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Set to be launched in 2018 from Kourou, French Guiana, the JWST will embark on a journey to unravel the universe’s mysteries, "from discovering the first stars and galaxies" to "studying the atmospheres of alien planets around other stars." “This was the first time all the different parts worked together at the same time, and this was the first time it was tested against the actual spacecraft flight hardware,” explained Alan Johns, ground segment and operations manager for the Webb telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA called, and the Webb telescope responded. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently...

Astronomers want to harness [the Sun's] spacetime-warping gravity as a lens to image the surface of exoplanets in astonishing detail The bluish ring is a distant galaxy whose image has been magnified and warped by the gravity of a reddish galaxy in the foreground Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA Wikimedia Within just a few years, astronomers may at last find a planet that shows signs of life as we know it, in the form of atmospheric gases that betray signs of biological activity. This would be a transformational event for our civilization. But, what would we do next? How could we...

The discovery of seven habitable planets just 40 light years away is certainly impressive, but the fact is, they are still 40 light years away. Unless we're willing and able to spend thousands of years traveling through space, we won't be rolling into the TRAPPIST-1 system anytime soon. This means that over the coming decades, advanced scientific instruments closer to home will play very important roles in exploring these distant worlds – perhaps none more so than the James Webb Space Telescope. So what can we expect when it is fired into orbit next year? We checked in with some...

The most precise map of the night sky ever assembled is taking shape. Astronomers working on the Gaia space telescope have released a first tranche of data recording the position and brightness of over a billion stars. And for some two million of these objects, their distance and sideways motion across the heavens has also been accurately plotted. Gaia's mapping effort is already unprecedented in scale, but it still has several years to run. Remarkably, scientists say the store of information even now is too big for them to sift, and they are appealing for the public's help in making...

Explanation: Seen any planets lately? All three planets now shining brightly in the night sky are imaged in these panels, captured last week with the 1 meter telescope at Pic du Midi Observatory in the French Pyrenees. Near opposition and closest to Earth on May 30, Mars is presently offering the best ground-based photo-ops in the last decade. The sharp image finds clouds above the Red Planet's north pole (top) and towering volcanos near its right limb. Saturn reaches its own opposition tonight, its bright rings and gaps clearly revealed in the telescopic portrait. Jupiter is currently highest during the...

Explanation: How did the universe evolve from such a smooth beginning? To help understand, computational cosmologists and NASA produced the featured time-lapse animated video depicting a computer simulation of part of the universe. The 100-million light-year simulation starts about 20 million years after the Big Bang and runs until the present. After a smooth beginning, gravity causes clumps of matter to form into galaxies which immediately begin falling toward each other. Soon, many of them condense into long filaments while others violently merge into a huge and hot cluster of galaxies. Investigating of potential universe attributes in simulations like this...

Explanation: Move over Hubble -- here comes the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST promises to be the new most powerful telescope in space. In the last month, the 18-segment gold-plated primary mirror for JWST was unveiled. In the featured time-lapse video taken last week, the 6.5-meter diameter mirror was raised to a vertical position. The dramatic 30-second sequence shows NASA engineers monitoring the test as room lights glint brightly off the mirror's highly reflective surface. The beryllium mirrors have been coated with a thin film of gold to make them more reflective to infrared light. The science goals of...

On Saturday, Japan lost contact with its newest space telescope, called Hitomi or ASTRO-H. The telescope, which includes an instrument from NASA, was intended to study the high-energy universe in X-rays and gamma rays, and observe such objects as supermassive black holes and galaxy clusters. Radar observations Sunday indicated that Hitomi, which launched on February 17, is in at least five pieces—and a plot of its orbit revealed a dramatic change on March 26, the date JAXA lost contact with the spacecraft. That means, says astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, that some kind of “energetic event” has occurred—something more than a simple...

