The Apex Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) has been completed, ESO announced on February 24, 2016. The survey resulted in an impressive new image of the Milky Way, showing the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere at…
The European Space Agency (ESA) has established the ExoMars programme to research the question if life ever existed on Mars. The programme will investigate the Martian environment through two missions. The first one, consisting of an Orbiter plus and Entry, Descent…
A large blue-green fireball was observed over southern California around 14:35 UTC on February 11, 2016. According to American Meteor Society, the event was reported by nearly 270 witnesses. It was seen primarily from California but witnesses from Arizona and…
Gravitational waves, the ripples in the spacetime fabric, were observed for the first time, the scientists confirmed on February 11, 2016. The waves resulted from a cataclysmic event of two black holes merging in the distant universe. Their existence, first…
NASA's New Horizons missions collected images and data indicating the isolated hills on Pluto may be fragments of water ice from the planet's surrounding uplands. The hills are thought to float in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move just like the icebergs in…
The China National Space Administration has published hundreds of previously unseen high-quality images, videos and scientific data of the Moon. The information was gathered by the Chang'e-3 lunar rover and is now available to anyone who is interested in it. …
NASA's scientists obtained images of a huge jet of particles blasted from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Pictor A galaxy. The continuous X-ray emission spread across the distance of 300 000 light years which is three times the diameter of Milky…
2013 TX68, the small asteroid that flew by our planet two years ago is now coming back again for another flyby on March 5, 2016. This time, the asteroid might make a much closer pass though still at a safe distance. Two years ago, 2013 TX68 flew by Earth at a…
A large cloud of hydrogen gas is on a return collision course to the Milky Way galaxy, running towards it with a speed of almost 1 126 540 km/h (700 000 mph) and is expected to hit it in about 30 million years. The new Hubble Space Telescope observations suggest the…
February 2016 starts with the conjunction between the Moon and Mars. The pair will be located in the constellation Libra and visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars on February 1. The best time of the month to observe faint objects such as galaxies…
