NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the agency’s StarBurst mission, a small satellite designed to investigate neutron star mergers and the origins of short gamma-ray bursts. StarBurst will launch aboard a Bandwagon rideshare mission on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida
This starry view of the nearby star-forming region IC 348 is one of the largest images released to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Using Webb, astronomers searched IC 348 for brown dwarfs, which are less massive than the smallest stars. The researchers discovered brown dwarfs just twice the mass of Jupiter, bringing the
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have discovered a new class of objects behaving unlike any they have seen before. Astronomers suggest these newly spotted objects in other galaxies may help solve not one, but two long-standing questions in astrophysics. These mysterious objects give off unusually low-energy X-rays but intense levels of ultraviolet radiation. This
This artist’s concept depicts a Trans-Neptunian Object, a small, faint, icy body orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. These objects are so small that even with NASA’s Hubble and Webb space telescopes, they appear only as tiny points of light. Artwork: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) For the first time, scientists used the
According to the standard model of cosmology, that expansion rate should be the same no matter how you measure it. But in recent years, scientists have found that the expansion rate of the early universe and that of the more recent universe vary by approximately 9 percent. That discrepancy, or tension, “has provoked heated debates
Recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope images show the gas giant Saturn and its southern pole, where astronomers have discovered a 10-sided atmospheric wave. Observations show the decagon extends through multiple layers of Saturn’s atmosphere. Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan Recent observations with
