Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy

A taste of discoveries to come!

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At the Habitable World's Observatory conference in Washington D.C., AURA's Heidi Hammel led a discussion of the Solar System Science this new space telescope will enable. #HWO2025 #HWO25

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🌟 Help measure sky brightness from wherever you are! 🌍✨ Join Globe At Night and measure sky brightness until July 28, using just your phone, tablet, or computer! 📱💻 Every data point counts! Let’s hit 20,000 measurements by the end of 2025! 💫🌃 #GlobeAtNight #LightPollution #CitizenScience

🚨 Cosmic discovery alert! 💥 Astronomers using the International Gemini Observatory and SOAR telescopes just caught something wild in action: the closest-ever link between a mysterious burst of X-rays and the explosive death of a massive star, a supernova! These powerful blasts, called fast X-ray transients (FXTs), are quick flashes of X-rays that vanish within hours. But until now, we didn’t know what caused them. That changed when the Einstein Probe telescope spotted an FXT in early 2025 just 2.8 billion light-years away (close in cosmic terms)! 👀 Thanks to the Gemini North and South telescope’s fast response, and SOAR’s follow-up observations from Chile, scientists realized they had caught a “failed” gamma-ray burst in action. That means the dying star launched powerful jets, but they couldn’t break through. Instead, they got trapped inside and released their energy as X-rays. ✨ The result? A never-before-seen look at how some massive stars explode in ways we’re just beginning to understand. This discovery is a big step forward in decoding the hidden deaths of stars much bigger than our Sun. Read more in the press release: https://lnkd.in/eSnkx5da

Think you can spot a comet? ☄️ Try your eye with the *very first* citizen science project on Zooniverse that uses data from NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory, Comet Catchers! We can't think of a more fitting project for #AsteroidDay 🤩 In this project, you'll help Rubin scientists spot comets in early data collected by the observatory. These fascinating objects are faint and full of secrets about the early Solar System — identifying and studying them helps us understand our origins! Comet Catchers is open to all, no special training required! All you need are curiosity and the desire to contribute to real scientific discovery. Be part of it now at cometcatchers.net ☄️ And we're far from done — this project is just the first of many! We're officially in the era of citizen science with Rubin ✨ Make sure you don't miss out on contributing to cutting-edge science when new Rubin projects go live ➡️ www.zooniverse.org/rubin

New exoplanet alert! The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the lightest planet ever directly seen outside our solar system. The gas giant planet, similar in mass to Saturn, orbits a star 34 light-years from Earth. This image combines ground-based data from the Very Large Telescope, shown in blue, and data from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, shown in orange. The light from the star TWA 7 has been subtracted. The location of the star is marked with a circle and a star symbol at the center of the image. The bright orange spot to the upper right of the star is the source identified as exoplanet TWA 7 b: https://lnkd.in/efnbqiCA #NASAWebb #JWST #exoplanet #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope #SpaceNews

Just released by the NSF-DOE Vera C.Rubin Observatory the first set of riches the Cosmic Treasure Chest! Introducing National Science Foundation (NSF)–U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Rubin Observatory's first wide and deep view of the cosmos, the southern region of the Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster is about 55 million light-years away from Earth, and is the nearest large collection of galaxies to our own Milky Way. Rubin captured the 1185 exposures combined into this stunning image in just 10.5 hours over 7 nights, using the 3200-megapixel LSST Camera. Only Rubin can produce an image this large and full this quickly! And by full, we mean FULL. Apart from a few foreground stars in our own Milky Way, this image contains about 10 million galaxies! 🤯 The image offers a stunning variety of objects — from bright stars ranging from blue to red in color, to nearby blue spiral galaxies, to distant red galaxy groups — demonstrating the broad range of science made possible by Rubin data ✨ Dive in and explore in all the rich detail at https://lnkd.in/eXsMa-Ji