Jupiter During The Day. By Ethan_Roberts123

Dueling Bands in the Night : What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is the one on the right and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy, so that from inside, this disk appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The Milky Way band can also be seen all year – if out away from city lights. The less commonly seem band, on the left, is zodiacal light – sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings in the north, particularly during the months of March and April, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent after sunset. It was determined only this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. Only on certain times of the year will the two bands be seen side by side, in parts of the sky, like this. The featured image, including the Andromeda galaxy and a meteor, was captured in late January over a frozen lake in Kanding, Sichuan, China. via NASA

Daytime moon

M16 [NGC 6611] Eagle Nebula [Kitt Peak Telescope]

With NASA announcing their streaming service NASA+ and also announcing it’s going to be free and also ad free, I’d just like to appreciate the lengths they go to make scientific knowledge and exploration as available as they possibly can.

Happy 90th birthday to Buzz Aldrin.

ISS by ajamesmccarthy

★☆★ SPACE ★☆★

NGC 6543 - Cats Eye Nebula

This is another photo of the Jupiter Saturn Conjunction! 🪐🪐🪐

The two planets are getting closer each day! I love this picture because you can clearly see Jupiter’s 4 largest moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) and a nice view of Saturn. This event is very rare - Jupiter and Saturn are the closest since the year 1623! ✨✨✨

Taken by me (Michelle Park) using the Slooh Canary Two telescope on December 20th, 2020 at 19:24 UTC.

Strange star system may hold first evidence of an ultra-rare 'dark matter star'

In a distant star system, a sunlike star orbits an invisible object that may be the first example of a 'boson star' made of dark matter, new research suggests.

Astronomers long thought that a peculiar star system observed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite was a simple case of a star orbiting a black hole.

But now, two astronomers are challenging that claim, finding that the evidence suggests something far stranger: Possibly, a never-before-seen type of star made of invisible dark matter. Their research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was published April 18 on the preprint server arXiv.

The system itself consists of a sunlike star and, well, something else. The star weighs a little less than the sun (0.93 solar mass) and has roughly the same chemical abundance as the sun. Its mysterious companion is much more massive — around 11 solar masses. The objects orbit each other at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, about the distance at which Mars orbits the sun, making a complete orbit every 188 days.

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