GALEX Stories

At 3:40 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 7, 1968, just three weeks before the highly anticipated launch of Apollo 8 and the first crewed flight to the Moon, an Atlas-Centaur rocket carrying NASA’s heaviest and most ambitious unpiloted satellite at…

Launched on Dec. 7, 1968, NASA's Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, nicknamed Stargazer, was the agency's first successful cosmic explorer — a direct ancestor of Hubble and many other astronomy satellites.

This simulation helps explain an odd light signal thought to be coming from a close-knit pair of merging black holes, PG 1302-102, located 3.5 billion light-years away. The close-up view at right shows that the smaller of the two black…