The Ariane 5 rocket is a workhorse for delivering satellites and other payloads into orbit, but fitting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) inside one is pushing the boundaries of the Ariane 5’s capabilities, and advancing our design of space observatories at the same time. The Ariane 5 is the most modern design in the ESA’s Ariane rocket series. It’s responsible for delivering things like Rosetta, the Herschel Space Observatory, and the Planck Observatory into space. The ESA is supplying an Ariane 5 to the JWST mission, and with the planned launch date for that mission less than three years...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A white dwarf star in the Constellation Virgo turns out to be a "death star" worthy of "Star Wars." Astronomers announced Wednesday that they have discovered a rocky object coming apart in a death spiral around this distant star. They used NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft to make the discovery, then followed up with ground observations. "This is something no human has seen before," said Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lead author. "We're watching a solar system get destroyed," he said in a statement.

FARGO – A pair of NDSU students got quite the scare Monday night when armed Fargo police officers mistook their telescope for a rifle.

With the 25th anniversary of The Hubble Space Telescope fast approaching, Brady and Keith look at a priceless artefact - Sir Isaac Newton's very own reflecting telescope.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.

"Hawaiians absolutely believe in science. How that plays out on this mountain is going to be a matter of getting the right set of people in the room to negotiate some sort of compromise that everyone can live with," Apo told reporters. Stopping construction would be key, he said. "You can't even get to the discussion point until they stop construction," he said. ... The dispute has pitted Native Hawaiians, who believe the telescope site is sacred because it is where their creation story begins, against scientists, who believe it's an ideal location for one of the world's largest telescopes...

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, despite being hobbled by the loss of critical guidance systems, has discovered a star with three planets only slightly larger than Earth. The outermost planet orbits in the "Goldilocks" zone, a region where surface temperatures could be moderate enough for liquid water and perhaps life, to exist. The star, EPIC 201367065, is a cool red M-dwarf about half the size and mass of our own sun. At a distance of 150 light years, the star ranks among the top 10 nearest stars known to have transiting planets. The star's proximity means it's bright enough for astronomers...

The Kepler space telescope has spotted over 1,000 exoplanets beyond our solar system, and its latest finds are three almost Earth-sized planets, including one in the habitable zone circling the star EPIC 201367075, just 150 light years from Earth. In the cosmic sense, that’s right around the block, making it one of the 10 closest known stars with observed planets in its gravitational hold. Of course, such distances in the cosmic sense also would take many generations to traverse, so don’t invest in real estate there just yet. Still, the relative closeness of this “EPIC” star and its planets provides...

Inside a very big and very clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., nearly 30 workers dressed in white protective suits, goggles and blue booties cluster around the parts of a time machine. These parts — gold-covered mirrors, tennis-court-size sun shields, delicate infrared cameras — are slowly being put together to become the James Webb Space Telescope.

Explanation: A new star, likely the brightest supernova in recorded human history, lit up planet Earth's sky in the year 1006 AD. The expanding debris cloud from the stellar explosion, found in the southerly constellation of Lupus, still puts on a cosmic light show across the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, this composite view includes X-ray data in blue from the Chandra Observatory, optical data in yellowish hues, and radio image data in red. Now known as the SN 1006 supernova remnant, the debris cloud appears to be about 60 light-years across and is understood to represent the remains of a...

Actual Headline: Mega Discovery! 715 Alien Planets Confirmed Using A New Trick On Old Kepler Data Planet-watchers, some exciting news: you know how we keep talking about planet candidates, those planets that have yet to be confirmed, when we reveal stories about other worlds? That’s because verifying that the slight dimming of a star’s light is due to a planet takes time – -specifically, to have other telescopes verify it through examining gravitational wobbles on the parent star. Turns out there’s a way to solve the so-called “bottleneck” of planet candidates vs. confirmed planets. NASA has made use of a...

Explanation: The Lighthouse nebula was formed by the wind of a pulsar, a rapidly rotating, magnetized neutron star, as it speeds through the interstellar medium at over 1,000 kilometers per second. Some 23,000 light-years distant toward the southern constellation Carina, pulsar and wind nebula (cataloged as IGR J1104-6103) are indicated at the lower right in this remarkable image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Energetic particles generated by the pulsar are swept back into the wind's comet-like tail trailing up and to the left, along the direction of the pulsar's motion away from its parent supernova remnant. Both runaway pulsar and...