NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered that a system of asteroids in the distant Kuiper Belt may be triplets, not twins as previously suspected. If so, the stable trio of icy space rocks would be just the second example of three gravitationally bound space rocks found in the Kuiper Belt, the doughnut-shaped region of icy … Read more
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have peered into the atmosphere of a cosmic body that could be a rogue planet or a “failed star.” Either way, the world wanders the cosmos without a parent. The cosmic orphan, or “free-floating planetary-mass object,” designated SIMP 0136 drifts through the universe around 20 light-years from … Read more
Dozens of dwarf galaxies swarming around the Andromeda Galaxy like bees have been caught on camera by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took more than a thousand orbits of the Earth to take enough images to get a full family portrait of Andromeda’s brightest satellites. The 36 dwarf galaxies are varied in their properties, and … Read more
As the hunt for dark matter, the universe’s most common yet most mysterious “stuff,” continues, scientists are understandably eager to get the most powerful space telescope in on the action. Space.com spoke to three scientists, cosmic detectives who are hot on the trail of dark matter candidates using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The … Read more
The scientists behind NASA’s largest and most powerful space telescope ever built are bracing for potentially crippling budget cuts, and the observatory is only halfway through its primary mission. The team overseeing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been directed to prepare for up to 20% in budget cuts that would touch on every … Read more
The black hole at the heart of our galaxy is a real party animal, endlessly blowing cosmic bubbles. The findings aren’t frivolous at all and could help us better understand how black holes interact with their environments and help galaxies evolve. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists discovered that the Milky Way’s central … Read more
How do you cool down a phoenix? I don’t mean the mythological birds of flame and rebirth, but rather a cosmic namesake with a fittingly fiery nature. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers may finally have the answer. They used the powerful instrument to investigate the extreme cooling of gas in the Phoenix … Read more
The Euclid space telescope has, by chance, discovered its first Einstein ring, and it is absolutely stunning. Beyond its aesthetic appeal, this perfectly circular Einstein ring has allowed researchers to “weigh” the dark matter at the heart of a galaxy almost 600 million light-years away. The European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft, which launched in July … Read more
A new study has revealed that temperamental stars that brighten and dim over the course of just a few hours could be distorting astronomers’ views of thousands of planets beyond the solar system. The team behind this research reached this conclusion by studying 20 extrasolar planets or “exoplanets” as they crossed, or “transited,” the faces … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that the centaur called 2060 Chiron is an oddball. The object, which is a minor body that orbits the sun in the expanse between Jupiter and Neptune, has a mixture of ices and gases that make it stand out from other objects in the distant outer solar system. … Read more