Today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day features the Vela Supernova Remnant — a vast tangle of glowing filaments left by a star that exploded 12,000 years ago, just 800 light-years from Earth. At its heart, a pulsar spins ten times per second.
New Harvard-affiliated research published in Nature reveals the thymus — long thought irrelevant in adults — may be a critical predictor of longevity, cardiovascular health, and cancer immunotherapy response.
Last night's full moon was easy to miss, and that was rather the point. While supermoons dominate headlines with their oversized glow, May 30th delivered the opposite: a blue micromoon, the farthest, smallest, and dimmest full moon of the year.... Continue Reading →
More than two miles below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily, an extraordinary observatory called KM3NeT sits in total darkness and it has been quietly rewriting the record books. In February 2023, it recorded the... Continue Reading →
Astronomers have just given us the sharpest picture yet of the universe's vast, invisible architecture and it's breathtaking. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers at the University of California, Riverside have produced the most detailed map ever made... Continue Reading →
What's happened to the center of this galaxy? Dramatic dust lanes run across the center of unusual elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. These dust lanes are so thick they almost completely obscure the galaxy's center in visible light. This is particularly unusual as Cen A's older stars and... Continue Reading →
How complex is Jupiter? NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter is finding the Jovian giant to be more complicated than expected. Jupiter's magnetic field has been discovered to be much different from our Earth's simple dipole field, showing several poles embedded in a complicated network more convoluted in the... Continue Reading →
Can you spot famous celestial objects in this image? 18th-century astronomer Charles Messier cataloged only two of them: the bright Lagoon Nebula (M8) at the bottom, and the colorful Trifid Nebula (M20) at the upper right. The one on the left that resembles a cat's paw is NGC 6559,... Continue Reading →
How does your favorite planet spin? Does it spin rapidly around a nearly vertical axis, or horizontally, or backwards? The featured video animates NASA images of all eight planets in our Solar System to show them spinning side-by-side for an easy comparison. In the time-lapse video, a day on Earth --... Continue Reading →