Wow! Stunning picture of Milky Way taken from Northern Chile

NASA published this stunning photograph today featuring the road that connects the Northern Cross and Southern Cross – the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Taken from Laguna Cejar in Northern Chile by Nicholas Buer, the photo was shot in October, just after sunset. Included in the photo are the Moon, Venus (above/left of…

Three days ago, a white dwarf exploded in the nearby M82 galaxy (aka Messier 82, Starburst Galaxy, or the Cigar Galaxy), the closest galaxy to our own. The explosion created the closest, and brightest, supernova seen by man in over a quarter of a century. In fact, the explosion is so bright, backyard astronomers are…

Seemingly impossible, the idea of a nested star has been proposed before – it’s just nobody has ever found an example of the cosmic oddity. That may be about to change though. Scientists are keeping the name of the star a secret right now – at least until their peers can validate their findings –…

NGC 6946 (also known as the Fireworks Galaxy, Arp 29, and Caldwell 12) is a medium-sized, face-on spiral galaxy about 22.5 million light years away from Earth located in the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus. At about 20,000 light years wide, it’s one of about a dozen nearby neighbors to the Milky Way. Since its discovery…

The bright star at the center of this nebula, the object responsible for the nebula’s distorted form, is Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in the galaxy. Eta Carinae is around 100 times the mass of our sun and 1 million times brighter. Scientists think it could explode as a supernova at any…

How sad. Here is NASA’s primary home page after the United States government shutdown on October 1, 2013. It reads: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.”

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is more than 11.66 billion miles from the sun and is now recognized as the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Solar storm aftershocks at the edge of our solar system provided confirmation that Voyager 1 made the passage on August 25, 2012.

Since who knows when, people have been watching the sky. It has been a means of tracking time, of navigating, of superstition, and a form of entertainment. Check out the giant list of interesting astronomy facts.

A professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has proposed a new model built from some of the most basic entities: time, space, mass, and length. In this new mind-bending model, time and space can be converted into each other and mass and length also convert in the same manner. Basically, as the universe…

Aren’t nebulae supposed to be, well, round. And blood-red in color to cap off the creepiness factor. What gives? Astronomers think they *may* be able explain away the Red Rectangle Nebula’s odd shape as an optical illusion but its crimson color still has them scratching their heads.