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A Grand Spiral

The ultraviolet GALEX satellite just revealed the largest known spiral galaxy! NGC 6872 (a barred spiral) is 522,000 light-years across from the tip of one outstretched arm to the tip of the other, which makes it about 5 times the size of our home galaxy, the Milky Way! We recently … Continue Reading →

Go, Super-TIGER, go!

Super-TIGER team members in Antarctica: John E Ward (WUSTL), Ryan Murphy (WUSTL), Thomas Hams (GSFC), Sean Fitzsimmons (GSFC) Credit: NASA/WUSTL We’ve talked about NASA’s scientific balloon projects in the past, even featuring them in a two-part podcast series about balloon-borne science in Antarctica and what it’s like to live and … Continue Reading →

Try It At Home: Turning Sound Into Light

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • January 22, 2013
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This is a long-overdue follow-up to the blog where we showed you how to eavesdrop on the signals coming from your remote control, turning the infrared light patterns into sound through a simple circuit with a photocell and an amplifier/speaker. In this Try It At Home activity, we’ll build another … Continue Reading →

American Astronomical Society wrap-up

  • By Sara Mitchell
  • January 18, 2013
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Each December, there’s a bit of a lull in astronomy news. Not only do the holidays slow things down, but astronomers are also getting ready for the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in January. These AAS meetings (there’s also a summer meeting in May or June) are … Continue Reading →

Shiny: a Look at Astro-H Flight Hardware

  • By Maggie Masetti
  • January 9, 2013
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Here’s some brand new photos from one of the missions we are working on here at the Astrophysics Science Division – Astro-H! Astro-H is an orbiting X-ray astronomy observatory being developed by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). NASA and JAXA have teamed up to develop a high resolution “Soft … Continue Reading →

Post-apocalyptic Musings

  • By Koji Mukai
  • January 3, 2013
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Congratulations! You have survived the end of the world on December 21st, 2012. Many of you who never believed it may nevertheless be relieved, thinking that we can now forget about these apocalyptic prophecies. But, you would be wrong, in my opinion. It’s likely that, before too long, the Internet … Continue Reading →

A composite image of the Crab Nebula showing the X-ray (blue), and optical (red) images superimposed. The size of the X-ray image is smaller because the higher energy X-ray emitting electrons radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower energy optically emitting electrons as they move. Credit: Optical: NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. X-Ray: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al.

Lighthouses in Space

Since pulsars are something we study here in the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA, and we know it’s a topic people are always curious about, we interviewed astrophysicist Dr. Tod Strohmayer to ask him all about them. Blueshift: What’s a pulsar? Would you say they look sort of like lighthouses … Continue Reading →

Farthest

I was inspired to pick up where Alexe left off with her “est” blogs, and write about “Farthest,” because of some recent, cool, astronomical news. There was recently excitement over a Hubble Space Telescope discovery of seven primitive galaxies located over 13 billion light years away from us. The results … Continue Reading →

The Life of a Scientist: Astrobiology in Iceland, Parts III and IV

  • By Christina Richey
  • December 13, 2012
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This is Parts III and IV of my blog about doing astrobiology in Iceland. Read parts I and II. Part III: Field Work: ATP and the search for life in hostile environments Icelandic horses (with the most fabulous 80s hair) in front of the Brenninsteinsalda Rhyolite Mountains. Photo courtesy of … Continue Reading →

A Mirror Milestone, Part 4

Here’s another update on the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors. In my last mirror blog I talked about the arrival of our flight secondary mirror, which is a pretty big deal, as there is only one on the telescope, and I hear it was a big challenge to manufacture. Along … Continue Reading →

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