Telescopes

Currently, 5,788 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,326 star systems, while thousands more candidates await confirmation. So far, the vast majority of these planets have been gas giants (3,826) or Super-Earths (1,735), while only 210 have been “Earth-like” – meaning rocky planets similar in size and mass to Earth. What’s more, the majority of these…

The Hubble Space Telescope was carried to space inside the space shuttle Discovery and then released into low-Earth orbit. The James Webb Space Telescope was squeezed inside the nose cone of an Ariane 5 rocket and then launched. It deployed its mirror and shade on its way to its home at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange…

Some of the most cataclysmic and mysterious events in the cosmos only reveal themselves by their gravitational waves. We’ve detected some of them with our ground-based detectors, but the size of these detectors is limited. The next step forward in gravitational wave (GW) astronomy is a space-based detector: LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. When…

Comet A3, or Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, is still visible in the Northern Hemisphere this weekend.The comet takes 80,000 years to orbit the sun, so Neanderthals were among the last people to see it.This could be your last chance to spot the bright comet. Here's how, where, and when to see it. Thanks for signing up! Access…

Comet A3, or Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, is visible in the Northern Hemisphere this October.The comet takes 80,000 years to orbit the sun, so Neanderthals were among the last people to see it.It could be the brightest comet in a decade. Here's how, where, and when to see it. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics…

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope floored astronomers and spectators across the globe when it released its first full-color images.Even the scientists who worked on the telescope were taken aback when they saw those first snapshots in the summer of 2022, telling reporters that they sobbed, fell speechless, or dropped their jaws so far that they…

If you enjoyed this summer’s display of aurora borealis, thank the Sun’s corona. The corona is the Sun’s outer layer and is the source of most space weather, including aurorae. The aurora borealis are benign light shows, but not all space weather produces such harmless displays; some of it is dangerous and destructive. In an…

Can a kilometer-scale telescope help conduct more efficient science, and specifically for the field of optical interferometry? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a pair of researchers propose the Big Fringe Telescope (BFT), which is slated to comprise 16 telescopes 0.5-meter in diameter and will be equivalent to a telescope…

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is one of its most scientifically productive space missions.The telescope has been in space for 25 years, discovering black holes and dark matter.Chandra's best images show how it reveals details that other telescopes can't see. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the…

NASA has long been interested in building bigger and better space telescopes. Its Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) has funded several methods for building and deploying novel types of telescopes for various purposes. Back in 2019, one of the projects they funded was the Dual Use Exoplanet Telescope (DUET), which would use an advanced form…