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If you don’t mind the nip of the cold, this month’s celestial phenomena are ones to watch, and include a Nutcracker ballet between the Moon and Mars, and the king of the meteor showers. Mars is at its brightest this December between the 7th and 8th, when an occultation occurs. This is the passing of… Keep Reading
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Just in time for Halloween, NASA released a photo of the sun “smiling”. Their Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the cheery image, sharing it in a Tweet in late October. The ‘smile’ we see here are made up of three coronal holes, solar fluctuations during which fast bursts of solar wind are released, NASA explained. “Seen… Keep Reading
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Astronomers have found a planet with the average density of a marshmallow. Along with being a big softie, scientists found that the Jupiter-sized exoplanet would also float if it were hypothetically put in a giant cosmic bathtub. Astronomers using the Kitt Peak National Observatory telescope in Arizona, observed an unusual planet in orbit around a… Keep Reading
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The James Webb Space Telescope recently made its debut with the “Deep Field” image, but as we are absorbed by the beautiful colors of near-infinity, scientists have used the data behind the shot to identify a very old and fascinating object in space. Named the “Sparkler,” it’s a “globular cluster” nine billion light years away.… Keep Reading
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A thin film of plastic was, for the first time ever, turned into tiny diamonds in the blink of an eye after being shot at with a laser beam. Synthetic diamonds are valuable for their hardness and are used to make high-quality cutting and polishing tools, but equally so for their thermal conductivity, and electrical… Keep Reading
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The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best shows all year for “shooting stars”. Though the Perseids have been active since July 14, the frequency of meteors hurtling through the sky is now heating up this week. Scientists say the peak time to view this shower will be on the night of Thursday, August… Keep Reading
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The dawn of a new era in astronomy is here as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The full set of the telescope’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data, which uncover a collection of cosmic features elusive until now, released Tuesday to an eager and… Keep Reading
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It’s been a long time coming, but this June stargazers are finally getting the chance to see five planets align in the night skies. For the rest of the month—look east towards the pre-dawn sky with the naked eye, or even better, with a telescope or binoculars—to see a five-long string of planets. We haven’t… Keep Reading
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When stars like our Sun use up all their fuel, they shrink to form white dwarfs. Sometimes such dead stars flare back to life in a super hot explosion and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation. A research team has now been able to observe such an explosion of X-ray light for the very first… Keep Reading
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Night sky fans, on May 15-16 look up to see the blood-red spectacle that is a total lunar eclipse. A lunar eclipse occurs when the full moon slips into the Earth’s shadow—and those watching from South America and the eastern side of North America are in for quite the show. If you’re an eclipse hunter… Keep Reading
