Natural sciences

Just when we begin to forget about the old Hubble Space Telescope, it comes back with another amazing look at the cosmos. It’s most recent target? Two spiral galaxies, more than a billion light-years from Earth, that appear to be colliding.To be clear: They aren’t actually anywhere near each other, but from Hubble’s perspective, one is eclipsing the other. The galaxies are named SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, and were imaged by Hubble as part of the Galaxy Zoo project, a citizen science project dedicated to classifying…

Vespera Observation StationPhoto: George Dvorsky / GizmodoA few weeks ago, my editor asked me to review a new telescope. Having never reviewed a single product for Gizmodo in all the years I’ve worked here, and having never laid my hands on a telescope, I made a valiant attempt to weasel my way out of this assignment. Unswayed by my arguments, my editor described the telescope as being “idiot-proof,” and as such, that made me a perfect candidate to review the new product. Hmph.Having no choice but to acquiesce, I agreed…

There it is, in four different bands of the infrared spectrum: the gas giant HIP 65426b, the first exoplanet directly imaged by the Webb Space Telescope.“Obtaining this image felt like digging for space treasure,” said Aarynn Carter, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the analysis of the images, in a NASA release. “At first all I could see was light from the star, but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet.”While these are the first direct…

The Webb Space Telescope has taken its biggest image yet, exceeding the scale of the deep field image revealed by President Biden on July 12. The new image covers a region of sky eight times larger than the first Webb deep field, and it includes some dazzling structures from the cosmos.The image—made up of a mosaic of 690 individual frames—was taken as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS). The images were taken in June, and Webb is scheduled to take another six (the last in a set of 10) in…

Northern Lights seen from the coast of Scotland in February, 2021.Photo: Peter Summers (Getty Images)If you happen to live on the northern end of the U.S., and you’re not completely engulfed by ambient light pollution, you might be in for a once-in-a-lifetime celestial light show, though a lot of things have to happen to make the aurora borealis, often called the Northern Lights, appear overhead.This disturbance in the night sky is being called by a coronal mass ejection, otherwise known as a CME. These range in severity…

A Washington State resident arranges cardboard above an air conditioning unit during soaring temperatures on July 28, 2022. Photo: David Ryder (Getty Images)The U.S. has seen several waves of dangerous heat this year, and extreme high temperatures are set to become more regular by the middle of this century. Researchers are warning about a future “heat belt” that will stretch from Texas up to Wisconsin, where people will regularly be exposed to stretches of heat index above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) as…

A culture of the Streptomyces bacteria.Image: Pablo Cruz-MoralesA popular rocket fuel called RP-1 gets its name from its key ingredient: refined petroleum. Research published last week in the journal Joule suggests a potentially cleaner and more powerful ingredient: a molecule produced by the Streptomyces bacteria. The proposed fuel won’t be ready any time soon, but the new research points to this intriguing possibility.Streptomyces produces anti-fungal molecules called POP-FAMEs, otherwise known as polycylcopropanated…

Cars in Honolulu, Hawaii. Photo: Kent Nishimura-Pool/ (Getty Images)Mesina D. is a 15-year-old from Kailua, Oahu. A few years ago, she visited the shoreline with a relative who pointed several feet into the water. “She said, ‘I used to play volleyball out there,’” Mesina told Earther. “And now it’s just all ocean 20 feet up to where we were.”Mesina is one 14 young people ranging from the ages of 9 to 18 years old who filed a lawsuit against Hawaii’s state’s transportation department last week, alleging that the agency…