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ScienceCasts Earth's Magnetosphere Elucidating The Black Holes The Surprising Power of a Solar Storm Weird Planets A Close Encounter With Jupiter Ancient remnants deep in the Kuiper belt The Super Fluid Core Of A Dead Neutron Star Massive Cloud On Collision Course With Milky Way Mysterious Objects at the Edge of the Electromagnetic Spectrum Big Mystery in the Perseus Cluster Spacecraft discovers thousands of doomed comets Close Encounter with Enceladus Amazing Moons The Sounds Of The InterStellar Space


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MXPlank Astronomy News Snippets



YEAR - 2024




**** Extremely sorry for some of the missing dates in the year. We will try to keep it as continuous as possible****





AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-11-10 : The largest canyon in the Solar System cuts a wide swath across the face of Mars. Named Valles Marineris, the grand valley extends over 3,000 kilometers long, spans as much as 600 kilometers across, and delves as much as 8 kilometers deep


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-11-07 : This spectacular intergalactic skyscape features Arp 227, a curious system of galaxies from the 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Some 100 million light-years distant within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, Arp 227 consists of the two galaxies prominent above and left of center, the shell galaxy NGC 474 and its blue, spiral-armed neighbor NGC 470


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-11-03 : What's that black spot on Jupiter? No one is sure. During one pass of NASA's Juno over Jupiter, the robotic spacecraft imaged an usually dark cloud feature informally dubbed the Abyss


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-11-02 : Saturn is bright in Earth's night skies. Telescopic views of the outer gas giant planet and its beautiful rings often make it a star at star parties


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-09-30 : The new comet has passed its closest to the Sun and is now moving closer to the Earth. C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is currently moving out from inside the orbit of Venus and on track to pass its nearest to the Earth in about two weeks


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-09-29 : Is this really the famous Pleiades star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleiades is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here, three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, G=12, B=4


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-09-11 : A natural border between Slovakia and Poland is the Tatra Mountains. A prominent destination for astrophotographers, the Tatras are the highest mountain range in the Carpathians


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-09-08 : The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy. Even at some two and a half million light-years distant, this immense spiral galaxy -- spanning over 200,000 light years -- is visible, although as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-09-06 : Ringed ice giant Neptune lies near the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The dim and distant world is the farthest planet from the Sun, about 30 times farther away than planet Earth


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-29 : A nearby star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. At that distance, this 1


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-27 : What if Saturn disappeared? Sometimes, it does. It doesn't really go away, though, it just disappears from view when our Moon moves in front


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-22 : In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnological constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower. In fact, monstrous clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that spans almost 40 light-years across this gorgeous telescopic portrait


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-20 : A supermoon occurred yesterday. And tonight's moon should also look impressive


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-16 : A single exposure made with a camera pointed almost due north on August 12 recorded this bright Perseid meteor in the night sky west of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The meteor's incandescent trace is fleeting


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-14 : This was an unusual night. For one thing, the night sky of August 11 and 12, earlier this week, occurred near the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-13 : What's that on the horizon? When circling the Earth on the International Space Station early last month, astronaut Matthew Dominick saw an unusual type of lightning just beyond the Earth's edge: a gigantic jet. The powerful jet appears on the left of the featured image in red and blue


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-12 : What's happening in the sky above Stonehenge? A meteor shower: specifically, the Perseid meteor shower. A few nights ago, after the sky darkened, many images of meteors from this year's Perseids were captured separately and merged into a single frame


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-11 : Where do Perseid meteors come from? Mostly small bits of stony grit, Perseid meteoroids were once expelled from Comet Swift-Tuttle and continue to follow this comet's orbit as they slowly disperse. The featured animation depicts the entire meteoroid stream as it orbits our Sun


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-09 : Denizens of planet Earth typically watch meteor showers by looking up. But this remarkable view, captured on August 13, 2011 by astronaut Ron Garan, caught a Perseid meteor by looking down


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-08 : A Halley-type comet with an orbital period of about 133 years, Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle is recognized as the parent of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. The comet's last visit to the inner Solar System was in 1992


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-07 : To some, they look like battlements, here protecting us against the center of the Milky Way. The Three Merlons, also called the Three Peaks of Lavaredo, stand tall today because they are made of dense dolomite rock which has better resisted erosion than surrounding softer rock


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-06 : What makes this storm cloud so colorful? First, the cloud itself is composed of millions of tiny droplets of water and ice. Its bottom is almost completely flat -- but this isn't unusual


