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Articles on Telescope

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Enjoying the planets lined up in a row. Derek Bruff/flickr

Five in a row - the planets align in the night sky

The five planets visible to the naked eye since ancient times are putting on a dazzling display this month, in a night-sky dance along with the Moon.
US F/A-18 footage of a UFO (circled in red). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Parzival191919

Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study

About 5 percent of all UFO sightings cannot be easily explained by weather or human technology. A physicist argues that there’s compelling evidence to justify serious scientific study and that the skeptics should step aside – for the sake of humanity.
Galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The inset image is the very distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1. ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, W. Zheng (JHU), M. Postman (STScI), the CLASH Team, Hashimoto et al.

When did the lights first come on in the universe? A galaxy close to the dawn of time gives a clue

Astronomers have indirectly spotted some of the first stars in the universe by making their most distant detection of oxygen in a galaxy that existed just 500m years after the Big Bang.
Imagined view from Kepler-10b, a planet that orbits one of the 150,000 stars that the Kepler spacecraft is monitoring. NASA/Kepler Mission/Dana Berry

Goodbye Kepler, hello TESS: Passing the baton in the search for distant planets

When NASA first started planning the Kepler mission, no one knew if the universe held any planets outside our solar system. Thousands of exoplanets later, the search enters a new phase as Kepler retires.
The Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy here seen in infrared light, but it looks different when viewed at other wavelengths. ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

Looking at the universe through very different ‘eyes’

The galaxies, stars and planets in our universe can look very different when you view them through equipment that sees beyond the visible light our eyes can see.
This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s south pole and its swirling atmosphere was created by citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

Juno mission unveils Jupiter’s complex interior, weather and magnetism

We may need to re-think our models of Jupiter’s formation thanks to the first results from Juno probe orbiting the planet, and new observations from Earth.
Part of CSIRO’s ASKAP antennas at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia. Australian SKA Office/WA Department of Commerce

A machine astronomer could help us find the unknowns in the universe

It’s almost impossible for any human to spot something unknown or unusual in the massive amount of data collected by our telescopes. So we’re teaching an intelligent machine to search the data for us.

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