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Astronomers have discovered that the well-studied exoplanet WASP-12b reflects almost no light, making it appear essentially pitch black. This discovery sheds new light on the atmospheric composition of the planet and also refutes previous hypotheses about WASP-12b’s atmosphere. The results are also in stark contrast to observations of another similarly sized exoplanet. Using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, an international team led by astronomers at McGill University, Canada, and the University of Exeter, UK, have measured how much light the exoplanet WASP-12b reflects — its albedo — in order to learn more about the composition of its atmosphere. The results were surprising, explains lead author Taylor Bell, a Master’s student in astronomy at McGill University who is affiliated with the Institute for Research on Exoplanets: “The measured albedo of WASP-12b is 0.064 at most. This is an extremely low value, making the planet darker ...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced this finely detailed image of the beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6384. This galaxy lies in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer), not far from the centre of the Milky Way on the sky. The positioning of NGC 6384 means that we have to peer at it past many dazzling foreground Milky Way stars that are scattered across this image. In 1971, one member of NGC 6384 stood out against these bright foreground stars when one of its stars exploded as a supernova. This was a Type Ia supernova, which occurs when a compact star that has ceased fusion in its core, called a white dwarf, increases its mass beyond a critical limit by gobbling up matter from a companion star. A runaway nuclear explosion then makes the star suddenly as bright as a whole galaxy. While many stars have already come to the ends of their lives in NGC 6384, in the centre, star formation is being fuelled by the galaxy’s bar structure; astronomers think such galactic bars ...

This image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of the dramatic effects new-born stars have on the gas and dust from which they formed. Although the stars themselves are not visible, material they have ejected is colliding with the surrounding gas and dust clouds and creating a surreal landscape of glowing arcs, blobs and streaks. The star-forming region NGC 6729 is part of one of the closest stellar nurseries to the Earth and hence one of the best studied. This new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of a section of this strange and fascinating region. The data were selected from the ESO archive by Sergey Stepanenko as part of the Hidden Treasures competition. Sergey’s picture of NGC 6729 was ranked third in the competition. Stars form deep within molecular clouds and the earliest stages of their development cannot be seen in visible-light telescopes because of obscuration by dust. In this image there are very young stars at the upper left of t...

At the centre of this image of the Centaurus constellation are Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri, two triple star systems. The brightest stars of both systems orbit near to each other, making them appear as one star. Alpha Centauri is the nearest "star" to Earth except for the Sun. This photograph of the Centaurus constellation was taken at ESO's La Silla Observatory. Image Credit: ESO Explanation from: https://www.eso.org/public/images/centaurus-ch17-bardon-cc/

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have detected titanium oxide in an exoplanet atmosphere for the first time. This discovery around the hot-Jupiter planet WASP-19b exploited the power of the FORS2 instrument. It provides unique information about the chemical composition and the temperature and pressure structure of the atmosphere of this unusual and very hot world. A team of astronomers led by Elyar Sedaghati, an ESO fellow and recent graduate of TU Berlin, has examined the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-19b in greater detail than ever before. This remarkable planet has about the same mass as Jupiter, but is so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit in just 19 hours and its atmosphere is estimated to have a temperature of about 2000 degrees Celsius. As WASP-19b passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight passes through the planet’s atmosphere and leaves subtle fingerprints in the light that eventually reaches Earth. By using the FORS2 instrument ...

This series of enhanced-color images shows Jupiter up close and personal, as NASA's Juno spacecraft performed its eighth flyby of the gas giant planet. The images were obtained by JunoCam. From left to right, the sequence of images taken on September 1, 2017 from 3:03 p.m. to 3:11 p.m. PDT (6:03 p.m. to 6:11 p.m. EDT). At the times the images were taken, the spacecraft ranged from 7,545 to 14,234 miles (12,143 to 22,908 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude range of -28.5406 to -44.4912 degrees. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Doran Explanation from: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21780

There was no shortage of storms brewing across the Atlantic basin in September 2017. On September 6, hurricanes Katia, Irma, and Jose lined up across the basin. The trio is visible in this image, captured that day by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite. The image is a mosaic, assembled from images acquired throughout the day during several orbits of the satellite. On September 6, Katia had strengthened over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico and was upgraded from tropical storm to hurricane status. The eye of Irma, a raging category 5 storm, passed north of Puerto Rico but still delivered strong winds and rain the Caribbean island. Meanwhile, Jose spun in the central Atlantic Ocean, and was also upgraded that day from a tropical storm to hurricane. The bright strips are reflected sunlight, or “glint,” which show up over ocean areas in the middle of each orbit. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory Explanation from: https://earthobservatory.nasa....

The Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS) telescope will search for terrestrial exoplanets around nearby ultracool stars and brown dwarfs when it has first light in December 2017. SPECULOOS joins a fleet of exoplanet-searching telescopes, including the two TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescopes(TRAPPIST)— one at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile and another at Oukaïmden Observatory in Morocco. Image Credit: H. Zodet/ESO Explanation from: https://www.eso.org/public/images/upr-kh9a0928-cc/

The Sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 12:06 p.m. EDT on September 10, 2017. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an X8.2-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc. This flare is the capstone on a series of flares from Active Region 2673, which was identified on August 29 and is currently rotating off the front of the Sun as part of our star’s normal rotation. Image Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard Explanation from: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/activ...

With dozens of wildfires burning across the western United States and Canada, many North Americans have had the acrid taste of smoke in their mouths during the past few weeks. On September 5, 2017, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported more than 80 large fires burning in nine western U.S. states. People living in large stretches of northern California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho have been breathing what the U.S. government’s Air Now website rated as “hazardous” air. The natural-color mosaic above was made from several scenes acquired on September 4, 2017, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. The Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite (OMPS) on Suomi NPP also collected data on airborne aerosols as they were swept by winds from west to east across the continental United States (second image). The OMPS map depicts relative aerosol concentrations, with lower concentrations appearing ...

With this view, Cassini captured one of its last looks at Saturn and its main rings from a distance. The Saturn system has been Cassini's home for 13 years, but that journey is nearing its end. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for nearly a half of a Saturnian year but that journey is nearing its end. This extended stay has permitted observations of the long-term variability of the planet, moons, rings, and magnetosphere, observations not possible from short, fly-by style missions. When the spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, the planet's northern hemisphere, seen here at top, was in darkness, just beginning to emerge from winter. Now at journey's end, the entire north pole is bathed in the continuous sunlight of summer. Images taken on October 28, 2016 with the wide angle camera using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color view. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 25 degrees above the ringplane. The view was acqu...

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture shows NGC 5398, a barred spiral galaxy located about 55 million light-years away. The galaxy is famous for containing an especially extensive HII region, a large cloud composed of ionised hydrogen (or HII, pronounced “H-two”, with H being the chemical symbol for hydrogen and the “II” indicating that the atoms have lost an electron to become ionised). NGC 5398’s cloud is named Tol 89 and sits at the lower left end of the galaxy’s central “bar” of stars, a structure that cuts through the galactic core and funnels material inwards to maintain the star formation occurring there. Tol 86 is conspicuous in being the only large massive star forming complex in the entire galaxy, with an extension of roughly 5000 times 4000 light-years; it contains at least seven young and massive star clusters. The two brightest clumps within Tol 89, which astronomers have named simply “A” and “B”, appear to have undergone two bursts of star-forming activity — “starb...

Meteorologists struggled to find the right words to describe the situation as a line of three hurricanes—two of them major and all of them threatening land—brewed in the Atlantic basin in September 2017. Forecasters were most concerned about Irma, which was on track to make landfall in densely populated South Florida on September 10 as a large category 4 storm. Meanwhile, category 2 Hurricane Katia was headed for Mexico, where it was expected to make landfall on September 9. And just days after Irma devastated the Leeward Islands, the chain of small Caribbean islands braced for another blow—this time from category 4 Hurricane Jose. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured the data for a mosaic of Katia, Irma, and Jose as they appeared in the early hours of September 8, 2017. The images were acquired by the VIIRS “day-night band,” which detects light signals in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared, and uses filtering techniq...

NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are two spiral galaxies in the process of merging. This pair contains a large collection of super bright X-ray objects called "ultraluminous X-ray sources" (ULXs). Astronomers have found evidence for three supernova explosions within this pair in the past 15 years. A new composite image of the system contains X-rays from Chandra (pink) along with optical and infrared data. At this time of year, there are lots of gatherings often decorated with festive lights. When galaxies get together, there is the chance of a spectacular light show as is the case with NGC 2207 and IC 2163 Located about 130 million light years from Earth, in the constellation of Canis Major, this pair of spiral galaxies has been caught in a grazing encounter. NGC 2207 and IC 2163 have hosted three supernova explosions in the past 15 years and have produced one of the most bountiful collections of super bright X-ray lights known. These special objects — known as "ultraluminous X-ray ...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a close-up view of an outer part of the Orion Nebula’s little brother, Messier 43. This nebula, which is sometimes referred to as De Mairan’s Nebula after its discoverer, is separated from the famous Orion Nebula (Messier 42) by only a dark lane of dust. Both nebulae are part of the massive stellar nursery called the Orion molecular cloud complex, which includes several other nebulae, such as the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) and the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024). The Orion molecular cloud complex is about 1400 light-years away, making it one of the closest massive star formation regions to Earth. Hubble has therefore studied this extraordinary region extensively over the past two decades, monitoring how stellar winds sculpt the clouds of gas, studying young stars and their surroundings and discovering many elusive objects, such as brown dwarf stars. This view shows several of the brilliant hot young stars in this less-studied region and it also ...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a natural-color image of Irma at 10:00 a.m. local time (16:00 Universal Time) on September 8, 2017. Image Credit: NASA

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a region of space containing the intriguing object IC 2574. Pink bubbles blown by supernova explosions abound in this faint galaxy. The colour of these shells comes from hydrogen gas irradiated by newborn stars. The formation of the stars was triggered by shock waves from earlier supernova detonations that compressed material together. IC 2574 is commonly known as Coddington's Nebula after the American astronomer Edwin Coddington, who discovered it in 1898. Astronomers classify IC 2574 as a dwarf irregular galaxy due to its relatively small size and lack of organisation or structure. These galaxies are thought to resemble some of the earliest that formed in the Universe. Dwarf irregular galaxies thus serve as useful "living fossils" for studying the evolution of more complex galaxy types such as our home, the Milky Way, with its central bar and spiral arms. The expanding shells in IC 2574 are of particular interest to astrono...

Messier 16 (M16), also known as the Eagle Nebula, is located in the southern constellation of Serpens (the Snake). Using the infrared multi-mode ISAAC instrument on the 8.2-m VLT ANTU telescope, European astronomers were able to image the Eagle Nebula at near-infrared wavelength. The ISAAC near-infrared images cover a 9 x 9 arcminutes region, in three broad-band colours and with sufficient sensitivity to detect young stars of all masses and — most importantly — with an image sharpness as good as 0.35 arcseconds. The wide-field view of M16 shows that there is much happening in the region. The first impression one gets is of an enormous number of stars. Those which are blue in the infrared image are either members of the young NGC 6611 cluster — whose massive stars are concentrated in the upper right (north west) part of the field — or foreground stars which happen to lie along the line of sight towards M16. Most of the stars are fainter and more yellow. They are ordinary stars behind M1...

NOAA's GOES East satellite captured this infrared image of Hurricane Irma in the Bahamas on September 8 at 4:45 a.m. EDT. Image Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a sharp image of NGC 4634, a spiral galaxy seen exactly side-on. Its disc is slightly warped by ongoing interactions with a nearby galaxy, and it is crisscrossed by clearly defined dust lanes and bright nebulae. NGC 4634, which lies around 70 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Coma Berenices, is one of a pair of interacting galaxies. Its neighbour, NGC 4633, lies just outside the upper right corner of the frame, and is visible in wide-field views of the galaxy. While it may be out of sight, it is not out of mind: its subtle effects on NGC 4634 are easy to see to a well-trained eye. Gravitational interactions pull the neat spiral forms of galaxies out of shape as they get closer to each other, and the disruption to gas clouds triggers vigorous episodes of star formation. While this galaxy’s spiral pattern is not directly visible thanks to our side-on perspective, its disc is slightly warped, and there is clear evidence...