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-05 : That's no moon. On the ground, that's the Lars Homestead in Tunisia


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-04 : What would it look like to return home from outside our galaxy? Although designed to answer greater questions, data from ESA's robotic Gaia mission is helping to provide a uniquely modern perspective on humanity's place in the universe. Gaia orbits the Sun near the Earth and resolves stars' positions so precisely that it can determine a slight shift from its changing vantage point over the course of a year, a shift that is proportionately smaller for more distant stars -- and so determines distance


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-08-02 : As Mars wanders through Earth's night, it passes about 5 degrees south of the Pleiades star cluster in this composite astrophoto. The skyview was constructed from a series of images captured over a run of 16 consecutive clear nights beginning on July 12


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-31 : What is creating these unusual spots? Light-colored spots on Martian rocks, each surrounded by a dark border, were discovered earlier this month by NASA's Perseverance Rover currently exploring Mars. Dubbed leopard spots because of their seemingly similarity to markings on famous Earth-bound predators, these curious patterns are being studied with the possibility they were created by ancient Martian life


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-30 : To some, it looks like a penguin. But to people who study the universe, it is an interesting example of two big galaxies interacting


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-28 : Sometimes, the surface of our Sun seems to dance. In the middle of 2012, for example, NASA's Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressive prominence that seemed to perform a running dive roll like an acrobatic dancer


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-27 : Saturn now rises before midnight in planet Earth's sky. On July 24, the naked-eye planet was in close conjunction, close on the sky, to a waning gibbous Moon


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-26 : From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation Cepheus


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-25 : These cosmic clouds have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. Called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula to evoke the imagery of flowers


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-24 : Our Moon doesn't really have craters this big. Earth's Moon, Luna, also doesn't naturally show this spikey texture, and its colors are more subtle


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-19 : For some, these subtle bands of light and shadow stretched across the sky as the Sun set on July 11. Known as anticrepuscular rays, the bands are formed as a large cloud bank near the western horizon cast long shadows through the atmosphere at sunset


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-18 : Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-17 : When Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, swings his blacksmith's hammer, the sky is lit on fire. A recent eruption of Chile's Villarrica volcano shows the delicate interplay between this fire -- actually glowing steam and ash from melted rock -- and the light from distant stars in our Milky Way galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds galaxies


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-15 : Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco)


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-13 : In 1990, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back to make this first ever Solar System family portrait. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-12 : Planetary nebula Jones-Emberson 1 is the death shroud of a dying Sun-like star. It lies some 1,600 light-years from Earth toward the sharp-eyed constellation Lynx


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-11 : Globular star cluster Omega Centauri packs about 10 million stars much older than the Sun into a volume some 150 light-years in diameter. Also known as NGC 5139, at a distance of 15,000 light-years it's the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-10 : These three bright nebulae are often featured on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula above center, and colorful M20 below and left in the frame


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-09 : These clouds are doubly unusual. First, they are rare noctilucent clouds, meaning that they are visible at night -- but only just before sunrise or just after sunset


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-07 : Why are these clouds multi-colored? A relatively rare phenomenon in clouds known as iridescence can bring up unusual colors vividly -- or even a whole spectrum of colors simultaneously. These polar stratospheric clouds also, known as nacreous and mother-of-pearl clouds, are formed of small water droplets of nearly uniform size


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-02 : The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond. Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies this 5 million year old star cluster NGC 602


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-07-01 : What's happened since the universe started? The time spiral shown here features a few notable highlights. At the spiral's center is the Big Bang, the place where time, as we know it, began about 13


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-29 : Rising opposite the setting Sun, June's Full Moon occurred within about 28 hours of the solstice. The Moon stays close to the Sun's path along the ecliptic plane and so while the solstice Sun climbed high in daytime skies, June's Full Moon remained low that night as seen from northern latitudes


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-28 : Not a paradox, Comet 13P/Olbers is returning to the inner Solar System after 68 years. The periodic, Halley-type comet will reach its next perihelion or closest approach to the Sun on June 30 and has become a target for binocular viewing low in planet Earth's northern hemisphere night skies


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-27 : Jets of material blasting from newborn stars, are captured in this James Webb Space Telescope close-up of the Serpens Nebula. The powerful protostellar outflows are bipolar, twin jets spewing in opposite directions


