Month: May 2023

A coronal mass ejection blasts out of the sun in the midst of a total solar eclipse over Australia on Apr. 20, 2023 (Image credit: Petr Horálek, Josef Kujal, Milan Hlaváč) A group of astrophotographers captured a breathtaking image of the recent “hybrid solar eclipse,” which was visible in the skies above Australia last month.  The image mainly shows off the ghostly filaments of the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, but it also caught a faint glimpse of an eruption of magnetized plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME),…

Stephen Bowen remembers seeing Skylab fly overhead. At eight years old, Bowen’s experience watching the United States’ first space station cross the night sky fueled his interest in spaceflight. Little did he know then, it would also play a big part of his future. “I do remember that it was Skylab,” Bowen said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “My dad took us outside and we actually watched it fly over our house one night.” “I think that was the first object I saw in space, you know, as in a…

South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter flew 11 miles (18 kilometers) above the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 7, 2023, enabling ShadowCam to capture this dramatic image of LRO.  (Image credit: NASA/KARI/Arizona State University) NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been caught out at its own game.  The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been studying the moon up close since 2009. It has also imaged other active spacecraft on the lunar surface, such as China’s Yutu 2 rover, and even other moon orbiters (opens in new tab). And now, a newcomer…

The world is abuzz, perhaps even befuddled, about the growing use of artificial intelligence. One of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to the public today is ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model that has been “trained” and fed vast amounts of online information. After taking all that in, ChatGPT can regurgitate human-like text responses to a given prompt. It can respond to queries, discuss a lot of topics and crank out pieces of writing. It isn’t difficult to imagine a robot wheeling and dealing on the surface of…

A space-age love story centered around NASA’s historic Voyager probes and the Golden Record that hitched a ride onboard might not seem like the most engaging of cinematic projects, but when the true-life persons whose real romance is involved are the famed astronomer Carl Sagan and documentary filmmaker Ann Druyan, it’s bound to draw an abundance of interested parties. Academy Award winning director Sebastian Lelio (“A Fantastic Woman”) is attached to helm FilmNation Entertainment’s next feature film project, “Voyagers,” which takes place in the late-1970s when NASA was prepping to…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to peer backwards through cosmic time, revealing the processes that created the universe as we see it today. Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to stare through the dusty clouds of a distant star-forming galaxy to investigate its structure in fine detail. They discovered that the galaxy is in the midst of a starburst, an explosive surge in star formation possibly caused by a collision with another galaxy.  Located at a distance of around 12 billion light-years away, the galaxy GN20…

SpaceX launched  new batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit early Sunday morning (May 14) and landed a rocket at sea in the company’s latest successful mission. A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 56 Starlink spacecraft lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida Sunday at 1:03 a.m. EDT (0503 GMT).  Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see in the night sky SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launches 56 new Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida early on May 14, 2023. (Image…

SpaceX plans to launch another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit early Sunday morning (May 14), and you can watch the action live. A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 56 Starlink spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida Sunday at 1:03 a.m. EDT (0503 GMT).  Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company (opens in new tab). Coverage is expected to begin five minutes before launch. Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see in the…