Discovering The Universe Through The Constellation Orion

Celebrating Spitzer, One of NASA’s Great Observatories

As the Spitzer Space Telescope’s 16-year mission ends, we’re celebrating the legacy of our infrared explorer. It was one of four Great Observatories – powerful telescopes also including Hubble, Chandra and Compton – designed to observe the cosmos in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Light our eyes can see

The part of the spectrum we can see is called, predictably, visible light. But that’s just a small segment of all the wavelengths of the spectrum. The Hubble Space Telescope observes primarily in the visible spectrum. Our Chandra X-ray Observatory is designed to detect (you guessed it) X-ray emissions from very hot regions of the universe, like exploded stars and matter around black holes. Our Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, retired in 2000, produced the first all-sky survey in gamma rays, the most energetic and penetrating form of light.

Then there’s infrared…

Infrared radiation, or infrared light, is another type of energy that we can’t see but can feel as heat. All objects in the universe emit some level of infrared radiation, whether they’re hot or cold. Spitzer used its infrared instrument to make discoveries in our solar system (including Saturn’s largest ring) all the way to the edge of the universe. From stars being born to planets beyond our solar system (like the seven Earth-size exoplanets around the star TRAPPIST-1), Spitzer’s science discoveries will continue to inspire the world for years to come.

Multiple wavelengths

Together, the work of the Great Observatories gave us a more complete view and understanding of our universe.

Hubble and Chandra will continue exploring our universe, and next year they’ll be joined by an even more powerful observatory … the James Webb Space Telescope!

Many of Spitzer’s breakthroughs will be studied more precisely with the Webb Space Telescope. Like Spitzer, Webb is specialized for infrared light. But with its giant gold-coated beryllium mirror and nine new technologies, Webb is about 1,000 times more powerful. The forthcoming telescope will be able to push Spitzer’s science findings to new frontiers, from identifying chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres to locating some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

We can’t wait for another explorer to join our space telescope superteam!

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It's the 1 year birthday for this acct!!!

Women who had ADHD (24%) [were more likely to have attempted suicide] compared to women who had not (3%). 

Men with ADHD were also more likely to have attempted suicide compared to men without ADHD (9% vs. 2%). 

Adults with ADHD were much more likely to have attempted suicide than those without (14.0% vs. 2.7%).

(Study in full)

Are You Up to the Task of Navigating Space with NASA?

We’re committed to exploration and discovery, journeying to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But how do we guide our missions on their voyage among the stars? Navigation engineers lead the way!

Using complex mathematical formulas, navigation experts calculate where our spacecraft are and where they’re headed. No matter the destination, navigating the stars is a complicated challenge that faces all our missions. But, we think you’re up to the task!

Our space navigation workbook lets you explore the techniques and mathematical concepts used by navigation engineers. The book delves into groundbreaking navigation innovations like miniaturized atomic clocks, autonomous navigation technologies, using GPS signals at the Moon, and guiding missions through the solar system with X-ray emissions from pulsars — a type of neutron star. It also introduces you to experts working with NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

If you’re a high schooler who dreams of guiding a rover across the rocky surface of Mars or planning the trajectory of an observer swinging around Venus en route to the Sun, this workbook is for you! Download it today and start your adventure with NASA: https://go.nasa.gov/3i7Pzqr

See the Universe in a New Way with the Webb Space Telescope's First Images

Are you ready to see unprecedented, detailed views of the universe from the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space observatory ever made? Scroll down to see the first full-color images and data from Webb. Unfold the universe with us. ✨

Carina Nebula

This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars, called the Cosmic Cliffs, is the edge of the star-birthing Carina Nebula. Usually, the early phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but Webb can peer through cosmic dust—thanks to its extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability. Protostellar jets clearly shoot out from some of these young stars in this new image.

Southern Ring Nebula

The Southern Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula: it’s an expanding cloud of gas and dust surrounding a dying star. In this new image, the nebula’s second, dimmer star is brought into full view, as well as the gas and dust it’s throwing out around it. (The brighter star is in its own stage of stellar evolution and will probably eject its own planetary nebula in the future.) These kinds of details will help us better understand how stars evolve and transform their environments. Finally, you might notice points of light in the background. Those aren’t stars—they’re distant galaxies.

Stephan’s Quintet

Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies near each other, was discovered in 1877 and is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This new image brings the galaxy group from the silver screen to your screen in an enormous mosaic that is Webb’s largest image to date. The mosaic covers about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter; it contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. Never-before-seen details are on display: sparkling clusters of millions of young stars, fresh star births, sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars, and huge shock waves paint a dramatic picture of galactic interactions.

WASP-96 b

WASP-96 b is a giant, mostly gas planet outside our solar system, discovered in 2014. Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) measured light from the WASP-96 system as the planet moved across the star. The light curve confirmed previous observations, but the transmission spectrum revealed new properties of the planet: an unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, and evidence of clouds in the atmosphere. This discovery marks a giant leap forward in the quest to find potentially habitable planets beyond Earth.

