Today is International Asteroid Day! via NASA https://ift.tt/3juBFmc

How did the first stars form? To help find out, the SPHINX computer simulation of star formation in the very early universe was created, some results of which are shown in the featured video. Time since the Big Bang is shown in millions of years on the upper left. Even 100 million years after the […]

NASA’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology X-plane is designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without producing sonic booms. via NASA https://ift.tt/3w939R8

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula. Also known as M42, the nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars are born partly because it is the […]

This composite image made from seven frames shows the International Space Station, with a crew of seven onboard, in silhouette as it transits the Sun. via NASA https://ift.tt/3h8GYVM

It may look like a paper Moon. Sailing past a canvas Sun. But those are not cardboard clouds. And it’s not make believe.  The featured picture of an orange colored sky is real — a digital composite of two exposures of the solar eclipse that occurred earlier this month. The first exposure was taken with […]

What drives auroras on Saturn? To help find out, scientists have sorted through hundreds of infrared images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft for other purposes, trying to find enough aurora images to correlate changes and make movies. Once made, some movies clearly show that Saturnian auroras can change not only with the angle […]

These two panels, composed of video frames made with a safe solar telescope and hydrogen alpha filter, show remarkably sharp details on the solar disk and giant prominences along the Sun’s edge on June 6 (top) and June 18. Taken from Beijing, China, they also show a transit of the International Space Station and China’s […]

A cataclysmic cosmic collision takes center stage in this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. via NASA https://ift.tt/3h4iFs6

How far can you see? The Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, is the most distant object easily seen by the unaided eye. Other denizens of the night sky, like stars, clusters, and nebulae, are typically hundreds to thousands of light-years distant. That’s far beyond the Solar System but well within our own Milky […]