As you know, astronomers often look at objects in space through multiple telescopes. And different telescopes can detect different types of light. Therefore, each brings its own pieces of information to what it’s observing. In a similar way, musicians can play different musical notes together to create harmonies that are impossible with single notes alone.

In the past few years, NASA has been producing sonifications of astronomical data. This project takes the space telescopes’ digital data – most of which is invisible to our unaided eyes – and translates them into musical notes and sounds.

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Archaeologists digging at an ancient site in the central Netherlands over the course of several years discovered something remarkable and unexpected. Following an analysis of excavations that have been ongoing since 2017, the archaeologists have confirmed that this site contains burial mounds, ditches, cemeteries and pathways lined with wooden poles, all of which were part of a sprawling religious sanctuary or ceremonial complex that was constructed more than 4,000 years ago.

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On June 15, 2023, an international team of astronomers released an unusual new image of a very distant supernova, SN Zwicky, a star that increased suddenly and dramatically in brightness. This supernova is 4 billion light-years away. And it appears as four supernovae in images. Why? The reason is an intervening galaxy, only about 2.5 billion light-years distant. The galaxy’s mass has warped the supernova’s light before the light had a chance to reach us.

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The Tarantula Nebula is a star formation region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Tarantula is about 160,000 light-years away and is highly luмinous for a non-stellar object. It’s the brightest and largest star formation region in the entire Local Group of galaxies. But it shouldn’t be.

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The universe we see today looks clear and empty, apart from the stars and galaxies. In the early universe, however, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was opaque. Light from the stars couldn’t penetrate the dense hydrogen intergalactic gas. So, how did the universe become clear? Using data from NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, an international group of astronomers said on June 12, 2023, that light from stars ionized and heated the surrounding gas.

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Whether naturally occurring or human-made, some phenomena on Earth are so perplexing that they leave even scientists scratching their hands. From strange lights that illuminate the night sky to creatures thriving under confounding circumstances and fields of giant, perfectly round stone spheres, take a mind-bending journey to eight places with mysterious phenomena.

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A solar mission that has been spiraling closer to the sun to unravel its secrets has flown near enough to our star’s surface to make a key discovery.

Data from the Parker Solar Probe has uncovered the source of solar wind, a stream of energized particles that flow from the corona, or the sun’s hot outer atmosphere, toward Earth.

One of the key motivations behind the mission, named for the late astrophysicist Eugene Parker and launched in 2018, was to determine what the wind looks like as it forms near the sun and how it escapes the star’s gravity.

As the probe came within about 13 million miles (20.9 million kilometers) of the sun, its instruments detected fine structures of the solar wind where it generates near the photosphere, or the solar surface, and captured ephemeral details that disappear once the wind is blasted from the corona.

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Link contributed by Gene Savoy.

On June 5, 2023, NASA released a new composite image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows our universe when it was less than 600 million years old. And, you can explore more than 45,000 baby galaxies in this image, especially if you zoom into the large interactive image.

Our universe is thought to be more than 13 billion years old. So – at 600 million years – the cosmos was in its infancy. The galaxies had just formed from the expanding cloud of most hydrogen gas, moving outward from the Big Bang.

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Astronomers have confirmed the presence of a second supermassive black hole in the turbulent heart of a distant galaxy.

The scientists also found that both of these cosmic monsters are feeding on gas and dust and that one has a peculiar oblong orbit that sends it plunging through a massive disk of red-hot dust and gas around its companion.

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The James Webb Space Telescope set its sights on a galaxy 20 million light-years away, capturing a dazzling star-forming galaxy in images streaked with the signature of passing asteroids.

A bright band in the upper left corner of the images shows the bright, bar-shaped center of the galaxy, according to a NASA news release.

The NGC 5068 galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy, the same type as our home Milky

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Link contributed by Gene Savoy, Jr.