Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have captured the most detailed images yet of a planetary nebula that looks like a brightly colored butterfly. The impressive shape is made of gasses in space, surrounding a pair of stars. Scientists believe one of the stars recently blew its top, sending gasses flying and creating the unique …
A baby planet was just spotted by scientists using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The object, a swirling mass of matter surrounding a central point in space, is believed to be the first in-progress planet spotted by scientists. As telescope technology improves, our ability to study and understand what is happening in other star …
If you’ve been wringing your hands and saying your goodbyes in advance of the visit from asteroid 2006 QV89 later this year, you can relax. The space rock, which had a very, very tiny chance of posing a threat to Earth, has been under close observation by astronomers who have since confirmed that it will …
Black holes are so strange that they’re kind of hard to wrap your brain around. They’re super-dense objects with gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape them and, while we know they exist, astronomers have never actually photographed one. Weird, right? When it comes to spotting a black hole the distance is really what …
Our Sun is one of the reasons we’re all here today and we simply couldn’t exist without it, but it won’t be around forever. At some point far in the future our Sun will die, and when it does it’ll probably look a lot like this image captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large …
NASA regularly delivers outer space eye candy snapped with its various telescopes, but the European Southern Observatory has plenty of star-gazing power as well, and it just released a new piece of “celestial art” that will stand toe-to-toe with any space photo you’ve ever seen. Captured with the newly installed HAWK-I infrared imager on the …
