Stellary Starry Universe

A team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of a planet with three times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone.”

The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from NASA’s Great Observatories–the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms,” seen in wide-angle views of the system.

These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies.

The most massive of these young stars have already sped through their evolution in a few million years and exploded as supernovas. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

This image from testing of ChemCam shows a ball of luminous plasma erupting from the surface of an iron pyrite crystal in the sample chamber approximately 10 feet from the instrument. The laser beam itself is invisible. The ChemCam instrument, built for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, uses a pulsed laser beam to vaporize a pinhead-size target, producing a flash of light from the ionized material — plasma — that can be analyzed to identify chemical elements in the target. ChemCam was designed and built by a U.S.-French team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N. M.; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (the French government space agency); and the Centre d’Étude Spatiale des Rayonnements at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT, on Wednesday, Sept. 29, to discuss new information about the boundary of our solar system obtained from the agency’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft.

Lighting lights up the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during thunderstorms on Monday, Sept. 27, 2010. The Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, is one of the largest buildings in the world. Originally built for assembly of Apollo and Saturn vehicles, it was later modified to support space shuttle operations. High Bays 1 and 3 are used for integration and stacking of the complete Space Shuttle vehicle. High Bay 2 is used for external tank (ET) checkout and storage and as a contingency storage area for orbiters. High Bay 4 is also used for ET checkout and storage, as well as for payload canister operations and solid rocket boster contingency handling. Image Credit: NASA