On February 15th, Intuitive Machines (IM) launched its first Nova-C class spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On February 22nd, the spacecraft – codenamed Odysseus (or “Odie”) – became the first American-built vehicle to soft-land on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. While the landing was...
We can’t understand what we can’t clearly see. That fact plagues scientists who study how planets form. Planet formation happens inside a thick, obscuring disk of gas and dust. But when it comes to seeing through that dust to where nascent planets begin to take shape, astronomers have a powerful new tool: the James Webb Space Telescope. ...
Historical astronomical records from China and Japan recorded a supernova explosion in the year 1181. It was in the constellation Cassiopeia and it shone as bright as the star Vega for 185 days. Modern astronomers took their cue from their long-gone counterparts and have been searching for its remnant. But it took them time to find it because...
We know how stars form. Clouds of interstellar gas and dust gravitationally collapse to form a burst of star formation we call a stellar nursery. Eventually, the cores of these protostars become dense enough to ignite their nuclear furnace and shine as true stars. But catching stars in that birth-moment act is difficult. Young stars are often hidden...
Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you’re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn’t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described...
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was designed to examine the Sun, but as a side benefit, it has been the most successful comet hunter ever built. Since early in the mission, citizen scientists have been scanning through the telescope’s data, searching for icy objects passing close to the Sun. An astronomy student in Czechia has identified...
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