Tag Archives: Space

Want to see what 14,000 stars looks like? Check out this photo from NASA of the Carina Nebula. This amazing photo is from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which has provided us with some of the most stunning (and surprising) space photos to date.

Twenty quadrillion miles away, scientists have discovered a diamond orbiting a star that's only fifteen miles across, but more massive than our sun. This star is spinning over 100 times per second, and the gigantic diamond orbiting around it is around the size of the planet Jupiter.

The astronomers, led by Takahiro Sumi if Osaka University in Japan, reported in the journal Nature there are hundreds of billions of planets that have been orphaned by their planetary systems. The planets have either been completely ejected out of orbit, meandering through space, or are distantly bound to their stars at a distance at least 10 times that of the Earth's distance from the Sun.

The International Space Station Multilateral Coordination Board (MCB), represented by space agency officials from Japan, Russia, Canada, Europe and NASA have reached an agreement to create a universal dock for linking spacecraft and space stations. This might not sound like much, but what it means is that not only can international agencies work in tandem at an unparalleled level, but ...

NASA has a little treat for all of us robot and/or space junkies out there. From 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET) every morning, Monday-Friday, work begins at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, as engineers carefully assemble the Curiosity Mars Rover. And you can watch them do it live with NASA’s Curiosity Cam. Other than occasional “maintenance periods” ...

If you grew up in a rural area and then moved to a big city, one of the first things that you probably noticed was the differences of the night sky. And if you’ve never traveled outside of your safety zone, then this could be a revelation. I think most people have a good idea that pollution and light have ...

Meet our two new national heroes. You might even have a pair of heroes living under your own roof. Luke Geissbuhler and his son (not the heroes) took an iPhone and an HD video camera (there they are!), enclosed in a Styrofoam block attached to a specially-designed weather balloon, and launched the devices 19 miles into the sky. As the ...

For as long as intelligent human life has existed, we’ve wondered about our origins. How did it all begin? Theories have ranged everywhere from waterborne molecules, to comets, to alien colonization, but now scientists are turning their eyes in a new direction – towards the heavens. A new experiment that simulates chemical reactions in the atmosphere of Titan, the largest ...

Today’s The Big Picture subject is our Solar System. They’ve chronicled a beautiful collection of photos from outer space taken within the last month or so. Above is a 30-frame sequence of Cassini’s approach towards the icy plumes of Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. After the jump you’ll see an actual Aurora Australis as seen from space, a few ...

It’s really quite obvious. Everything we do and say is projected into space at the speed of light. So in theory, we’d be able to see our past if we had a massive mirror launched deep into the universe and reflected back towards us. And we wouldn’t even need a suped-up DeLorean. Though this method comes packaged with plenty of ...