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-25 : What is that strange brown ribbon on the sky? When observing the star cluster NGC 4372, observers frequently take note of an unusual dark streak nearby running about three degrees in length. The streak, actually a long molecular cloud, has become known as the Dark Doodad Nebula


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-23 : What creates Saturn's colors? The featured picture of Saturn only slightly exaggerates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The image was taken in 2005 by the robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-22 : Stars are forming in Lynds Dark Nebula (LDN) 1251. About 1,000 light-years away and drifting above the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, LDN 1251 is also less appetizingly known as 'The Rotten Fish Nebula


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-20 : Last April's Full Moon shines through high clouds near the horizon, casting shadows in this garden-at-night skyscape. Along with canine sentinel Sandy watching the garden gate, the wide-angle snapshot also captured the bright Moon's 22 degree ice halo


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-19 : Do dragons fight on the altar of the sky? Although it might appear that way, these dragons are illusions made of thin gas and dust. The emission nebula NGC 6188, home to the glowing clouds, is found about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud, unseen at visible wavelengths, in the southern constellation Ara (the Altar)


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-17 : Squids on Earth aren't this big. This mysterious squid-like cosmic cloud spans nearly three full moons on planet Earth's sky


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-15 : This colorized and sharpened image of the Sun is composed of frames recording emission from hydrogen atoms in the solar chromosphere on May 15. Approaching the maximum of solar cycle 25, a multitude of active regions and twisting, snake-like solar filaments are seen to sprawl across the surface of the active Sun


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-13 : Big, beautiful spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away. The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the Milky Way


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-07 : Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the well-trained constellation Canis Major and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-05 : What if you saw your shadow on Mars and it wasn't human? Then you might be the Perseverance rover exploring Mars. Perseverance has been examining the Red Planet since 2021, finding evidence of its complex history of volcanism and ancient flowing water, and sending breathtaking images across the inner Solar System


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-06-04 : Why does Comet Pons-Brooks now have tails pointing in opposite directions? The most spectacular tail is the blue-glowing ion tail that is visible flowing down the image. The ion tail is pushed directly out from the Sun by the solar wind


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-31 : Made with narrowband filters, this cosmic snapshot covers a field of view over twice as wide as the full Moon within the boundaries of the constellation Cygnus. It highlights the bright edge of a ring-like nebula traced by the glow of ionized hydrogen and oxygen gas


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-30 : Why does a cloudy moon sometimes appear colorful? The effect, called a lunar corona, is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud. Since light of different colors has different wavelengths, each color diffracts differently


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-29 : What happens if you ascend this stairway to the Milky Way? Before answering that, let's understand the beautiful sky you will see. Most eye-catching is the grand arch of the Milky Way Galaxy, the band that is the central disk of our galaxy which is straight but distorted by the wide-angle nature of this composite image


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-28 : It's back. The famous active region on the Sun that created auroras visible around the Earth earlier this month has survived its rotation around the far side of the Sun -- and returned


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-26 : What's happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual -- it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space, producing an energetic coronal mass ejection (CME)


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-25 : Orbiting 400 kilometers above Quebec, Canada, planet Earth, the International Space Station Expedition 59 crew captured this snapshot of the broad St. Lawrence River and curiously circular Lake Manicouagan on April 11


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-23 : Spiral galaxy NGC 3169 looks to be unraveling like a ball of cosmic yarn. It lies some 70 million light-years away, south of bright star Regulus toward the faint constellation Sextans


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-22 : It was bright and green and stretched across the sky. This striking aurora display was captured in 2016 just outside of Östersund, Sweden


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-20 : It seemed like night, but part of the sky glowed purple. It was the now famous night of May 10, 2024, when people over much of the world reported beautiful aurora-filled skies


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-19 : Take this simulated plunge and dive into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, the Solar System's ruling gas giant. The awesome animation is based on image data from JunoCam, and the microwave radiometer on board the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-13 : It was larger than the Earth. It was so big you could actually see it on the Sun's surface without magnification


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-12 : Northern lights don't usually reach this far south. Magnetic chaos in the Sun's huge Active Region 3664, however, produced a surface explosion that sent a burst of electrons, protons, and more massive, charged nuclei into the Solar System


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-11 : Right now, one of the largest sunspot groups in recent history is crossing the Sun. Active Region 3664 is not only big -- it's violent, throwing off clouds of particles into the Solar System


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-10 : Relax and watch two black holes merge. Inspired by the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, this simulation plays in slow motion but would take about one third of a second if run in real time


