OUR UNIVERSE

And 'how much longer until a new discovery shouts it out?' asks the Science @ NASA video series. In July 2014, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler 452b, a planet slightly larger than …Read More » Earth that resides in the habitable zone of its solar system. It is 6 billion+ years old, (older than Earth) allowing for plenty of time for life to develop.

So how thick is what we call sky? Well, you'd think, looking up, that there's so much blue up there it's got to go on for hundreds and hundreds of miles. But it doesn't. Looking at this photo, you can see that the ring of atmosphere around the earth is cellophane thin...a wisp of gas. It's a little thinner at the poles and thicker near the equator, but the "sky" is about 250 miles wide (or up), the distance, roughly, between New York City and Washington, D.C. Which means — if Amtrak could run a "Sky Chief" straight up and handle the spin — you could chug to the very edge of space in three and a half hours. But that's not the cool part. In the 1940's, the great illustrator Eric Sloane did a cross-section of the atmosphere that surrounds our planet. He observed that we live in a sea of air, and we, like lobsters, are at the bottom: Eric Sloane/Dover Publications Then he took a closer look at that bottom piece, ...

Astrophotographer Brian Hancock sent in a photo of the Milky Way over a moai near Hanga Roa on Easter Island in the south Pacific Ocean, a province of   Chile. He writes in an email message to  Space.com : “Just wanted to share a ... [photo] from a recent trip to Chile this past October. I honestly was totally lost when I first looked up — familiar constellations like Sagittarius and Scorpius were so ‘out of place’ that I didn't recognize them at first. [This] photo is from a night of observing at a moai near Hanga Roa. It is right by the shore and clouds rolled in as the Milky Way hovered above.”

Before twilight and shortly after the moon set in Yellowstone National Park, astrophotographer  A. Garrett Evans  found the perfect moment to capture this stunning image. Made up of dust, gas and roughly 400 billion stars, the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy stretching between 100,000 to 120,000 light-years in diameter. It is visible as a dazzling band of light in the night sky. The steam from the spring can be seen center right in the frame. The lines in the foreground created by the silica and the colors created by the microbial mats that grow around the edge of the spring. "All the sights in the park are amazing some maybe even more so at night!" Evans added. This photo is a single shot taken with a Canon 6D, using a Nikon 14024 mm lens with a Novoflex adapter. Camera settings were ISO 6400, f/2.8, 30 seconds.

The Alpha Centauri system is the closest star system to our sun. On our sky’s dome, we see this multiple system as a single star – the third-brightest star visible from Earth.                                                     Alpha centauri three stars compared to our parent star the SUN The Alpha Centauri system probably consists of three stars. Alpha Centauri is part of a double, or triple, star system. The two main components are Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. The third star, a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, is thought to be about 4.22 light-years distant and is actually our sun’s closest neighbor among the stars. Is it part of the Alpha Centauri system? The actual status of Proxima as a system member is unclear. It might simply be passing nearby but not part of the system, or it might be gravitationally bound. Still, we say – and o...

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly took this photo of sunrise — looking like an abstract painting — over Earth's horizon from the International Space Station on Oct. 21, 2015.