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This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the planet Jupiter in a color composite of ultraviolet wavelengths. Released on Nov. 3, 2023, in honor of Jupiter reaching opposition, which occurs when the planet and the Sun are in opposite sides of the sky, this view of the gas giant planet includes the iconic, massive storm called the “Great Red Spot.” Though the storm appears red to the human eye, in this ultraviolet image it appears darker because high altitude haze particles absorb light at these wavelengths. The reddish, wavy polar hazes are absorbing slightly less of this light due to differences in either particle size, composition, or altitude.

Learn more about Hubble and how this type of data can help us learn more about our universe.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Wong (University of California – Berkeley); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

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President-elect Donald Trump has expressed his interest in buying Greenland, an idea he first floated back in 2019. The Onion examines the pros and cons of the U.S. acquiring the country.

PRO: New Indigenous people to wrong

CON: Feels immoral to do anything that makes the Danes richer

PRO: Would increase domestic supply of ice caps to melt

CON: Full of foreigners

PRO: Would make Alaska jealous

CON: The Great American Melting Pot is still adjusting to the Scots-Irish

PRO: Can finally sate America’s appetite for pickled fish

CON: 51 stars is a little gaudy, don’t you think?

PRO: Immigrant camps have to go somewhere

CON: Vacation to Greenland no longer considered exotic

PRO: USA! USA! USA!

CON: Björk from Iceland

Two galaxies are squaring off in Corvus. When two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. That's because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small amount of that space. During the slow, hundred million year collision, one galaxy can still rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. In this clash of the titans, dark dust pillars mark massive molecular clouds are being compressed during the galactic encounter, causing the rapid birth of millions of stars, some of which are gravitationally bound together in massive star clusters. (text from APOD) This image has been selected as APOD of 16th March 2014. The raw files comes from Hubble Legacy Archive.

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NEW YORK — The purported leader of a Japan-based crime syndicate pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges alleging that he conspired to traffic uranium and plutonium from Myanmar in the belief that Iran would use it for nuclear weapons.

Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, of Japan, entered the plea in Manhattan federal court to weapons and narcotics trafficking charges that carry a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison and the possibility of life behind bars. Sentencing was set for April 9.

Prosecutors say Ebisawa didn't know he was communicating in 2021 and 2022 with a confidential source for the Drug Enforcement Administration along with the source's associate, who posed as an Iranian general. Ebisawa was arrested in April 2022 in Manhattan during a DEA sting.

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a release that the prosecution demonstrated the DEA's "unparalleled ability to dismantle the world's most dangerous criminal networks."

She said the investigation "exposed the shocking depths of international organized crime from trafficking nuclear materials to fueling the narcotics trade and arming violent insurgents."

Acting U.S. Attorney Edward Y. Kim said Ebisawa admitted at his plea that he "brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma."

"At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma," he added.

Court papers said Ebisawa told the DEA's confidential source in 2020 that he had access to a large quantity of nuclear materials that he wanted to sell. To support his claim, he sent the source photographs depicting rocky substances with Geiger counters measuring radiation, claiming they contained thorium and uranium, the papers said.

The nuclear material came from an unidentified leader of an "ethnic insurgent group" in Myanmar who had been mining uranium in the country, prosecutors said. Ebisawa had proposed that the leader sell uranium through him in order to fund a weapons purchase from the general, court documents allege.

Prosecutors said samples of the alleged nuclear materials were obtained and a U.S. federal lab found they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that the "the isotope composition of the plutonium" was weapons-grade, meaning enough of it would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.

An email seeking comment was sent to Ebisawa's attorneys.

President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 10 in New York, 10 days before he is sworn in to be president of the United States.

In a decision Friday, New York Judge Juan Merchan noted that his inclination was to not impose a sentence of incarceration. In the filing, Merchan noted that if a sentence was unable to be given before Trump took the oath of office, the only other viable option may be to postpone proceedings until after Trump's presidential term is over.

In May, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, officially labeling him a convicted felon. The decision also comes after Merchan ruled last month that Trump is not immune from a conviction in the case.

Proceedings had been indefinitely stayed in order for Trump's legal team to argue that the case be dismissed.

In a statement, the Trump-Vance transition team called the order a "witch hunt."

"There should be no sentencing, and President Trump will continue fighting against these hoaxes until they are all dead," Steven Cheung, Trump's spokesman, said. Trump's New York criminal charges were the only to go to trial

After about a day and a half of deliberations, 12 New York jurors said last May that they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 election.

Following the verdict, Trump virtually completed a routine pre-sentencing interview with the New York City Department of Probation. The prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, who prosecuted Trump, and Trump's legal teams each submitted sentencing recommendations last month. Those documents have not been released to the public.

Trump also turned his attention to mobilizing donations for his campaign and mounting legal fees by using the conviction as a fundraising tool. Within 24 hours of the guilty verdict, Trump's campaign boasted raising millions of dollars. Trump and his legal team have also vowed to appeal the conviction, a process that could take years.

The jury heard from 22 witnesses during about four weeks of testimony in Manhattan's criminal court. Jurors also weighed other evidence — mostly documents like phone records, invoices and checks to Michael Cohen, Trump's once loyal "fixer," who paid Daniels to keep her story of an alleged affair with the former president quiet.

The facts of the payments and invoices labeled as legal services were not in dispute. What prosecutors needed to prove was that Trump falsified the records in order to further another crime — in this case, violating the New York election law that makes it a crime for "any two or more persons [to] conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means." The jurors were able to choose whether those unlawful means were violating the Federal Election Campaign Act, falsifying tax returns or falsifying other business records.

The verdict came more than a year after a grand jury indicted Trump on March 30, 2023, marking the first time a former or sitting president faced criminal charges.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover used its right-front navigation camera to capture this first view over the rim of Jezero Crater on Dec. 10, 2024, the 1,354th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, when it reached the end of its long climb from the crater floor.

The rover is looking west in this image from a location nicknamed "Lookout Hill." Not visible is "Witch Hazel Hill," a scientifically significant rocky outcrop that Perseverance is headed toward. Once there, the rover will spend about six months exploring the area. Scientists are excited to explore the region outside of Jezero because the rover will encounter rocks excavated by a monster meteor impact that formed the crater an estimated 3.9 billion years ago. These rocks could not only be early Martian crust, but among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system.

A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

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Here are the countries the US sells to

https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2023-u-s-arms-transfers-and-defense-trade/