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Latest by G. Torbet

Twilight observations with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile have enabled astronomers to spot three near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) hiding in the glare of the Sun. These NEAs are part of an elusive population that lurks inside the orbits of Earth and Venus. One of the asteroids is the largest object that is potentially hazardous to Earth to be discovered in the last eight years.

Astronomers spot a huge ‘planet killer’ asteroid between Earth and Venus

Astronomers announced they have spotted a huge asteroid nearly a mile wide that could one day intersect with Earth's path.
Hundreds of small galaxies appear across this view. Their colours vary. Some are shades of orange, while others are white. Most appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinct spiral arms. There are also many thin, long, orange arcs that curve around the centre of the image, where there is a prominent orange glow.

Spooky cobwebbed Hubble image helps investigate dark matter

With Halloween coming up, the Hubble Space Telescope team is celebrating by releasing a new Hubble image showing the dark cobwebs of galaxy cluster Abell 611.
This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope depicts IC 1623, an entwined pair of interacting galaxies which lies around 270 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. The two galaxies in IC 1623 are plunging headlong into one another in a process known as a galaxy merger. Their collision has ignited a frenzied spate of star formation known as a starburst, creating new stars at a rate more than twenty times that of the Milky Way galaxy.

James Webb captures a stunning colliding pair of galaxies

A recently released image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the stunning galaxies IC 1623 A and B, which are in the process of merging.
Mars Express HRSC image of Phobos, taken on 7 March 2010.

Rebooted Mars Express instrument peers inside martian moon Phobos

A nearly 20-year-old instrument on the Mars Express orbiter received a software upgrade that enabled it to take a close-up look at the martian moon Phobos.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this image (which has been cropped) of the Earth on Oct 15, 2022, as a part of an instrument calibration sequence at a distance of 380,000 miles (620,000 km). The upper left of the image includes a view of Hadar, Ethiopia, home to the 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor fossil for which the spacecraft was named.

Lucy spacecraft snaps stunning image of Earth during flyby

Earlier this month, NASA's Lucy spacecraft whipped by Earth as it performed a flyby. While it was passing by, it snapped images of both the Earth and the moon.
This illustration, updated as of June 2020, depicts NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.

NASA’s Psyche mission to metal asteroid has a new launch date

NASA's Psyche spacecraft, set to visit a metal asteroid, has been given a new launch date following a delay to its launch originally set for August 2022.
The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has experienced its second close encounter with the Sun. It is delivering more stunning data, and at higher resolution than ever before.

See the ‘quiet’ of the sun’s corona in Solar Orbiter footage

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft has made a second close approach to the sun and has captured stunning footage of its corona.
Illustration of an impact causing surface waves to spread across Mars.

Enormous meteor strike blows 500 foot-wide crater into Martian surface

One of the biggest meteor strikes ever witnessed in the solar system has been recorded by two different Mars missions.
This annotated image from NASA’s Perseverance shows the location of the first sample depot – where the Mars rover will deposit a group of sample tubes for possible future return to Earth – in an area of Jezero Crater called Three Forks. The image was taken Aug. 29, 2022.

Perseverance rover to drop off samples for return to Earth

The NASA Perseverance rover is paving the way for future missions which intend to bring samples back from Mars to Earth for the first time.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared view of the Pillars of Creation strikes a chilling tone. Thousands of stars that exist in this region disappear – and seemingly endless layers of gas and dust become the centerpiece.

The Pillars of Creation look spooky in new James Webb image

Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have released another image of the Pillars of Creation -- and it's a spooky one.
Partial eclipse of the Sun, 20 July 1982. Captured from Harefield in the UK.

How to watch this week’s solar eclipse in person or online

This Tuesday, a partial solar eclipse will be visible in some parts of the world as the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. Here's how to watch.
The lives of newborn stars are tempestuous, as this image of the Herbig-Haro objects HH 1 and HH 2 from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts. Both objects are in the constellation Orion and lie around 1,250 light-years from Earth. HH 1 is the luminous cloud above the bright star in the upper right of this image, and HH 2 is the cloud in the bottom left.

Hubble captures a tempestuous pair of Herbig-Haro objects

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a pair of objects called Herbig-Haro objects, which were captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.
This mosaic is composed of images covering the entire sky, taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) as part of WISE’s 2012 All-Sky Data Release. By observing the entire sky, WISE can search for faint objects, like distant galaxies, or survey groups of cosmic objects.

See how the night sky changes over a decade with this NASA time lapse

NASA has shared a time lapse animation showing the changes in the night sky over a period of more than a decade.
The cross-hairs mark the location of the newly discovered monster black hole.

Astronomers spot a monster black hole ‘practically in our backyard’

Recently, astronomers discovered a massive black hole just 1,550 light-years away, which is right in our neighborhood, astronomically speaking.
An artists concept of DAVINCI+ on its way to Venus's surface.

