Remember Zoozve? The quasi-moon of Venus featured on Radiolab that was named after a typo on a map of the Solar System?
Now is your chance to name one of Earth’s quasi-moons. The IAU and Radiolab are holding a contest — they will pick the top 10 names, which then go to a popular vote.
NASA confirms that #Hubble will switch to one-gyroscope mode after the increasingly erratic behavior of gyro 3 caused the observatory to repeatedly go into safe mode.
Hubble will continue doing great science, but with somewhat reduced efficiency. It will need more time to slew and lock onto science targets. There is also a limit to the fraction of the sky it can observe at any one time (although it will have access to the full sky over the course of a year).
@kellylepo Will they shutdown the other good remaining gyro? If so, what is the likelihood of it seizing (i.e. not able to re-accelerate to 19.2K RPM when asked to do so)? In my career, we were always nervous about S/D equipment failing to start when needed, to the point where we test ran whatever device/system to confirm availability.
@GlennEJP I think, based on what I heard in today's press conference, they are keeping the second good gyro powered on, but I don't have any of the technical details.
Folks in #Baltimore! Join us for Astronomy on Tap tomorrow — Wednesday, May 29 at Guilford Hall. Doors open at 7pm.
Come hear free, accessible, and fun talks from local astronomers about gas in galaxies, think deep thoughts about time, and see how we are exploring the universe in mid-infrared light with MIRI.
The summer 2024 NASA's Astrophoto Challenge is now open! This summer's target: Cassiopeia A.
Make your own images with real NASA data using a simple, online tool. Then, submit your image. Standout entries are featured on the website and get comments from expert judges.
While JWST was originally designed to see some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, astronomers also use it to observe objects in our cosmic backyard.
Learn how JWST is exploring our solar system to answer questions like:
• How was the solar system formed?
• Where did the chemicals necessary for life on Earth come from?
• What are the icy small bodies in the outer solar system made of?
• How are planets around other stars like planets in our solar system?
Baby stars are messy eaters. This diagram from a review article illustrates the complex interplay between protostars, magnetic fields, and the surrounding gas on large and small scales.
Stars form in cold, dusty clouds of mostly hydrogen gas. As they grow, stars pull in more mass from disks, permeated with magnetic fields. The fields twist around the star, channeling some gas into the star and some into jets above and below the disk.
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Here is Herbig-Haro 211, imaged in near-infrared light by JWST. We can see the bipolar outflows, and the dark, dusty disk that surrounds the forming star.
This creates some gorgeous objects, like Herbig-Haro 46/47, a pair of jets launched by a tightly bound pair of protostars. The stars are located in the center of the red spikes in the center of this JWST image. The jets carve out the reddish cavities inside of the nebula that surrounds it.
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To celebrate #BlackHoleWeek here is a collection of images, videos, interactives, activities, and background resources about black holes from NASA's Universe of Learning.
I came across this delightful video this afternoon when going through some old slides and paused what I was doing to watch the whole thing.
Here is a supercut of 18 astronomy visualizations from @spacetelescope, using computer simulations and Hubble images to create 3D flythroughs of objects in space.
Look how tiny JWST's view of the sky is, especially compared to Euclid's wide field of view.
#JWST took an image of the very top of the Horsehead Nebula, focusing in on a region that transitions from a dense, warm area of gas and dust (blue) to an area of hot, ionized gas (red).
@nSonic Yes! The "spiky" things in the background are stars, the little ovals and spirals are galaxies, and the dots could be either faint stars or distant galaxies.
Millennial telescope tries to celebrate 34th birthday, but instead goes into safe mode because of gyroscope issues (relatable).
The same gyroscope that was causing issues back in November is acting up again, so Hubble has paused science operations while operators troubleshoot the issue. If needed, Hubble can operate with only one of its three remaining gyroscopes, with reduced observing efficiency.
Important to note: The images are from ground-based surveys and are not live feeds from the telescope. They show the area of the current target, pulled from Hubble's observation scheduling database.
Happy Birthday #Hubble! It was launched #OTD April 24, 1990 on the Space Shuttle Discovery.
This year's anniversary image is of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, or M76.
M76 is a planetary nebula, a glowing cloud of gas ejected by a sun-like star at the end of its lifetime. The central bar structure is actually a ring seen edge-on. This was likely sculpted by a binary companion star. Two lobes extend from the bar to the left and right of the ring.
NASA teams were able to move code that was on a section of corrupted memory in one of the spacecraft's computers. Now it's sending back usable engineering data for the first time since November 2023.
@garygouldsberry Yep. Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 46 years ago. Their vintage 70s computers are constantly irradiated, they don't have a lot of power anymore, and it takes more than 22 hours to send a signal to the spacecraft and another 22 hours to see if it worked. Yet they are still mostly working. Hats off to the folks at JPL who make this possible.
A behind the scenes look at the recent press release on finding asteroid trails in #Hubble's back catalog of images.
The first image is uncalibrated. Most of the dots and streaks are from cosmic rays, high-energy particles from space, hitting the detector. The long streaks running across the middle top of the image are from the asteroid.
The post explains the choices Visuals Developer Joe DePasquale made to get to the second full-color image that ran with the release.
@kellylepo - I almost forgot to tell you one of the best parts. As I was in position getting ready for the eclipse to begin, a large front-end loader drove by, and the driver stared at me. This driver would have come in no worse than second place in an Albert Einstein lookalike contest! I thought "Why are you, of all people, not watching this eclipse???" Good times.