Kepler—the beloved NASA telescope responsible for discovering 70% of the 3,800 confirmed “alien worlds” to date—officially met its end yesterday. After nearly a decade of exploration, the telescope ran out of fuel and can no longer transmit data or focus on transient objects in space. During its time in flight the Kepler was able to study nearly 150,000 stars simultaneously and could determine exactly which ones …
In a mind-boggling excerpt from Seth Fletcher’s book Einstein’s Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable (published by Ecco), the author probes the meticulous process behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). In fact, a series of collaborative data sets collected in 2017 by eight telescopes around the planet, the EHT aims to create an image of the shadow of a …
The Hubble Space Telescope has turned 28 years old—and everyone has received a birthday gift. To honor the groundbreaking, traveling documentarian, NASA has released a zoom and flythrough video of the Lagoon Nebula. About 4,000 light-years away, the Nebula centers around the million-year-old Hershel 36 star—which happens to be “200,000 times brighter and eight times hotter than Earth’s sun.” It’s an exquisite area with a …