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-09 : Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured in 2017 by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black hole. Giant of the Virgo galaxy cluster about 55 million light-years away, M87 is rendered in blue hues in this infrared image from the Spitzer Space telescope


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-08 : What would it look like to circle a black hole? If the black hole was surrounded by a swirling disk of glowing and accreting gas, then the great gravity of the black hole would deflect light emitted by the disk to make it look very unusual. The featured animated video gives a visualization


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-07 : What happens when a black hole devours a star? Many details remain unknown, but observations are providing new clues. In 2014, a powerful explosion was recorded by the ground-based robotic telescopes of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (Project ASAS-SN), with followed-up observations by instruments including NASA's Earth-orbiting Swift satellite


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-06 : This is how the Sun disappeared from the daytime sky last month. The featured time-lapse video was created from stills taken from Mountain View, Arkansas, USA on 2024 April 8


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-04 : Despite their resemblance to R2D2, these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-03 : A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-02 : Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own Milky Way


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-05-01 : To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish. However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-29 : Three bright objects satisfied seasoned stargazers of the western sky just after sunset earlier this month. The most familiar was the Moon, seen on the upper left in a crescent phase


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-28 : The Ring Nebula (M57) is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkably deep exposure - a collaborative effort combining data from three different large telescopes - explores the looping filaments of glowing gas extending much farther from the nebula's central star


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-27 : If the Sun is up but the sky is dark and the horizon is bright all around, you might be standing in the Moon's shadow during a total eclipse of the Sun. In fact, the all-sky Moon shadow shown in this composited panoramic view was captured from a farm near Shirley, Arkansas, planet Earth


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-25 : Located some 3 million light-years away in the arms of nearby spiral galaxy M33, giant stellar nursery NGC 604 is about 1,300 light-years across. That's nearly 100 times the size of the Milky Way's Orion Nebula, the closest large star forming region to planet Earth


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-24 : How did a star form this beautiful nebula? In the middle of emission nebula NGC 6164 is an unusually massive star. The central star has been compared to an oyster's pearl and an egg protected by the mythical sky dragons of Ara


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-23 : What created this giant X in the clouds? It was the shadow of contrails illuminated from below. When airplanes fly, humid engine exhaust may form water droplets that might freeze in Earth's cold upper atmosphere


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-22 : Yes, but can your volcano do this? To the surprise of some, Mt. Etna emits, on occasion, smoke rings


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-21 : Watch Juno zoom past Jupiter. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its now month-long, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-20 : When the dark shadow of the Moon raced across North America on April 8, sky watchers along the shadow's narrow central path were treated to a total solar eclipse. During the New Moon's shadow play diamonds glistened twice in the eclipse-darkened skies


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-19 : A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula is more modestly known as NGC 3372. One of our Galaxy's largest star forming regions, it spans over 300 light-years


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-17 : Not one, but two comets appeared near the Sun during last week's total solar eclipse. The expected comet was Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, but it was disappointingly dimmer than many had hoped


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-16 : The explosion is over, but the consequences continue. About eleven thousand years ago, a star in the constellation of Vela could be seen to explode, creating a strange point of light briefly visible to humans living near the beginning of recorded history


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-15 : Something strange happened to this galaxy, but what? Known as the Cigar Galaxy and cataloged as M82, red glowing gas and dust are being cast out from the center. Although this starburst galaxy was surely stirred up by a recent pass near its neighbor, large spiral galaxy M81, this doesn't fully explain the source of the red-glowing outwardly expanding gas and dust


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-14 : How does a total solar eclipse end? Yes, the Moon moves out from fully blocking the Sun, but in the first few seconds of transition, interesting things appear. The first is called a diamond ring


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-13 : Only those along the narrow track of the Moon's shadow on April 8 saw a total solar eclipse. But most of North America still saw a partial eclipse of the Sun


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-12 : Baily's beads often appear at the boundaries of the total phase of an eclipse of the Sun. Pearls of sunlight still beaming through gaps in the rugged terrain along the lunar limb silhouette, their appearance is recorded in this dramatic timelapse composite


AstroPhysics Snippet Of The Day 2024-04-11 : Start at the upper left above and you can follow the progress of April 8's total eclipse of the Sun in seven sharp, separate exposures. The image sequence was recorded with a telescope and camera located within the narrow path of totality as the Moon's shadow swept across Newport, Vermont, USA