Category Astronomy/Space

A Hubble image of a field of distant galaxies. A new study of the gas content in galaxies so distant their light has been traveling for about ten billion years suggests that the processes converting gas into stars is about the same back then as in the local universe. NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick & UCSC), R. Bouwens (UCO/Lick & Leiden U.), and the HUDF09 Team

The first stars appeared ~100 million years after the big bang, and ever since then stars and star formation processes have lit up the cosmos. When the universe was about 3 billion years old, star formation activity peaked at rates about 10 times above current levels...

This photo provided by United Launch Alliance shows a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying GOES-R spacecraft for NASA and NOAA lifting off from Space Launch Complex-41 at 6:42 p.m. EST at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016. The most advanced weather satellite ever built rocketed into space Saturday night, part of an $11 billion effort to revolutionize forecasting and save lives. (United Launch Alliance via AP)

The most advanced weather satellite ever built rocketed into space Saturday night, part of an $11 billion effort to revolutionize forecasting and save lives. This new GOES-R spacecraft will track U.S. weather as never before: hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, volcanic ash clouds, wildfires, lightning storms, even solar flares...

Carbon dioxide detection

As Rosetta’s comet approached its most active period last year, the spacecraft spotted CO2 ice – never before seen on a comet – followed by the emergence of 2 unusually large patches of water ice. The CO2 ice layer covered an area comparable to the size of a football pitch, while the two water ice patches were each larger than an Olympic swimming pool and much larger than any signs of water ice previously spotted at the comet.The 3 icy layers were all found in the same region, on the comet’s southern hemisphere.

A combination of the complex shape of the comet, its elongated path around the Sun and the substantial tilt of its spin, seasons are spread unequally between the 2 hemispheres of the double-lobed Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko...

Occator Crater, home of Ceres’ intriguing brightest areas, is prominently featured in this image from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The brightest area on Ceres stands out amid shadowy, cratered terrain in a dramatic new view from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, taken as it looked off to the side of the dwarf planet. Dawn snapped this image on Oct. 16, from its 5th science orbit, in which the angle of the sun was different from that in previous orbits. Dawn was about 920 miles above Ceres when this image was taken—an altitude the spacecraft had reached in early October.

Occator Crater, with its central bright region and secondary, less-reflective areas, appears quite prominent near the limb, or edge, of Ceres. At 57 miles wide and 2...