Whether you are a keen astrophotographer or general lover of all things outer-space, NASA has a treat for you. They have made 140,000 audio clips, videos, and images available for everyone to view and download – copyright free and for public use.

Within the in-depth, searchable library, NASA has included the EXIF data with all images. This is particularly exciting as it provides an insight into how these photographs were created, whether that be with specialist equipment or more accessible DSLRs.

When a star explodes (a supernova), it sends its intense burst of light out in all directions. On rare occasions, in the months and years that follow, rings of light or “light echoes” spread out from the original supernova position.

This is what is described in a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters based on observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) by a collaboration of astronomers from Dublin, Barcelona, Aarhus, New York and Garching. The paper, “Hubble Space Telescope Reveals Spectacular Light Echoes Associated with the Stripped-envelope Supernova 2016adj in the Iconic Dust Lane of Centaurus A,” was published this week.

The scientists merged the HST images in a short gif-video, showing first the supernova explosion at the very center, followed by light rings which appeared when light from the explosion hit various layers of dust in the vicinity.

How Abell 611 remains intact at its celestial perch is a major question — and its likely that dark matter binds it together.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that even black holes don’t live forever, but emit radiation and eventually evaporate. Here’s how.

An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a new planetary system by observing a nearby star known as HD 18,599 (or TOI-179). It appears that this star is orbited by a Neptune-mass exoplanet and a massive sub-stellar object. The finding was detailed in a paper published October 14 on the arXiv pre-print server.

TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified nearly 6,000 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 266 have been confirmed so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Silvano Desidera of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova, has recently confirmed another TOI monitored by TESS. They report that a transit signal has been identified in the light curve of a bright K-dwarf star—TOI-179 (other designations HD 18,599 and HIP 13754). The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up observations using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instruments.

Maybe by 5 to 10 years JWST will have an answer for us.

Researchers from Japan add a new wrinkle to a popular theory and set the stage for the formation of monstrous black holes.

A massive burst of gamma radiation hit Earth, likely from a new black hole. There’s no threat, but we can’t rule out more Hulks.