About 2,400 massive stars in the center of 30 Doradus are producing intense radiation and powerful winds as they blow off material. Multimillion-degree gas detected in X-rays (blue) by the Chandra X-ray Observatory comes from shock fronts formed by these stellar winds and by supernova explosions. This hot gas carves out gigantic bubbles in the surrounding cooler gas and dust shown here in infrared emission from the Spitzer Space Telescope (orange). Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/PSU/L.Townsley et al. Explanation from: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/images/4790-sig11-015-30-Doradus-and-The-Growing-Tarantula-Within

On September 7 at 12:45 p.m. EDT (1645 UTC) the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible-light image of Hurricane Jose approaching the Leeward Islands. Image Credit: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

Although this cluster of stars gained its name due to its five brightest stars, it is home to hundreds more. The huge number of massive young stars in the cluster is clearly captured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The cluster is located close to the Arches Cluster and is just 100 light-years from the centre of our galaxy. The cluster’s proximity to the dust at the centre of the galaxy means that much of its visible light is blocked, which helped to keep the cluster unknown until its discovery in 1990, when it was revealed by observations in the infrared. Infrared images of the cluster, like the one shown here, allow us to see through the obscuring dust to the hot stars in the cluster. The Quintuplet Cluster hosts two extremely rare luminous blue variable stars: the Pistol Star and the lesser known V4650 Sgr. If you were to draw a line horizontally through the centre of this image from left to right, you could see the Pistol Star hovering just above the line about one th...

M51 is a spiral galaxy, about 30 million light years away, that is in the process of merging with a smaller galaxy seen to its upper left. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The eye of Hurricane Irma is clearly visible from the International Space Station as it orbited over the Category 5 storm on September 5, 2017. Image Credit: NASA

DSCOVR, 1 million miles from Earth August 21, 2017 Image Credit: NASA EPIC Team

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is renowned for its breathtaking images and this snapshot of NGC 634 is definitely that — the fine detail and exceptionally perfect spiral structure of the galaxy make it hard to believe that this is a real observation and not an artist’s impression or a screenshot taken straight from Star Wars. This spiral galaxy was discovered back in the nineteenth century by French astronomer Édouard Jean-Marie Stephan, but in 2008 it became a prime target for observations thanks to the violent demise of a white dwarf star. The type Ia supernova known as SN2008a was spotted in the galaxy and briefly rivalled the brilliance of its entire host galaxy but, despite the energy of the explosion, it can no longer be seen this Hubble image, which was taken around a year and a half later. White dwarfs are thought to be the endpoint of evolution for stars between 0.07 to 8 solar masses, which equates to 97% of the stars in the Milky Way. However, there are exceptions to th...

Extremely intense radiation from newly born, ultra-bright stars has blown a glowing spherical bubble in the nebula N83B. A new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image has helped to decipher the complex interplay of gas and radiation in a star-forming region of a nearby galaxy. The image graphically illustrates just how these massive stars sculpt their environment by generating powerful winds that alter the shape of the parent gaseous nebula. These processes are also seen in our own Milky Way in regions like the Orion Nebula. Extremely intense radiation from newly born, ultra-bright stars has blown a glowing spherical bubble in the nebula N83B. A new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image has helped to decipher the complex interplay of gas and radiation in a star-forming region of a nearby galaxy. The image graphically illustrates just how these massive stars sculpt their environment by generating powerful winds that alter the shape of the parent gaseous nebula. These processes are also se...

On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma—an unusually powerful category 5 storm—slammed into the Leeward Islands on its way toward Puerto Rico and possibly the U.S. mainland. By definition, category 5 storms deliver maximum sustained winds of at least 157 miles (252 kilometers) per hour. When it hit the Leeward Islands, Irma’s winds surpassed 185 miles (295 kilometers) per hour—making it the strongest storm to ever hit the islands and the strongest storm ever measured for an Atlantic hurricane outside of the Gulf of Mexico or north of the Caribbean. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this nighttime view of the storm in the early hours of September 6 as the eye was over the island of Barbuda. The image was acquired by the VIIRS “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. In th...

