This week marks 48 years since the Sept. 5, 1977, launch of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to study Jupiter and Saturn up close. Nearly a half-century later, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 are still exploring. Only now they’re in the outer reaches of our solar system.

Go to Source

[…]

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, has been called the most precise ruler in the world for its ability to measure motions more than 10,000 times smaller than the width of a proton. By making these extremely precise measurements, LIGO, which consists of two facilities—one in Washington and one in Louisiana—can detect undulations in space-time […]

Scientists have discovered a giant black hole that they believe may have been formed in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. The black hole is so huge that it may change our understanding of how these cosmic giants form. If the findings are confirmed, this will be the first evidence of primordial black […]

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the […]

As Earth moves through space, it wobbles slightly. A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Bonn has now succeeded in measuring these fluctuations in Earth’s axis using a completely new method—until now, possible only through complex radio astronomy. The team used the high-precision ring laser at TUM’s […]

The second of the Meteosat Third Generation Imagers, MTG-I2, has passed some important milestones in the cleanroom facilities at Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, southern France.

Go to Source

For this new Picture of the Month feature, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has provided a fantastic new view of IRAS 04302+2247, a planet-forming disk located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region. With Webb, researchers can study the properties and growth of dust grains within protoplanetary disks […]

An international team of researchers has announced a significant advancement in gravitational-wave astronomy, with the detection of 128 new cosmic collisions involving black holes and neutron stars.

Go to Source