Here are some downright chilling sounds recorded by several spacecraft. The sounds come from radio signals that are created by solar winds interacting with plasma that is wafting through our solar system.

Since its launch 25 Years ago, the Hubble Telescope has returned images of unprecedented beauty of a dynamic and changing universe.

In this episode of COSMIC JOURNEYS, Hubble’s most iconic images are bought to life to answer some of the most important questions facing astronomers today. Colliding galaxies, the birth and death of stars, jets of gas thrown out by material crashing into distant suns: these incredible images tech us valuable lessons about how galaxies are formed, what dark matter is and even the fate of the earth itself.

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Dawn, the speedy ion-drive spacecraft, left Earth in 2007 bound for Vesta and Ceres in the Asteroid Belt. These are no ordinary asteroids. Scientists see them as tiny, still born planets. They sent Dawn out to fly around them, map them, and look for evidence that will transport them to very early days of our solar system.

Music by Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com)

What happens with a giant solar outburst on the scale of the Great Solar Storm of 1859 hits the Earth. Solar scientists got a taste of such a blast in 2012 when the Sun erupted in a giant coronal mass ejection. In one of the largest solar computer simulations ever performed, scientists tracked the impact of a massive wave of solar plasma as it slammed into Earth.

So what else is new? Science has known since the late 1990s that the universe is accelerating outward. That means it will continue to dissipate on into the future through a number of well defined epochs. A large international collaboration called the Galaxy and Mass Assembly Project (GAMA) has been surveying deep regions of the universe to find out how the energy output of galaxies has changed.

They found that a large sampling are emitting about half the energy they did two billion years ago. This is because rates of star birth are steadily declining. This is part of a slow decline in our current epoch, known as the Stellar Epoch, the epoch of stars. As one astronomer put it, the universe has settled down on the couch, while getting lazier and older. The timeline of this epoch, however, is many trillions of years into the future.

The Cassini Spacecraft swooped in for the last of five close encounters with one of the most beautiful moons in our solar system: Dione. After more than a decade exploring the Saturn system, the Cassini-Huygens mission must be regarded as one of the most successful science missions ever. It has already amassed one of the greatest photographic collections of all time. Revel in the details of Dione out near the limits of the solar system.

Music by Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com)

From Hubblecast. A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows off the Twin Jet Nebula, highlighting the nebula’s shells and its knots of expanding gas in striking detail. Two iridescent lobes of material stretch outwards from a central star system. Within these lobes two huge jets of gas are streaming from the star system at speeds in excess of one million kilometres per hour.

The glowing and expanding shells of gas clearly visible in this image represent the final stages of life for an old star of low to intermediate mass. The star has not only ejected its outer layers, but the exposed remnant core is now illuminating these layers — resulting in a spectacular light show like the one seen here.

Ordinary planetary nebulae have one star at their centre, bipolar nebulae have two, in a binary star system. Astronomers have found that the two stars in this pair each have around the same mass as the Sun, ranging from 0.6 to 1.0 solar masses for the smaller star, and from 1.0 to 1.4 solar masses for its larger companion. The larger star is approaching the end of its days and has already ejected its outer layers of gas into space, Continue reading Ultimate Bipolar Nebula →

Feel the pull of the largest object in our galaxy, a supermassive black hole. Astronomers are discovering its properties by probing the objects that are buzzing around it at mind-boggling speeds.

From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.

A fury is building on the surface of the Sun – high-velocity jets, a fiery tsunami wave that reaches 100,000 kilometers high, rising loops of electrified gas. What’s driving these strange phenomena? How will they affect planet Earth? Find the answers as we venture into the seething interior of our star.

Solar Superstorms is a major new production that takes viewers into the tangle of magnetic fields and superhot plasma that vent the Sun’s rage in dramatic flares, violent solar tornadoes, and the largest eruptions in the solar system: Coronal Mass Ejections.

The show features one of the most intensive efforts ever made to visualize the inner workings of the sun, including a series of groundbreaking scientific visualizations computed on the giant new supercomputing initiative, Blue Waters, based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois.

Brace yourself for the onslaught of the next ….Solar Superstorm.

What if we could see the universe as a whole? We’ve been trying to see and describe the large scale shape and structure of the universe since the dawn of science. Now, with powerful telescopes and supercomputers we have what earlier generations might have thought was a truly “God’s Eye” view of creation. Those same technologies suggest that our view is still highly limited.