An X9.3 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the Sun on September 6, 2017. This image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory at 11:58:20UT and shows light in the 131 angstrom wavelength. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

A study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton suggests X-rays emitted by a planet's host star may provide critical clues to how hospitable a star system could be. Researchers looked at the X-ray brightness from 24 stars with masses similar to the Sun or less, each at least one billion years old. The artist's illustration depicts one of these older Sun-like stars with a planet in orbit around it, which researchers found to be relatively calm compared to younger stars. The large dark area is a "coronal hole", a phenomenon associated with low levels of magnetic activity. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss Explanation from: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2017/gj176/more.html

This visible light image of Hurricane Irma was captured by NOAA's GOES East satellite as it strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane in the Central Atlantic Ocean on September 5 at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 UTC). Image Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

Anyone who has wondered what it might be like to dive into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colours, will enjoy the latest image released by ESO. Obtained in part with the Very Large Telescope, the image is the deepest ground-based U-band image of the Universe ever obtained. It contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations with the VIMOS instrument. This uniquely beautiful patchwork image, with its myriad of brightly coloured galaxies, shows the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S), arguably the most observed and best studied region in the entire sky. The CDF-S is one of the two regions selected as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), an effort of the worldwide astronomical community that unites the deepest observations from ground- and space-based facilities at all wavelengths from X-ray to radio. Its primary purpose is to provide astronomers with the most sensitive census of the distant Universe to...

The Sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 4:33 pm EDT on September 4, 2017. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an M5.5 class flare. M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc. Image Credit: NASA/SDO Explanation from: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-s-sdo-captures-image-of-mid-level-flare

On September 4 at 17:24 UTC, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured this view of Hurricane Irma as a Category 4 hurricane approaching the Leeward Islands. Image Credit: NOAA/NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

M81 is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light years away that is both relatively large in the sky and bright, making it a frequent target for both amateur and professional astronomers. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A billowing cloud of hydrogen in the Triangulum galaxy (Messier 33), about 2.7 million light-years away from Earth, glows with the energy released by hundreds of young, bright stars. This NASA/ESA Hubble Spare Telescope image provides the sharpest view of NGC 604 so far obtained. Some 1500 light-years across, this is one of the largest, brightest concentrations of ionised hydrogen (H II) in our local group of galaxies, and is a major centre of star formation. The gas in NGC 604, around nine tenths of it hydrogen, is gradually collapsing under the force of gravity to create new stars. Once these stars have formed, the vigorous ultraviolet radiation they emit excites the remaining gas in the cloud, making it glow a distinct shade of red. This colour is typical not only of NGC 604 but of other H II regions too. Although it is part of Messier 33 this object is so bright and prominent that it was given its own NGC number. The fierce ultraviolet radiation released by the stars that give thes...

DSCOVR, 1 million miles from Earth August 21, 2017 Image Credit: NASA EPIC Team

Like firecrackers lighting up the sky on New Year’s Eve, the majestic spiral arms of NGC 5559 are alight with new stars being born. NGC 5559 is a spiral galaxy, with spiral arms filled with gas and dust sweeping out around the bright galactic bulge. These arms are a rich environment for star formation, dotted with a festive array of colours including the newborn stars glowing blue as a result of their immensely high temperatures. NGC 5559 was discovered by astronomer William Herschel in 1785 and lies approximately 240 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Boötes (the herdsman) In 2001, a calcium-rich supernova called 2001co was observed in NGC 5559. Calcium-rich supernovae (Ca-rich SNe) are described as “fast-and-faint”, as they're less luminous than other types of supernovae and also evolve more rapidly, to reveal spectra dominated by strong calcium lines. 2001co occurred within the disc of NGC 5559 near star-forming regions, but Ca-rich SNe are often observed ...