The Hubble Space Telescope captured a crowd of stars that looks rather like a stadium darkened before a show, lit only by the flashbulbs of the audience’s cameras. via NASA https://ift.tt/3p1Trg7

What’s the matter with the Bullet Cluster? This massive cluster of galaxies (1E 0657-558) creates gravitational lens distortions of background galaxies in a way that has been interpreted as strong evidence for the leading theory: that dark matter exists within. Different analyses, though, indicate that a less popular alternative — modifying gravity– could explain cluster […]

Using the unique capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe. via NASA https://ift.tt/2WnTvul

It’s happening. Saturn and Jupiter are moving closer and will soon appear in almost exactly the same direction. Coincidentally, on the night of the December solstice — the longest night of the year in the north and the longest day in the south — the long-awaited Great Conjunction will occur. Then, about six days from […]

Ten NASA-sponsored CubeSats are preparing to fly on the agency’s next Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) mission, making this the first payload carried by Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket. via NASA https://ift.tt/3gIk3jA

The streak across the sky is a capsule returning from an asteroid. It returned earlier this month from the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu carrying small rocks and dust from its surface. The canister was released by its mothership, Japan’s Hayabusa2, a mission that visited Ryugu in 2018, harvested a surface sample in 2019, and zoomed […]

Where do Geminid meteors come from? In terms of location on the sky, as the featured image composite beautifully demonstrates, the sand-sized bits of rock that create the streaks of the Geminids meteor shower appear to flow out from the constellation of Gemini. In terms of parent body, Solar System trajectories point to the asteroid […]

During this northern summer Saturn and Jupiter were both near opposition, opposite the Sun in planet Earth’s sky. Their paired retrograde motion, seen about every 20 years, is followed from 19 June through 28 August in this panoramic composite as they wander together between the stars in western Capricornus and eastern Sagittarius. But this December’s […]

NASA and Boeing have completed Starliner’s last parachute balloon-drop test designed to strengthen the spacecraft’s landing system ahead of crewed flights. via NASA https://ift.tt/3gnZjNV

Don’t miss the coming great conjunction. In just under two weeks, the two largest planets in our Solar System will angularly pass so close together in Earth’s sky that the Moon would easily be able to cover them both simultaneously. This pending planetary passage — on December 21 — will be the closest since 1623. […]