Tag Archives: "STScI"

  • Home
  • Posts Tagged "STScI"
    • (Page 7)
Many Segments are now One Mirror

Many Segments are now One Mirror

Today NASA released the first image from Webb with all 18 segments focused and functioning together as a single 6.5-meter ...
Read More
STScI: Galaxy Collision Creates 'Space Triangle' in New Hubble Image

STScI: Galaxy Collision Creates ‘Space Triangle’ in New Hubble Image

A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from ...
Read More
This artist's illustration shows the wayward interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua (pronounced oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah) racing toward the outskirts of our solar system. The object, heated by the Sun (lower right), is venting gaseous material from its surface, as a comet would. Researchers suggest this outgassing is one possible cause for 'Oumuamua's slight acceleration, as detected by several telescopes. The irregularly shaped object is only a half-mile across. It is now farther from the Sun than Jupiter and traveling away at about 70,000 miles per hour. The orbits of the major planets are included for scale. The box-shaped constellation Corvus is in the background near image center, and the bright blue star Spica is at upper left of center, in the constellation Virgo. The stars at bottom left belong to the constellation Hydra.

STScI: Studying the Next Interstellar Interloper with Webb

Scientists have had only limited ability to study these objects once discovered, but all of that is about to change ...
Read More
STScI: Capturing All That Glitters in Galaxies with NASA’s Webb

STScI: Capturing All That Glitters in Galaxies with NASA’s Webb

An international research team will survey the stars, star clusters, and dust that lie within 19 nearby galaxies ...
Read More
STScI: Hubble Finds a Black Hole Igniting Star Formation in a Dwarf Galaxy

STScI: Hubble Finds a Black Hole Igniting Star Formation in a Dwarf Galaxy

Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest ...
Read More
Webb Begins its Journey on ESA’s Ariane 5 Rocket!

Webb Begins its Journey on ESA’s Ariane 5 Rocket!

Today, the James Webb Space Telescope successfully blasted off from the European Space Agency’s launch site in Kourou, French Guiana ...
Read More
Outer Planets Grand Tour

STScI: Hubble’s Grand Tour of the Outer Solar System

From its vantage point high above Earth's atmosphere, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has completed this year's grand tour of the ...
Read More
Illustration of Exoplanet TOI-421 b and Its Star

STScI: Webb Primed to Lift the Haze Surrounding Sub-Neptunes

More than half of the Sun-like star systems surveyed in the Milky Way harbor a mysterious type of planet unlike ...
Read More
STScI: NASA’s Webb Will Join Forces with the Event Horizon Telescope to Reveal the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

STScI: NASA’s Webb Will Join Forces with the Event Horizon Telescope to Reveal the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

to create an image of the area directly surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way ...
Read More
STScI: Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Are Speeding Up

STScI: Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Are Speeding Up

Researchers analyzing Hubble's regular "storm reports" found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the storm, known ...
Read More
Head and shoulders photo of Jennifer Lotz smiling

Jennifer Lotz

Director, Space Telescope Science Institute Dr. Lotz returned to STScI from NOIRLab where she was the Director of the International ...
Read More
About 5,000 years ago a comet swept within 23 million miles of the sun, closer than the innermost planet Mercury. The comet must have been a spectacular sight to those young civilizations across Eurasia and North Africa that were arising at the end of the Stone Age. However, this nameless space visitor is not recorded in any known historical account. So how do astronomers know that there was such an interplanetary intruder? Enter comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4), which first appeared near the beginning of 2020. ATLAS quickly met an untimely death in mid-2020 when it disintegrated into a cascade of small icy pieces. Such a comet’s self-destruction happens once or twice a decade. Astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland reports that ATLAS is a broken-off piece of that ancient visitor from 5,000 years ago. Why? Because ATLAS follows the same orbital “railroad track” as that of a comet seen in 1844. This means the two comets are siblings from the parent comet that broke apart very long ago. The link between the two comets was first noted by amateur astronomer Maik Meyer. Such comet families are common. The most dramatic visual example was in 1994 when the doomed comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) was pulled into a string of pieces by Jupiter’s gravitational pull. This “comet train” was short-lived. It fell piece by piece into Jupiter in July 1994. But comet ATLAS is just “weird,” says Ye, who observed it with Hubble about the time of the breakup. Unlike its hypothesized parent comet, ATLAS disintegrated while it was farther from the Sun than Earth, at a distance of over 100 million miles. This was much farther than the distance where its parent passed the Sun. “This emphasizes its strangeness,” said Ye. “If it broke up this far from the sun, how did it survive the last passage around the sun 5,000 years ago? This is the big question,” said Ye. “It’s very unusual because we wouldn’t expect it. This is the first time a long-period comet f

STScI: Comet ATLAS May Have Been a Blast from the Past

In a new study using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland in ...
Read More
More
AURA Astronomy AURA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization        © 2025 Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy