains of western Argentina seems to expend much energy. Cattle stand nearly motionless as they graze on the thin grass, which grows slowly in the dry heat and high altitude. A cylindrical water tank with a small solar panel and a skyward-facing antenna sits unobtrusively in the nearly motionless landscape. But hidden within this scene is plenty of drama. At any given moment, millions of projectiles from deep space...

The mysterious hole in space seems to have been blasted into the side of a nebula by jets of gas from young stars. There is a black patch of space in NGC 1999, and for years astronomers have thought it was just a dense cloud of gas and dust, blocking light from passing through. But the Herschel infrared space telescope – which has the ability to peer into these dense clouds — has made an unexpected discovery. This black patch is actually a hole that has been blown in the side of the nebula by the jets and winds of...

Scientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton to detect a vast reservoir of gas lying along a wall-shaped structure of galaxies about 400 million light years from Earth. In this artist's impression, a close-up view of the so-called Sculptor Wall is depicted. Spiral and elliptical galaxies are shown in the wall along with the newly detected intergalactic gas, part of the so-called Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM), shown in blue. This discovery is the strongest evidence yet that the "missing matter" in the nearby Universe is located in an enormous web of hot, diffuse gas. The X-ray...

A vast hole in space has been unexpectedly discovered in a part of the universe thought to be packed with a cloud of dense gas and dust – the latest in a string of cosmic finds by the European Herschel infrared space telescope. The surprising hole in space has provided astronomers with a new glimpse at the end of the star-forming process. ... Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas, and while jets of gas have been spotted coming from young stars, the process of how a star uses this gas to disperse surrounding debris and emerge...

Really cool video about what exists in the blackness of space, and just how many stars and galaxies there are... Really cool animations as well!

A colossal star many times the mass of our own Sun is seen growing in a bubble of gas and dust just pictured by the Herschel space observatory. The image of the bubble, known as RCW 120, has been released a few days ahead of the European telescope's first birthday in orbit on 14 May. Herschel's infrared detectors are tuned to see the cold materials that give birth to stars. Pictures like RCW 120 will help explain how really giant ones are made. The monster in this picture is seen as the small white blob on the bottom edge of...

The Sun As You've Never Seen It: Nasa Reveals Stunning Footage From New Satellite [Pics in URL] By CLAIRE BATES and DAVID DERBYSHIRE 22nd April 2010 Forget Iceland's volcano. If you want to see a really big eruption, you need to head to the Sun. This astonishing image - captured by a new Nasa space telescope - shows a ferocious solar flare looping out the Sun with the power of 100 hydrogen bombs. The ring of fire, heated to tens of millions of degrees, stretches out tens of thousands of miles - and is so big it could contain more...

Tomorrow, April 24, marks twenty years since the Hubble Space Telescope, with the help of he space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit, what took place afterwards is NOW HISTORY and part of the twenty years of EXCELLENCE for the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun’s dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth. Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. "These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of...

Deep inside the famous Orion Nebula, a colony of very young stars have been imaged by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Although the observatory ran out of liquid helium coolant in May 2009, two modules inside its Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) remain fully operational, capturing wonderfully detailed pictures of Orion's star-forming region currently exploding with stellar life.

GREENBELT, Md. -- The James Webb Space Telescope reached a mission-readiness landmark today when its first primary mirror segment was cryo-polished to its required prescription as measured at operational cryogenic temperatures. This achievement sets the stage for a successful polishing process for the remaining 18 flight mirror segments.

A powerful new solar observatory will spend the next five years recording images of the sun with 10 times better resolution than HD television, peering deep within the sun's layers to reveal just how solar storms erupt. The observations could help scientists build the first effective models for space weather forecasting. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is slated for launch on Feb. 10 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. It carries three instruments that will pierce the mysteries enshrouding the sun's magnetic fields and ultraviolet radiation, which together help shape the Earth's atmosphere every day. "The unique...

Heavy-lift launch vehicles of the type many believe will be a part of President Barack Obama’s long-awaited space policy — and in-space assembly techniques based on lessons from the Hubble Space Telescope — could enable NASA to deploy telescopes large enough to answer the eternal question “Are we alone?” in the coming decades. Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and John Grunsfeld, his newly named deputy and a three-time Hubble-servicing astronaut, told the Space Transportation Association Jan. 15 that astronomers are on the cusp of technical advances that will cast their view back — literally —...

REDONDO BEACH, Calif., Jan. 18, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The first primary mirror segment of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has met flight specifications at ambient temperatures, the result of a process that has been six years in the making. Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC - News) is leading the design and development effort for the space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no known planets beyond the (then nine) planets in our own solar system: just a few found by chance orbiting a pulsar. Then, in late 1995 and 1996, came the initial discovery of planets orbiting main sequence stars like the Sun. That slow trickle of discoveries became a steady stream as astronomers refined their instruments and techniques, as well as increased both the number of stars studied and their period of time observed. By the beginning of 2010 astronomers reported finding over 400 such extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. That steady stream of discoveries, though,...

The race to find exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — continues to quicken. Last week NASA researchers announced that the agency’s new space telescope, Kepler, has discovered five new exoplanets, expanding the number of known exoplanets to 422, an increase of about 25 percent in the past year alone. A satellite proposed by MIT researchers could accelerate these discoveries and even detect hundreds of Earth-sized planets — a few of which could be natural candidates for life.