A long-faded black hole outburst may have left material that a cosmic collision made visible again. That is the proposed history of VLSS J0318.9+5755, a radio source nicknamed the Treble Clef because of its distinctive outline. A composite view of the Treble Clef: X-rays in blue, radio emission in pink, and infrared data. Credits: X-ray: […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 12/07/2022 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s first deep field, this image of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster is bursting with detail. Thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 03/03/2021 The Perseverance rover continues to amaze us. Every day NASA sends images, videos and even the first sounds from the planet Mars. The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will investigate a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been conducive to microbial life, probing Martian rocks […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 01/12/2020 The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided today that a gradual closure of the Arecibo observatory, for years the largest radio telescope in the world with its 305m in diameter, will be initiated on the island of Puerto Rico. A painful but inevitable decision: the National Science […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 22/09/2020 Scientists from the Slac (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) National Accelerator Laboratory – one of the 17 national laboratories of the United States Department of Energy – have finally tested the camera of the future Vera C. Rubiin Observatory, The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST): the incredible resolution […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 16/08/2020 A gigantic eruption would be the most probable cause of the sudden decrease in brightness of the star Betelgeuse, which at the turn of 2019 and 2020 had caused astronomers to worry enough to suspect an imminent explosion. Its mystery was solved by the Hubble Space Telescope, […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 30/07/2020 NASA’s Mars 2020 mission launched, the third direct to Mars that started in the last ten days after those of the United Arab Emirates and China. The launch took place from the US Air Force base in Cape Canaveral with an Atlas 5 rocket and leads to […]
From the Bits of Universe archive — 03/07/2020 A single video for ten years of the Sun’s life condensed into a time-lapse of just over an hour. The spectacular video, available at the link below, is the result of the assembly work of scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, with thousands of […]