Category Astronomy/Space

Still image from a movie clip showing a global map of Mars with atmospheric changes from Feb. 18, 2017, through March 6, 2017, a period when two regional-scale dust storms appeared. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A regional dust storm currently swelling on Mars follows unusually closely on one that blossomed less than 2 weeks earlier and is now dissipating, as seen in daily global weather monitoring by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Images from the orbiter’s wide-angle Mars Color Imager (MARCI) show each storm growing in the Acidalia area of northern Mars, then blowing southward and exploding to sizes bigger than the United States after reaching the southern hemisphere.

That development path is a common pattern for generating regional dust storms during spring and summer in Mars’ south...

This is a HSC-SSP image of a massive cluster of galaxies in the Virgo constellation showing numerous strong gravitational lenses. The distance to the central galaxy is 5.3 billion light years, while the lensed galaxies, apparent as the arcs around the cluster, are much more distant. This is a composite image in the g, r, and i band, and has a spatial resolution of about 0.6 arcseconds. Credit: NAOJ/HSC Project

The first massive data set of a “cosmic census” has been released using the largest digital camera on the Subaru Telescope. With its beautiful images now available for the public at large, figuring out the fate of the Universe has come one step closer. Data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) was released to the public on February 27th, 2017...

This beautiful Hubble image reveals a young super star cluster known as Westerlund 1, only 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way neighborhood, yet home to one of the largest stars ever discovered. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This beautiful Hubble image reveals a young super star cluster known as Westerlund 1, only 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way neighborhood, yet home to one of the largest stars ever discovered. Stars are classified according to their spectral type, surface temperature, and luminosity. While studying and classifying the cluster’s constituent stars, astronomers discovered that Westerlund 1 is home to an enormous star.

Originally named Westerlund 1-26, this monster star is a red supergiant (although sometimes classified as a hypergiant) with a radius over 1,500 tim...

In this simulation, a reconnection even pushes a blob of plasma toward Earth. The jet blown in the opposite direction wobbles due to the unstable conditions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Yi-Hsin Liu/Joy Ng, producer

Every day, invisible magnetic explosions are happening around Earth, on the surface of the sun and across the universe. These explosions, known as magnetic reconnection, occur when magnetic field lines cross, releasing stored magnetic energy. Such explosions are a key way that clouds of charged particles – plasmas – are accelerated throughout the universe. In Earth’s magnetosphere – the giant magnetic bubble surrounding our planet — these magnetic reconnections can fling charged particles toward Earth, triggering auroras.

Magnetic reconnection, in addition to push...