Webb's First Deep Field

This image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, looks 4.6 billion years into the past. Looking at infrared wavelengths beyond Hubble’s deepest fields, Webb’s sharp near-infrared view reveals thousands of galaxies—including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared—in the most detailed view of the early universe to date. We can now see tiny, faint structures we’ve never seen before, like star clusters and diffuse features and soon, we’ll begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.

These images and data are just the beginning of what the observatory will find. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space—and for milestones like this!

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

“Nature uses as little as possible of anything.”

— Johannes Kepler

SHIELDS Up! NASA Rocket to Survey Our Solar System’s Windshield Apr 16, 2021

Eleven billion miles away – more than four times the distance from us to Pluto – lies the boundary of our solar system’s magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun’s magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible cobweb, fizzles to nothing. Interstellar space begins. “It’s really the largest boundary of its kind we can study,” said Walt Harris, space physicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

We still know little about what lies beyond this boundary. Fortunately, bits of interstellar space can come to us, passing right through this border and making their way into the solar system.

A new NASA mission will study light from interstellar particles that have drifted into our solar system to learn about the closest reaches of interstellar space. The mission, called the Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamics Spectrometer, or SHIELDS, will have its first opportunity to launch aboard a suborbital rocket from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on April 19, 2021.

Our entire solar system is adrift in a cluster of clouds, an area cleared by ancient supernova blasts. Astronomers call this region the Local Bubble, an oblong plot of space about 300 light-years long within the spiraling Orion arm of our Milky Way galaxy. It contains hundreds of stars, including our own Sun.

We fare this interstellar sea is our trusty vessel, the heliosphere, a much smaller (though still gigantic) magnetic bubble blown up by the Sun. As we orbit the Sun, the solar system itself, encased in the heliosphere, hurtles through the Local Bubble at about 52,000 miles per hour (23 kilometers per second). Interstellar particles pelt the nose of our heliosphere like rain against a windshield.

Our heliosphere is more like a rubber raft than a wooden sailboat: Its surroundings mold its shape. It compresses at points of pressure, expands where it gives way. Exactly how and where our heliosphere’s lining deforms gives us clues about the nature of the interstellar space outside it. This boundary – and any deformities in it – are what Walt Harris, principal investigator for the SHIELDS mission, is after.

SHIELDS is a telescope that will launch aboard a sounding rocket, a small vehicle that flies to space for a few minutes of observing time before falling back to Earth. Harris’ team launched an earlier iteration of the telescope as part of the HYPE mission in 2014, and after modifying the design, they’re ready to launch again.

SHIELDS will measure light from a special population of hydrogen atoms originally from interstellar space. These atoms are neutral, with a balanced number of protons and electrons. Neutral atoms can cross magnetic field lines, so they seep through the heliopause and into our solar system nearly unfazed – but not completely.

The small effects of this boundary crossing are key to SHIELDS’s technique. Charged particles flow around the heliopause, forming a barrier. Neutral particles from interstellar space must pass through this gauntlet, which alters their paths. SHIELDS was designed to reconstruct the trajectories of the neutral particles to determine where they came from and what they saw along the way.

A few minutes after launch, SHIELDS will reach its peak altitude of about 186 miles (300 kilometers) from the ground, far above the absorbing effect of Earth’s atmosphere. Pointing its telescope towards the nose of the heliosphere, it will detect light from arriving hydrogen atoms. Measuring how that light’s wavelength stretches or contracts reveals the particles’ speed. All told, SHIELDS will produce a map to reconstruct the shape and varying density of matter at the heliopause.

The data, Harris hopes, will help answer tantalizing questions about what interstellar space is like.

For instance, astronomers think the Local Bubble as a whole is about 1/10th as dense as most of the rest of the galaxy’s main disk. But we don’t know the details – for instance, is matter in the Local Bubble is distributed evenly, or bunched up in dense pockets surrounded by nothingness? “There’s a lot of uncertainty about the fine structure of the interstellar medium – our maps are kind of crude,” Harris said. “We know the general outlines of these clouds, but we don’t know what’s happening inside them.”

Astronomers also don’t know much about the galaxy’s magnetic field. But it should leave a mark on our heliosphere that SHIELDS can detect, compressing the heliopause in a specific way based on its strength and orientation.

Finally, learning what our current plot of interstellar space is like could be a helpful guide for the (distant) future. Our solar system is just passing through our current patch of space. In some 50,000 years, we’ll be on our way out of the Local Bubble and on to who knows what.

“We don’t really know what that other cloud is like, and we don’t know what happens when you cross a boundary into that cloud,” Harris said. “There’s a lot of interest in understanding what we’re likely to experience as our solar system makes that transition.”

Not that our solar system hasn’t done it before. Over the last four billion years, Harris explains, Earth has passed through a variety of interstellar environments. It’s just that now we’re around, with the scientific tools to document it.

“We’re just trying to understand our place in the galaxy, and where we’re headed in the future,” Harris said.

TOP IMAGE….An illustration of the heliosphere being pelted with cosmic rays from outside our solar system. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

LOWER IMAGE….Illustration of the Local Bubble. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science."

-Edwin P. Hubble

Is that even possible??