On April 21, 2010, NASA released the first collection of images taken by its newest solar spacecraft, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Launched on February 11, SDO has already captured two significant events—a prominence and a solar flare—in unprecedented detail at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. See these solar events in motion in AMNH's latest Astro Bulletin.

Even though you’ve been told never to gaze directly at the Sun, the SDO satellite allows researchers to do just that, at a resolution and with coverage never before achieved. With an array of four telescopes called the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), which observe at different wavelengths, SDO constantly monitors the Sun’s corona by taking one image every 10 seconds. Astronomers will use these images, along with data from other instruments onboard the satellite, to better understand the dynamics of solar activity and apply that knowledge to other star systems across the Universe.

During solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and other eruptive events, the Sun ejects charged particles into the Solar System. As these particles near Earth, they can interact with Earth’s magnetic field and trigger space weather. Typically, space weather manifests itself as colorful auroras near the poles, but it can also disrupt radio communications and global positioning systems (GPS) on Earth. By using SDO to examine how eruptive events evolve, astronomers should be better able to predict space weather and help people prepare.

SDO’s work has just begun. Preliminary image collection began on March 30, and the mission is expected to run until 2015. SDO’s first crop of high-resolution images already gives an indication of the beautiful and valuable data still to come.

To learn more about other recent astronomy news, take a look at the Science Bulletins website.

NASA's latest infrared space telescope—the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE—was launched on December 14, 2009. It recently began a six-month survey of the entire sky around Earth. With its unprecedented sensitivity, WISE will map the sky in wavelengths longer than the human eye can see, revealing previously unknown asteroids, brown dwarfs, and distant, dusty galaxies.

The WISE mission has partnered with the Hayden Planetarium to visualize these newly discovered objects in the Digital Universe 3-D Atlas. In anticipation, WISE team members created a simulation of WISE's potential brown dwarf discoveries. The Digital Universe team created a video fly-through of the simulated data, which is featured in the latest Astro Bulletin below. View the entire video, called The Solar Neighborhood After WISE, on the University of California's WISE website.

To learn about recent astronomical discoveries and other news about space, visit the Science Bulletins website.

Evidence is mounting of a widespread yet faint signature of water on Earth’s moon that is strongest near the poles. See the signature in the Astro Bulletin from October 19, 2009 along with recent images from NASA’s water-seeking LCROSS mission, which crashed part of its spacecraft into a frozen crater at the Moon’s south pole on October 9, 2009. We’ll be keen to know if LCROSS mission scientists confirm traces of water ice in the faint plume of debris kicked up by the impact. NASA will reveal results in the coming weeks.

This Astro Bulletin from July 21, 2008 highlights a previous discovery of lunar water dissolved inside tiny, glassy rocks that astronauts on the Apollo missions brought back from the Moon about 40 years ago. Clues to the water content in these volcanically formed beads have turned up since the 1980's, yet technology is only now sufficiently advanced to detect such trace amounts.

To learn about other recent astronomical discoveries, visit the Science Bulletins website.