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4 days ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
After failing to make it past Earth orbit on March 31, 1972, the remains of a Venus mission launched by the former Soviet Union circled our planet for years and was given the name Cosmos (or Kosmos) 482. While the rocket stage and other pieces returned to Earth weeks later, the lander itself made an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean over the weekend.
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1 week ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
Women have long contributed meaningful scientific discoveries to the field of astronomy; however, men have primarily dominated the vocation. As of 2019, women earn about 40 percent of the Ph.D.s granted in the field of astronomy, but that has not always been the case. And there are many cases of women working in astronomy only to have their findings overshadowed or derided in some capacity.
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1 week ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
Beyond our solar system, sub-Neptunes — gassy planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune — reign as the most common type of exoplanet observed in our galaxy. Despite their prevalence, no such planets exist around our Sun, so these worlds have remained shrouded in mystery. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently observed exoplanet TOI-421 b, whose unique atmospheric conditions are now enabling scientists to understand sub-Neptunes in unprecedented detail.
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1 week ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
The NASA and European Space Agency’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped a mesmerizing shot of an astronomical oddball, known as Arp 184 or NGC 1961. This strange spiral galaxy’s single broad arm earned it a place in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, published in 1966. That structure, along with multiple past supernovae, makes it an interesting subject for astronomers. Arp 184 resides approximately 190 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis the Giraffe.
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3 weeks ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
In the 35 years since the Hubble Space Telescope flew to space, it has taken pictures of comets, merging galaxies, planets, supernova remnants, and more. The first-of-its-kind telescope — a joint NASA and European Space Agency effort — was lofted aboard the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Since then it has made nearly 1.7 million observations, looking at approximately 55,000 astronomical targets.
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3 weeks ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
Last month, the European Space Agency (ESA) released a huge dataset from its space telescope Euclid. The release featured three deep-field mosaics glittering with 380,000 galaxies and hundreds of examples where the light of distant objects is bent and magnified by the gravitational influence of massive galaxies. The mosaics were captured in the constellations of Fornax, Draco, and Horologium.
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3 weeks ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited the asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson on Sunday, April 20, coming within 600 miles (920 kilometers) of the object located in the inner region of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid was named after the paleontologist Donald Johanson, who in 1974 co-discovered the first identified example of previously unknown type of hominid. They named the specimen “Lucy,” which is what the mission is named after.
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4 weeks ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
Looking like a bird ready to take flight from atop a post, this dusty filament within the Eagle Nebula was recently captured in intricate detail by the Hubble Space Telescope. Also known as M16, this nebula lies some 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens the Serpent and surrounds an open star cluster. This pillar of cold gas and dust stretches 9.5 light-years long and is composed of cold hydrogen gas, which serves as material to create new stars.
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1 month ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
NASA could see a 20 percent cut to its overall 2026 budget, with funding for its science division slashed in half, if a preliminary budget proposal from the White House is enacted. The cuts would, among other impacts, cancel several missions and shut down NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The proposed cuts were laid out in an internal document called a passback, sent from the White House Office of Management and Budget to NASA on Thursday.
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1 month ago | 
astronomy.com | Samantha Hill
Hera, European Space Agency’s (ESA) flagship planetary defense mission that launched in October 2024, took images of Mars and Deimos, one of its two moons, yesterday. The mission’s flyby was used as a gravity assist to its final destination at the binary asteroid system Dimorphos and Didymos. The mission also used this journey past Mars as an opportunity to test some of its scientific equipment. Deimos is the smaller and less photographed of Mars’ moons.
