Today NASA released the first image from Webb with all 18 segments focused and functioning together as a single 6.5-meter mirror.
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Former NOAO employee Doug Tody, who was the visionary behind the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility (IRAF), has passed away from complications related to cancer.
On Wednesday, February 23, 2022, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (Inouye Solar Telescope) commenced its first science observations, signaling the start of its year-long operations commissioning phase and a new era of solar science. Over 25 years in the making, the world’s most powerful solar telescope is now poised to revolutionize our understanding of the Sun and its impacts on Earth.
A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
This image, taken by astronomers using the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, captures the galaxy NGC 1566 as it twirls, flinging its arms through the vastness of space. Colloquially nicknamed the Spanish Dancer, this spiral galaxy is often studied by astronomers learning about galaxy groups, stars of different ages, and galactic black holes.
Scientists have had only limited ability to study these objects once discovered, but all of that is about to change with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
This week the Webb telescope team kept the excitement going with two main developments.
Light from a star made its way through the entire telescope for the very first time, and engineering images were acquired!
Today Webb concluded a month of incredible achievements, and we checked off the last box on our deployment “To Do List.” Webb’s last deployment activity, insertion into L2 orbit, is now complete. Although there are many more achievements to look forward to, let’s take a moment to review what the Webb teams accomplished so far.
Sinuous stellar jets meander lazily across a field of stars in new images captured from Chile by the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The gently curving stellar jets are the outflow from young stars, and astronomers suspect their sidewinding appearances are caused by the gravitational attraction of companion stars.
What do the Webb Space Telescope mirror segments and a tortoise have in common? They both take it slow and steady. In the case of Webb, slow and steady times eighteen.
An international research team will survey the stars, star clusters, and dust that lie within 19 nearby galaxies.
Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis.
Now that the telescope is fully deployed, engineers started to unlock and move the mirror segments this week in preparation for focusing. This is a slow and deliberate process, and the full release of the mirrors will continue over the next 10 days.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has cataloged more galaxies than all other previous three-dimensional redshift surveys combined, measuring 7.5 million galaxies in only seven months since beginning science operations. The US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory leads DESI, which is installed at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab, on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope.
EK Draconis illuminates an unimagined picture of how superflares may affect interplanetary space through coronal mass ejection
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