Universe Today
NASA Starshade Would Enable Astronomers To Directly Image Rocky Exoworlds
Innovative NASA-funded orbital starshade could help capture first direct images from extrasolar earths.
Telescopes
Telescopes and observatories
Recent Articles
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Upgraded Sardinia Radio Telescope To Continue Probing Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts
Largest Italian radio telescope located on an out of the way mountain plateau in southern Sardinia sheds light on the cosmos’ still misunderstood Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).
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The Telescope That Points Itself
Time on a large professional telescope is one of the scarcest resources in science. Astronomers wait months for a few hours, and every one of those hours is a running argument with the weather, the Moon and the atmosphere. Point at the wrong target at the wrong moment and the data comes back soft, washed out, or useless, with the next chance half a year away. A team has now handed that argument to a machine. Their system was trained not on the rules astronomers use but on what astronomers actually did, night after night, for years.
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The ELT's Spectrograph Could Sniff Out Biosignatures on Other Worlds
Before any major telescope commissioning, there are dozens of papers that attempt to define what we can expect from it. We’re starting to see some come through for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which hopefully will get a more imaginative name when the 39m behemoth is officially commissioned in Chile in the 2030s. A new paper from Evann Kurzawa-Ferrandez and his co-authors at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and available in pre-print on arXiv, showcases what kind of biologically relevant gases we can find on some of our nearest exoplanets.
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Radio Astronomy is Getting a Big Boost from the VLA's New Sky Survey
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has completed a new survey with the updated Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. It's called the VLASS, the Very Large Array Sky Survey, and it's the most detailed radio survey of the sky ever completed. The VLA used the power of its 28 movable dishes to complete the survey.
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The Roman Space Telescope Will Find Ancient Black Holes By Watching How They Eat Stars
When supermassive black holes (SMBH) in a certain mass range eat a star, they first tear it apart in a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). By detecting TDE across cosmic time, astronomers can chart the growth of SMBH as the Universe aged. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help, by finding about 100 TDEs every year.
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Habitable Worlds Targets in New Star Activity Catalog
Searching for habitable worlds beyond our solar system consists of more than just having it orbit within its star’s habitable zone, which is the region where temperatures could be just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. On Earth, where water comprises approximately 75 percent of the planet’s surface, life is absurdly abundant. But what about the exoplanet’s star, specifically its activity and rotation? How could this influence how exoplanets are identified for current and future missions?
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It's Finally Begun! The Vera Rubin Observatory Creating What Will Be the Greatest Movie Ever Made
The Vera Rubin Observatory's long-awaited Legacy Survey of Space and Time has begun. This decade-long movie of the cosmos will capture anything that changes brightness, position, or both in the southern night sky. It will study grand subjects like dark energy and dark matter, and important things closer to home like near-Earth objects.
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Roman Telescope's massive infrared mirror is ready to fly
It’s June 2027, and you’re fresh off defending your PhD studying the direct imaging of exoplanets while starting your postdoctoral journey at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The trauma of eating ramen and living off a sub-living wage for the last five years of your life is still fresh in your brain. But you’re excited to finally get your real career started with funding you received for viewing time on the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman for short). You begin to download the first set of data as your eyes tear up knowing your entire journey in research and academia is about to be worth it.
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20,000 Eyes on the Universe
We live in a golden age of astronomical imaging. Telescopes are capturing billions of galaxy images, painting the universe in breathtaking detail. But there's a problem, and it's a big one. A photograph tells you what something looks like but it doesn't tell you what it's made of, how fast it's moving, or how far away it really is. For that, you need spectroscopy. And right now, astronomy has a catastrophic imbalance, billions of images and nowhere near enough spectra to match them. A new telescope currently under construction in the mountains of western China is about to change that quite dramatically.
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The Roman Space Telescope is Ahead of Schedule, and the Hubble is Giving it a Jump Start
One of the core community surveys of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, is expected to locate over a thousand exoplanets that orbit far away from their stars, beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the Sun. Although Roman hasn’t launched yet, astronomers already are gathering useful supporting data by utilizing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which could assist astronomers in analyzing Roman data.
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The Rubin Observatory's LSST Will Detect Imminent Impactors Before They Crash Into Earth
One of the Vera Rubin Observatory's objectives is to detect incoming objects. It's decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will detect one-meter class objects about to impact Earth and allow more detailed observations of them. That will help determine their impact sites with greater accuracy, allowing for more recovery.
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Get Ready For The Rubin Observatory's Deluge Of Discoveries
We've been waiting a long time for the Vera Rubin Observatory to begin its work. The observatory features the largest digital camera ever built. It'll create a time-lapse of the southern night sky for ten years with its 3.2 gigapixel camera. An untold number of discoveries awaits.
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Chile's Paranal Observatory Saved from Industrial Development
After months of protests led by Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel, the American energy company AES Andes has abandoned plans to build a massive solar and wind facility just kilometres from one of the world's premier telescope sites. The decision preserves the pristine night skies above Chile's Paranal Observatory, where the European Southern Observatory operates some of humanity's most powerful eyes on the universe.
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Rubin Observatory Spots Fastest Spinning Asteroid Ever
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has discovered the fastest-spinning asteroid ever over 500 meters in size.
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The Ambitious Plan to Spot Habitable Moons Around Giant Planets
So far, humanity has yet to find its first “exomoon” - a Moon orbiting a planet outside of the solar system. But that hasn’t been for lack of trying. According to a new paper by Thomas Winterhalder of the European Southern Observatory and his co-authors available as a pre-print on arXiv, the reason isn’t because those Moons don’t exist, but simply because we lack the technology to detect them. They propose a new “kilometric baseline interferometer” that can detect moons as small as the Earth up to 200 parsecs (652 light years) away.
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Why Astronomy Needs a Giant in the Canary Islands
Size matters when it comes to telescopes. The bigger they are, the farther they can see. Prioritizing constructing large ones is therefore high on the priority list for many observational organizations. But doing so comes at a cost, and not just in terms of money. Finding a suitable site can be a challenge, and that has been particularly true for the effort to build a 30-meter telescope in the Northern hemisphere. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Francesco Coti Zelati of the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and his co-authors, makes the argument for building it at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma.
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The ALMA Array is Completed With 145 New Low-Noise Amplifiers
The Atacama Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the world's most powerful radio telescope, has received 145 new low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) that will increase its range and sensitivity.
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The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Is Complete!
Construction is complete on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and its ahead of schedule. After extensive testing, the new flagship telescope should be ready to launch in Fall, 2026.
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To Celebrate 25 Years In Service, The Gemini Observatory Imaged The Butterfly Nebula
To celebrate 25 years since the completion of the International Gemini Observatory, students in Chile voted for the Gemini South telescope to image NGC 6302 — a billowing planetary nebula that resembles a cosmic butterfly. The International Gemini Observatory is partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab.