Another day, another perplexing Hubble Space Telescope observation. This time, the space telescope observed a star’s final moments, classified as AT2022dsb, in which it passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. Its outer gasses are then pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field and shredded as tidal forces pull it apart.
We know that Pluto may have a liquid ocean beneath its surface, but how many have seen the dwarf planet’s icy mountains? NASA’s New Horizons space probe captured amazing images of mountains at the edge of Pluto’s heart-like region Tombaugh Regio that measure up to 11,000-feet high and can be best compared to North America’s Rocky Mountains.
There’s Ross 508 b, and then TOI 700 e, a recently discovered habitable Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the Goldilocks Zone of its star. The rocky planet is 95% of Earth’s size and may also be tidally locked, which means it takes 28 days to orbit its star, placing it in between planet c and d, or the habitable zone.
Photo credit: NASA/Isaac Watson
ESA has Shaun the Sheep for their missions, while NASA’s Snoopy astronaut plush has just returned from the Artemis I mission. This zero-gravity indicator flew aboard Orion after being unpacked from his specially designed transport case. The beagle was secured inside Orion during the journey to the Moon and back to prepare for crewed missions.
Another day, another incredible James Webb Space Telescope image, and this time, we see the star forming dusty ribbons in dwarf galaxy NGC 346. This dynamic region is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) around 200,000 light-years from Earth. It was of particular interest due to the conditions and amount of metals withing the SMC that resemble those seen in galaxies billions of years ago.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected and confirmed its first exoplanet, a rocky Earth-sized world that orbits another star, classified as LHS 475 b. This planet measures in at 99% of Earth’s diameter and is a few hundred degrees warmer than Earth, so if clouds are detected, it could be more like Venus, which has a carbon dioxide atmosphere.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) didn’t capture a fiery slithering snake, but it did image the Sun in 4K over 133 days. Researchers then compiled the images into an amazing time-lapse video captured with various instruments aboard the SDO spacecraft, including the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), which takes images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light.
Lincoln Laboratory’s TerraByte Infrared Delivery System will beam data at 100Gbps, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s NOAA-21 satellite uses its Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) to capture global visible and infrared observations of land, ocean, as well as atmosphere parameters at high temporal resolution. It began collecting data on December 5th as it passed over the East Coast of the United States and transmitted the first images of Earth.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope used its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 to view the scattered stars of globular cluster NGC 6355, which is located less than 50,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. This massive globular cluster is actually nestled in our Milky Way galaxy’s inner regions.
You can’t use the second-generation Citizen CZ smartwatch like a desktop computer, but it does have IBM and NASA technology. More specifically, the CZ Smart YouQ application uses neural networks developed within the IBM Watson Studio workspace to learn and understand the wearer’s preferred timing of sleep and wake within 7-10 days.