Born in 1928, Vera Rubin set her sights on Princeton, but they wouldn’t accept female grad students in astronomy. So she earned her master’s from Cornell & PhD from Georgetown.
In 1965, Rubin became the 1st woman allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory. She went on to find evidence for the existence of dark matter.
My weekly space news show Ad Astra is here! Have 10 minutes? Then you can hear about my favorite space, space science, and space flight stories this week.
Do you want to learn about the amazing #engineering behind large optical telescopes? Tom Scott recently visited ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile, and in his latest video he tells us all about it, including a sneak peek at our Extremely Large #Telescope !
A new data release from #ESA's #Gaia - disentangling the cores of globular clusters, accidentally doing cosmology, tracking asteroids, diffuse interstellar matter and a catalogue of pulsating stars.
LOTS of cool science including using observation modes that were not planned for science originally 🤯 (see blurb from @minzastro in the article!)
First discovery of a disc around a star in another galaxy! A few years ago astronomers pointed ESO's Very Large Telescope to our galactic neighbour, the Large Magellanic Cloud. They spotted two jets coming out of a dust-hidden star, a sign that it might have a disc around it.
Now, using ALMA, they've found evidence of such a rotating gas disc, similar to those in our galaxy where planets form around young stars.
We've just started installing the aluminium cladding that will protect ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope from the harsh conditions of the Atacama Desert in #Chile.
It's amazing to see this project take shape. And it's hard to convey just how big this is –– the dome is 80 m tall!
In this new #JWST NIRCam image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), we see the remains of a star that first imploded and then exploded about 340 years ago (from our point of view), leaving behind a tangle of gas, dust, and magnetic fields.
A #thread with some details of what we are seeing in the image.
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Another look at Jupiter’s moon Io with decorrelated colors and boosted to show the dark jupitershine on the right. A lot of credit goes to the JunoCam team for recovering the camera from apparent severe radiation damage that ruined much of the last perijove images. Expect a lot of cool science to come out of this pass and the next one in February!
Wow. Jet Propulsion Lab laying off over 500 people due to uncertainty from Congress on funding; memo tells everyone to stay home tomorrow as people are canned.
Let’s take a look at the recent announcement of the “astonishing” discovery of a global subsurface ocean on Saturn’s “Death Star” icy moon Mimas.
The discovery is based on new modeling/simulation of Mimas’s "wobble" (libration) around its axis, its orbital shift over 13 years and Mimas’s tidal heating. It rules out the alternate hypothesis of an oval shaped rocky core. There is no direct evidence of liquid water.
For the first time, astronomers have direct evidence of planets that survived the death of their star.
These remarkable JWST images appear to show Jupiter-like planets still clinging to burned-out white dwarf stars. Our solar system might look a lot like this in 8 billion years.
#PPOD: This stunning photo was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Phobos is the larger and closer of Mars's two moons, the other being Deimos. One hypothesis of their origin involves the possible capture of primitive asteroids. Unfortunately, Phobos is being pulled apart and closer by Mars's tidal forces and gravity. Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/ @andrealuck CC BY (https://www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/53635851891/)
🚀 First dibs for Mastodon peeps: I’m selling an unassembled Open DSKY (Apollo guidance computer user interface) kit which includes all electronics (including Arduino nano) and 3D printed parts and laser cut components to build an Open DSKY.
An annular eclipse, or "ring of fire" eclipse, will be visible across parts of North America and South America on October 14, 2023. Here's how to see it.
The earliest well-established observation a solar eclipse was recorded on March 5, 1222 BCE. It was inscribed in a clay tablet from Ugarit, a city in modern-day Syria.
The expansion of the universe could be a mirage, new theoretical study suggests (68k.news)
The expansion of the universe could be a mirage, a potentially controversial new study suggests....