Astronomical objects

Deep in the Stone Age, when Neanderthals still lived alongside Homo sapiens, our ancestors might have been agog at a green light in the night sky. Now, that light—C/2022 E3 (ZTF) (more familiarly, the Green Comet)—is back.The Green Comet’s highly elliptical orbit means it will take a long time for it to swing past Earth again—about 50,000 years, to be specific. And that’s if it repeats its 50,000-year sojourn, which it may not.Astronomers discovered the comet in March 2022 using the Samuel Oschin robotic telescope at the…

2,500 years ago, one of space’s most beautiful features was born: the Southern Ring Nebula. The nebula was vividly imaged by the Webb Space Telescope earlier this year, and astronomers now think they know exactly how a star’s violent outburst occurred, leaving the elegant nebula in its wake.The star that bore the nebula was about three times the size of the Sun and 500 million years old. That’s quite young, in stellar terms; our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and should live for another 5 billion.Around 2,500 years…

The Viking 1 lander arrived on the Martian surface 46 years ago to investigate the planet. It dropped down intowhat was thought to be an ancient outflow channel. Now, a team of researchers believes they’ve found evidence of an ancient megatsunami that swept across the planet billions of years ago, less than 600 miles from where Viking landed.In a new paper published today in Scientific Reports, a team identified a 68-mile-wide impact crater in Mars’ northern lowlands that they suspect is leftover from an asteroid strike…

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The Lucy spacecraft captured this image of Earth on October 15. Image: NASANASA’s Lucy spacecraft got its first view of the Earth-Moon system one year after launching from its home planet to explore a distant swarm of asteroids. The spacecraft captured beautiful, and somewhat daunting, images of Earth and its natural satellite as it whizzed past for a gravitational assist. The Lucy spacecraft is currently on a six-year journey to Jupiter to study the Trojan asteroids, two groups of rocky bodies that lead and follow…

The Webb Space Telescope has just imaged what might be its most iconic target yet: the Pillars of Creation, a monumental arm of the Eagle Nebula.The pillars are so-named for their magnitude. They are light-years-long tendrils of gas and dust that reach out like the grand fingers of a cosmic hand. The recent image, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, highlights the bright red sites of new star births.Small red dots on the edges of the pillars are baby stars—only a few hundred thousand years old, according to…

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took images of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa during a recent flyby. One of the photos—released this week byNASA—offers an intimate view of Europa’s surface features.Juno has orbited the gas giant Jupiter since 2016, but only recently has NASA diverted the spacecraft’s attention to the planet’s moons. Europa is of particular scientific interest because scientists believe a salty ocean lies beneath the moon’s frozen surface.If such an ocean is there—something the upcoming Europa Clipper mission will…

Saturn’s rings are 100 million years old and are made up of chunks of water ice. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSISaturn’s rings are one of the most iconic structures in the solar system, but their genesis has long been up for debate. New research suggests that the spectacular rings may have been born out of the death of an icy moon.Saturn is a dynamic system. Besides those fascinating rings, one if its moons, Titan, is moving rapidly away from the planet at about 4 inches (11 centimeters) per year (our own Moon moves away from…

Left: Pioneer 10's view of Jupiter in March 1973. Right: Webb Telescope’s view of Jupiter in July 2022. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy SchmidtFor centuries, astronomers were limited to ground-based observations of the planets, but now we use spacecraft to capture close-up views of our neighboring worlds. Excitingly, our views of solar system planets have been getting progressively better over the decades, as these images attest.The dawn of the Space Age finally made it possible for…

The Webb Telescope recently imaged a region of the Orion Nebula associated with star birth, and the result is about what we’ve come to expect from the cutting-edge space observatory. I’m not saying that the image is bad. It’s quite nice! It was taken with the telescope’s NIRCam instrument and captures an inner region of the Orion Nebula.But, I must say, it’s not quite as thrilling as Webb’s recent conquests: a deep field eight times larger than the telescope’s first, the eerie tendrils of the Tarantula Nebula, and the…