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Today β€” 1 June 2024Main stream

Daily Telescope: The most distant galaxy found so far is a total surprise

1 June 2024 at 08:00
Behold, the most distant galaxy found to date.

Enlarge / Behold, the most distant galaxy found to date. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI et al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's June 1, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a banger.

This telescope, launched 18 months ago now, had as one of its express goals to deliver insights about the early Universe. The most straightforward way of doing so is to collect the faintest, most distant light that has spent the longest time traveling to reach Earth.

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Before yesterdayMain stream

Daily Telescope: See carbon dioxide sublimating on Mars

29 May 2024 at 08:00
A field of sand dunes in the Martian springtime.

A field of sand dunes in the Martian springtime. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 29, and today's photo comes from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is, you guessed it, in orbit around Mars.

The image shows an area of sand dunes on Mars in the springtime, when carbon dioxide frost is sublimating into the air. According to NASA, the pattern of dark spots is due to the fact that the sublimation process is not uniform.

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Daily Telescope: The initial results from Europe’s Euclid telescope are dazzling

24 May 2024 at 08:00
Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust.

Enlarge / Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 24, and today's photo comes from the European Space Agency's new Euclid space telescope.

Launched in July 2023, the mission is intended to create a giant map of the Universe, across more than one-third of the nighttime sky. Its big-ticket goal is to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which account for the vast majority of the mass in the Universeβ€”but about which we know almost nothing.

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Daily Telescope: Black holes have been merging for a long, long time

21 May 2024 at 07:00
Scientists have determined the system to be evidence of an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was only 740 million years old.

Enlarge / Scientists have determined the system to be evidence of an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was only 740 million years old. (credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA et. al)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 21, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. It showcases the coming together of two massive black holes in the early Universe, just 740 million years after the Big Bang.

Each of the black holes has an estimated mass of roughly 50 million times the mass of our star, the Sun. The discovery of this merger so early in the Universe indicates that the growth of these objects in the centers of galaxies occurred very rapidly.

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Daily Telescope: I spy, with my little eye, the ISS

16 May 2024 at 08:00
The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away.

Enlarge / The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away. (credit: HEO on X)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 16, and today's image comes from an on-demand satellite imagery company named HEO. Only this image is not of the Earth, but rather the International Space Station.

According to the company, which is headquartered in Australia, one of its cameras imaged the space station at a distance of 69.06 km away, over the Indian Ocean. HEO flies its sensors as hosted payloads on satellites in Earth orbit. However, HEO's focus is not on Earth; it's on other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit to assess their status and identify anomalous behavior.

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