Thirty years ago, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter, marking a historic moment in astronomy. This collision gave scientists a first-of-its-kind direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision within our Solar System, providing important information regarding Jupiter’s atmosphere and its role in protecting the inner planets from cosmic debris.
New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have changed our understanding of star formation as what scientists previously believed may have been an off-switch for the process does not work that way after all. The telescope shows that the powerful astrophysical…
Astronomers on the hunt for an intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397, found something they weren’t expecting — a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there instead of one massive black hole. Image credits: NASA,…
Some of our solar system's asteroids have photobombed deep images of the universe taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. These asteroids reside, on average, only about 99.4 million km (160 million miles) from Earth — right around the corner in…
As British royal families fought the War of the Roses in the 1400s for control of England's throne, a grouping of stars was waging its own contentious skirmish — a star war far away in the Orion Nebula. The stars were battling each other in a gravitational…
Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart, which occurred 108 million km (67 million miles) from Earth. Hubble took the images over a three-day span in January 2016 and revealed 25 building-size…
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…
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have applied a new image processing technique to obtain near-infrared scattered light photos of five disks observed around young stars in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes database. These disks are telltale evi
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has recorded the never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces.
Fragile comets, comprised of ice and dust, have been seen falling apart as they near the sun, but nothing like this has ever before been
NASA's Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes are teaming up to look deeper into the universe than ever before. With a boost from natural "zoom lenses" found in space, they should be able to uncover galaxies that are as much as 100 times
