Space

Z8_GND_5296 Is The Universe’s Most Distant Galaxy- 30 Billion Light Years Away

Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but There's a new most distant galaxy ever found, created within 700 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy is z8_GND_5296. Unlike our Milky Way, which ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 24 2013 - 11:16am

SDO Sees Sun Emit An M9.4 Solar Flare

On Oct. 23rd, 2013, the sun emitted a solar flare, classified as an M9.4 flare on a scale from M1 to M9.9- near the very top of the scale for M class flares. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 26 2013 - 8:00am

In Time For Halloween, The Ghostly Shape Of The Boomerang Nebula

The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe; even colder than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space. ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 24 2013 - 4:49pm

Sun Emits Fourth X-class Solar Flare In The Last Week

The sun emitted another significant solar flare, peaking at 5:54 p.m. on Oct. 29th, 2013  – the fourth X-class flare in the last week. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation and while the radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmo ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2013 - 2:30pm

Kepler-78b: Just Like Earth, Except 2,000 Degrees Hotter

A newly discovered planet, Kepler-78b, is in the constellation of Cygnus but it's a lot like Earth. If Earth were 2,000 degrees hotter and orbited the sun every 8 hours.  But otherwise it is a lot like our planet, about 20% larger and 169% of our mass ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2013 - 3:24pm

Doomed World Kepler-78b Delights Astronomers

Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn't exist because the blazing hot lava world circles its star every 8.5 hours at a distance of less than one million miles- one of the tightest known orbits. According to current beliefs about planet formation, it co ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2013 - 4:05pm

Giant Gas Cloud Collision Imminent: Raise The Magnetic Force Field

The Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas, is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy., hurtling toward its doom at more than 540,000 miles per hour. But that means the impact will happen in approximately 30 million years. Yet when it d ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 1 2013 - 7:30am

Black Hole In Globular Cluster M62

Two black holes in a collection of stars known as a globular cluster are not unique- another black hole candidate has been found in globular cluster M62. The globular cluster M62 is located in the constellation Ophiuchus, about 22,000 light years from Ear ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2013 - 6:31pm

Collapsing Star Thunderdome: 2 Black Holes Enter, 1 Black Hole Leaves

Black holes, with gravitational forces so strong that not even light can escape them, come in a variety of sizes. On the smaller end of the scale are the stellar-mass black holes that are formed during the deaths of stars. At the larger end are supermassi ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 6 2013 - 4:32pm

Hydra-Like Asteroid Spouts 6 Tails

Astronomers viewing the asteroid belt with the Hubble Telescope havd found an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel. P/2013 P5 is different from all other known asteroids. It looks kind of like a rotating lawn ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 7 2013 - 6:33pm