How NASA is building an instrument to withstand the brutal conditions of Venus

NASA has shared more details about one of the DAVINCI mission's instruments and how it will collect vital data in the challenging Venus environment.
spacex aborts starship test flight just one second from launch abort

See SpaceX’s chopsticks in action stacking the Starship rocket

SpaceX recently shared footage of its Starship rocket being stacked at its Starbase development facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this panorama of a hill nicknamed Bolívar and adjacent sand ridges on Aug. 23, the 3,572nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Curiosity rover investigates salty region of Mars for clues of life

It's an exciting time when a Mars rover reaches an area high in sulfates, and the Curiosity rover recently arrived at one such location on Mount Sharp.
A gas giant exoplanet [right] with the density of a marshmallow has been detected in orbit around a cool red dwarf star [left] by the NASA-funded NEID radial-velocity instrument on the 3.5-meter WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The planet, named TOI-3757 b, is the fluffiest gas giant planet ever discovered around this type of star.

Unusual puffy exoplanet has the density of marshmallow

Researchers using the Kitt Peak National Observatory have identified a puffy, low-density marshmallow planet orbiting a cool red dwarf star.
Two tails of dust ejected from the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system are seen in new images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, documenting the lingering aftermath of the NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact.

Crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid caused it to form twin tails

A few weeks ago NASA's DART mission crashed into an asteroid. Followup observations from Hubble show a surprising finding: the asteroid now has a second tail.
Artist's impression of asteroid 21 Lutetia.

30,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered — and the search is on for more

There are a whole lot of asteroids out there in our solar system, and looking for potentially dangerous asteroids is an ongoing job.
This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate.

Astronomers develop ‘early warning system’ for stars about to go supernova

We can't predict exactly when any given star will go supernova, but now astronomers have come up with a method to spot stars approaching this critical point.
An illustration of OSIRIS-REx returning its sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth. The sample return capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere, cross the Western U.S., deploy its parachute, and touch down at the Air Force's Utah Test and Training Range in the Great Salt Lake Desert. From there, the capsule will be flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where its samples of asteroid Bennu will be curated, distributed, and studied for decades to come.

Here’s how NASA will drop off a sample of an asteroid

NASA has shared details on how exactly the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will deliver its sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth.
see lucy spacecraft slingshot past earth fly by

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft swings by Earth on its way to Trojan asteroids

This weekend, a few lucky observers were able to see NASA's Lucy spacecraft as it performed an Earth flyby before heading back out into space.
Artist’s illustration of tidal disruption event AT2019dsg where a supermassive black hole spaghettifies and gobbles down a star. Some of the material is not consumed by the black hole and is flung back out into space.

Something strange is up with this black hole

Astronomers recently discovered a totally mysterious phenomenon, where a black hole is ejecting material years after it ripped apart a star.
Shells of cosmic dust created by the interaction of binary stars appear like tree rings around Wolf-Rayet 140.

This oddball pair of stars is producing dust shells like clockwork

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted an intriguing object created by a rare pair of stars which are encircled by rings of dust.
This artist’s impression shows an ultra-hot exoplanet, a planet beyond our Solar System, as it is about to transit in front of its host star. When the light from the star passes through the planet’s atmosphere, it is filtered by the chemical elements and molecules in the gaseous layer. With sensitive instruments, the signatures of those elements and molecules can be observed from Earth. Using the ESPRESSO instrument of ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have found the heaviest element yet in an exoplanet's atmosphere, barium, in the two ultra-hot Jupiters WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b.

Heaviest element ever discovered in exoplanet atmospheres is a puzzle

Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope have discovered the heaviest element ever in an exoplanet atmosphere.
nas tess satellite begins exoplanet hunt orbits planet

NASA’s exoplanet hunting satellite is back up and running

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has resumed operations following a technical issue that caused it to be put into safe mode earlier this week.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft is seen as it lands with NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines, Jessica Watkins, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti aboard in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, Friday, Oct. 14, 2022.

NASA’s four-person Crew-4 mission splashes down safely off Florida coast

The four astronauts of NASA's Crew-4 mission have returned from the International Space Station and splashed down safely off the coast of Florida.
samsung smart refrigerator deal may 2022 last chance bespoke 4 door french feature

Save $1,100 on Samsung’s smart refrigerator in its rival Amazon sale

This smart refrigerator usually costs $4,224, but right now, you can save a massive $1,125 with the price reduced to $3,099.
Acer Aspire 3

These Laptops are Under $500 in the October Prime Day Sales

Scoop up a bargain on a new laptop with these Prime Day laptop deals that are available now for under $500.
The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Two interacting galaxies are warped by gravitational forces in Hubble image

Hubble snaps a pair of interacting galaxies, close enough to be distorted by tremendous gravitational forces.
Saturn's geologically active moon, Enceladus.

How we could search for life on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus

When it comes to searching for places beyond Earth where life could thrive in our solar system, some of the most intriguing targets aren't planets but moons.
X-rays from Chandra have been combined with infrared data from early publicly-released James Webb Space Telescope images.

X-ray data from Chandra gives a new view of Webb’s first images

The Chandra X-ray Observatory provides a new spin on the famous first images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Artist's illustration of CAPSTONE approaching the moon.

Engineers get NASA’s CAPSTONE lunar satellite spin back under control

For the past month, NASA's CAPSTONE satellite has been spinning through space. But now, engineers have managed to get its attitude back under control.