The University of Arizona’s Magellan Adaptive Optics Xtreme instrument, combined with a six-and-a-half meter ground-based telescope, has imaged protoplanets in sharp detail. By capturing images of the ...

For non-astronomers, the twinkling of the stars can be quite romantic. For astronomers, it is the outward sign of a fundamental problem: As light passes through turbulent areas of the Earth's ...

Near-infrared images of the active galaxy NGC 1097, obtained with the NACO adaptive optics instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, disclose with unprecedented detail a complex central network of ...

It’s sometimes easy to forget that the light in the sky is an actual star. With how reliable it is and how busy we tend to be as humans, we can take that incredible fact and stow it away and largely ...

A new grant to the Medical College of Wisconsin will fund further development of a technique to image individual retina cells. A four-year career development grant worth $250,000 from the voluntary ...

The Giant Magellan Telescope, as it will appear at night upon completion. As humanity works together to build the newest generation of ground-based optical telescopes, with diameters between 25 and 39 ...

A sharp-eyed instrument on the Very Large Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the heart of a nearby galaxy, revealing a host of young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries and a possible twin of ...

For astronomers, it’s a magical moment: you’re staring at a monitor, and a blurry image of a cosmological object sharpens up, revealing new details. We call this “closing the loop,” a reference to the ...

This story is a selection from the August issue of Air & Space magazine Astronomers have devised ingenious methods for finding objects that were, as late as 2010, thought to be rare: Earth-size ...