Astronomers once thought asteroids were boring, wayward space rocks that simply orbit around the Sun. These objects were dramatically presented only in science fiction movies.
After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has produced this stunningly detailed portrait of the Triangulum galaxy (M33), displaying a full spiral face aglow with the light of nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. It is the largest high-resolution mosaic image of Triangulum ever assembled, composed of 54 Hubble fields of view spanning an area more than 19,000 light-years across.
This visualization of a spectacular spiral galaxy, called the Whirlpool Galaxy, appears in the “Deep Field” film. Based on a 90-megapixel image from the Hubble Space Telescope, the visualization sequence sweeps viewers past the swirling structure of dark dust lanes, yellowish older stars, bluish younger stars, and vibrant red star-forming regions. Credit: NASA, ESA, and […]
Our solar system has eight major planets, and nearly 200 moons. Though astronomers have to date found nearly 4,000 planets orbiting other stars, no moons have yet been found. That hasn’t been for any lack of looking, it’s just that moons are smaller than planets and therefore harder to detect.