Small Satellite Deployed From the Space Station
A satellite is ejected from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Small Satellite Orbital Deployer on the International Space Station on Dec. 19, 2016. The satellite is actually two small...
Top Astronomy News Stories of 2016
The discovery made headlines worldwide and even appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. After more than a half-century of searching, physicists finally detected gravitational waves — ripples...
New Year’s Fireworks from a Shattered Comet
Earth will pass through a stream of debris from comet 2003 EH1 on January 3, 2017, producing a shower of meteors known as the Quadrantids. According to the International Meteor Organization and...
Space Timekeeping: NASA’s SDO Adds Leap Second to Master Clock
On Dec. 31, 2016, official clocks around the world will add a leap second just before midnight Coordinated Universal Time — which corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST. NASA missions will also have to...
Hubble Gazes at a Cosmic Megamaser
This galaxy has a far more exciting and futuristic classification than most — it hosts a megamaser. Megamasers are intensely bright, around 100 million times brighter than the masers found in...
NASA Administrator Remembers NASA Scientist, Astronaut Piers Sellers
The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on Piers Sellers, who passed away Friday in Houston of pancreatic cancer: “The entire NASA family mourns the passing of scientist...
A Total Solar Eclipse in 2017
The “Big One” is coming. In astronomical circles there is no greater, more spectacularly stellar event than a total solar eclipse. And at long last, we will have one in the United States in 2017. It...
Vera Rubin, dark matter pioneer dies aged 88
Vera Rubin, a US astronomer who pioneered work on invisible dark matter in the universe and who some colleagues felt was overlooked for a Nobel Prize, has died at 88, her son said on Monday. Rubin...
