Category Astronomy/Space

During a December 2013 solar flare, three NASA missions observed a current sheet form — a strong clue for explaining what initiates the flares. This animation shows four views of the flare from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory, and JAXA/NASA’s Hinode, allowing scientists to make unprecedented measurements of its characteristics. The current sheet is a long, thin structure, especially visible in the views on the left. Those two animations depict light emitted by material with higher temperatures, so they better show the extremely hot current sheet. Credit: NASA/JAXA/SDO/STEREO/Hinode (courtesy Zhu, et al.)

Solar flares are intense bursts of light from the sun...

Visualization of merging black holes and gravitational waves. Credit: NASA/J. Bernard Kelly (Goddard), Chris Henze (Ames) and Tim Sandstrom (CSC Government Solutions LLC)

On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the 1st-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.

Less than half a second later, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope picked up a brief, weak burst of high-energy light consistent with the same par...

HAWC observations show that a previously known gamma ray source in the Milky Way galaxy, TeV J1930+188, which is probably due to a pulsar wind nebula, is far more complicated than originally thought. Where researchers previously identified a single gamma ray source, HAWC identified several hot spots. Credit: HAWC Collaboration

Scientists operating HAWC released a new survey of the sky made from the highest energy gamma rays ever observed. The new sky map, which uses data collected since the observatory began running at full capacity last March, offers a deeper understanding of high-energy processes taking place in our galaxy and beyond.

The new sky map shows many new gamma ray sources within our own Milky Way galaxy...

The Spider Nebula lies about 10,000 light-years away from Earth and is a site of active star formation. Infrared wavelengths have been assigned visible colors. Light with a wavelength of 1.2 microns, detected by 2MASS, is shown in blue. The Spitzer wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns are green and red, respectively. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS

A nebula known as “the Spider” glows fluorescent green in an infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spider, officially named IC 417, lies near a much smaller object NGC 1931. Together, the two are called “The Spider and the Fly” nebulae. Nebulae are clouds of interstellar gas and dust where stars can form.

The Spider, ~10,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Auriga, is clearly a ...