The Universe – Page 4 – NeRDs Moonbase

Hubble Studies a Nearby Galaxy’s Star Formation

April 4, 2025 NeRD

Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News…

Hubble Spots Stellar Sculptors in Nearby Galaxy

April 4, 2025 NeRD

NASA’s SPHEREx Takes First Images, Preps to Study Millions of Galaxies

April 1, 2025 NeRD

5 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s SPHEREx, which will map millions of galaxies across the entire sky, captured one of its first exposures March 27. The observatory’s six detectors each captured one of these uncalibrated images, to which visible-light colors have been added to represent infrared wavelengths. SPHEREx’s complete field of view spans the top three images; the same area of the sky is also captured in the bottom three images. NASA/JPL-Caltech Processed with rainbow hues to represent a range of infrared wavelengths, the…

Earth’s sea ice hits all-time low, NASA satellites reveal

March 30, 2025 NeRD

New research from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado measured Arctic sea ice cover on March 22, during what should’ve been its annual peak. In conclusion, the agency reported seeing 5.53 million square miles (14.33 million square kilometers) of sea ice — for context, that’s the lowest Arctic winter sea ice levels have ever been. To make matters worse, NASA scientists also discovered that, this year, summer ice in the Antarctic retreated to 764,000 square miles (1.98 million square kilometers) as of March 1,…

Hubble Spots a Chance Alignment

March 28, 2025 NeRD

NASA’s daredevil solar spacecraft survives 2nd close flyby of our sun

March 27, 2025 NeRD

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its second close flyby of the sun, the space agency announced earlier this week. The car-sized spacecraft swooped within 8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun‘s surface at a whopping 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour), matching the historic record it set during its encounter on Christmas Eve last year. During this approach, which occurred on Saturday (March 22), the Parker Solar Probe once again operated autonomously, with its four science instruments programmed to collect science data about solar…

Understanding Cosmic Explosions: StarBurst Arrives at NASA for Testing

March 27, 2025 NeRD

From left to right, NASA Marshall engineers Carlos Diaz and John Luke Bili, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory mechanical engineer contractor Eloise Stump, and Marshall engineers Tomasz Liz, David Banks, and Elise Doan observe StarBurst in the cleanroom environment before it’s unboxed from its shipping container. The cleanroom environment at Marshall is designed to minimize contamination and protect the observatory’s sensitive instruments. Image Credit: NASA /Daniel Kocevski StarBurst, a wide-field gamma ray observatory, arrived at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, March 4 for environmental testing and final…

Hold onto your hats! Is the ‘blaze star’ T Corona Borealis about to go boom?

March 26, 2025 NeRD

A new set of predictions for the so-called “blaze star,” T Corona Borealis suggests the star might go nova on either March 27, November 10, or June 25, 2026. However, other astronomers are skeptical about these predictions, which are based on an implied pattern in the explosive system’s orbital configuration, “T Corona Borealis [T CrB] is a unique object that has fascinated amateur and professional astronomers for more than a century,” Léa Planquart of the Institut d’Astronomie et d’Astrophysique at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, told Space.com. T…

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Detects Largest Organic Molecules Found on Mars

March 24, 2025 NeRD

Researchers analyzing pulverized rock onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover have found the largest organic compounds on the Red Planet to date. The finding, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests prebiotic chemistry may have advanced further on Mars than previously observed. Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-lab and found the molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane. These compounds, which are made up of 10, 11, and 12 carbons, respectively, are thought to be the fragments of fatty acids that…

How the James Webb Space Telescope is helping size up tiny dwarf planets

March 21, 2025 NeRD

A surprising chemical difference between Pluto and Sedna, another dwarf planet in the distant Kuiper Belt, is helping scientists nail down their respective masses, a new study reports. The Kuiper Belt is a region in space beyond the orbit of Neptune that’s home to Pluto and most of the known dwarf planets, as well as some comets that are thought to be relics of the solar system’s planet-formation era. “Kuiper Belt objects are icy worlds [that] can tell us what conditions were like billions of years ago,” explained study lead…