Space News & Blog Articles

Jupiter’s atmosphere and clouds have mesmerized stargazers for centuries, as their multi-colored, swirling layers can easily be viewed from powerful telescopes on Earth. However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter’s atmospheric features, having revealed them in breathtaking detail. This includes images of massive lightning storms, clouds swallowing clouds, polar vortices, and powerful jet streams. Yet, despite its beauty and wonder, scientists are still puzzled about the processes occurring deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere that result in these incredible features.

From 2013 to 2019, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) carried out a deep, wide-area survey of the sky in a collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae, and measure the rate at which the cosmos is expanding. For more than a century, scientists have been trying to constrain this cosmological phenomenon - the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant - named in honor of astronomers Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaitre (who independently confirmed that the Universe is expanding in the early 20th century).

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile offers some of the clearest, darkest skies on Earth. High altitude, minimal cloud cover, and distance from major cities combine to create conditions astronomers dream about. It's why the European Southern Observatory chose Paranal for its Very Large Telescope array and the four 8.2 meter instruments that can work individually or combine their light to achieve staggering resolution.

When Edwin Hubble revealed in the 1920s that distant galaxies were retreating from us in all directions, he laid the foundation for our understanding of the expansion of the universe. But even then, the picture wasn't quite clean. Some nearby galaxies, like Andromeda, were moving toward us rather than away, exactly what you'd expect from gravity between neighboring galaxies.

For decades, Mercury has carried the reputation of being a dead, dry planet whose geological story ended long ago. Its cratered surface, baked by the Sun and seemingly frozen in time, appeared to tell a tale of ancient violence followed by billions of years of silence. That story just got considerably more interesting.

The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda CDM) model is the current cosmological model and explains much of what we see in the cosmos. One of Lambda CDM's core features is the prediction that structure grows hierarchically from the bottom up. It begins with dark matter density fluctuations, then dwarf galaxies form, then those dwarfs merge to form more massive galaxies, which merge into still larger galaxies. Eventually, there are galaxy clusters.