Scientific graph divided into 3 sections. Top left is mottled green bottom left and right are blue and red.

NSF-NOAA GONG Maps Hidden Magnetism on the Sun’s Far Side

A team of scientists led by the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory developed a new physics-based method to assign magnetic polarities to far-side sunspots. By characterizing regions already identified through helioseismology, this breakthrough ...
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A tightly cropped Hubble view of a vast star-forming region known as the Trifid Nebula. The top left is bright blue. Brown and amber colors run from top right through the center in irregular, overlapping lines to the bottom-center. At bottom right, the view is almost black. Tiny, amber-colored stars appear throughout the scene. Toward the left there is a prominent brown shape that looks like a head with two horns. The left horn points left and is wavy. The right horn is triangular and points up. The brown dust continues, flowing down, as if along a back, and up toward the top right. A prominent line, about the same length as the left horn, appears below the middle of the body, and changes from orange to red. A small, separate semi-transparent pillar is left of the head. A few slightly larger, blue foreground stars with four diffraction spikes appear throughout.

NASA’s Hubble Dazzles With Young Stars in Trifid Nebula

NASA celebrates Hubble’s 36th anniversary with a new image of the Trifid Nebula, a star-forming region it first captured in 1997. The telescope leveraged almost its full operational lifetime to show us changes in the ...
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Illustration shows four people at work within the outline of a large cloud. At center is a woman with a ponytail and dark skin whose hand is raised and close to the Roman Space Telescope body floating in space next to small white stars. The words, Roman Research Nexus, arc above the pair under the cloud outline. To her left are two other people, one with darker skin who is wearing headphones and writing and another with lighter skin, also with headphones, at a laptop. At right is a man with glasses, short wavy brown hair and light skin who is looking left, toward the telescope. In the background within the cloud shape, there are zeros and ones falling in the left third. At center is part of an outline of Roman’s camera’s field of view, and at right are representations of charts. Above the cloud is a darker background with simpler dark blue shapes. From left to right, they show a sphere following a path, a large spiral galaxy, a large ringed planet, and an object with diffraction spikes.

Roman Space Telescope Science Platform Will Open New Frontiers in Space Science

With the release of the cloud-hosted Roman Research Nexus, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) provides astronomers around the world an environment where they can prepare to work with the massive data stream expected from NASA's ...
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Light interconnected filaments on a dark background creates an interconnected structure. The color of the background graduates from lighter in the top left corner to darkest in the bottom left corner.

DESI Completes Planned 3D Map of the Universe and Continues Exploring

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos ever conducted, finished all observations for its originally planned 3D map of the Universe ...
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A black square labeled “29 Cyg” at upper right. In the middle, a white star symbol is surrounded by a small blue trapezoid that widens from upper left to lower right of the star. The star is labeled with a capital A. The trapezoid indicates where the star’s light has been blocked by a coronagraph. To the star’s left beyond the blue trapezoid at 8 o’clock is a fuzzy white blob labeled with a lower-case b.

NASA’s Webb Redefines Dividing Line Between Planets, Stars

Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to directly image 29 Cygni b, which weighs 15 times Jupiter. They found evidence for heavy chemical elements like carbon and oxygen, which strongly suggests it formed like ...
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Illustration of 2 bridges - one comming from the top right and one from the bottom left. The two bridges don't meet and there is a large gap in between. The background is a dark brown fading to a mottled blue and orange in the top left.

The Local Universe’s Expansion Rate Is Clearer Than Ever, but Still Doesn’t Add Up

A new synthesis of astronomical measurements confirms a persistent mismatch that could point to physics beyond current models ...
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A rendering of the inner Solar System showing the asteroids discovered by Rubin in light teal. Known asteroids are dark blue. The rendering shows a total of almost 12,700 asteroids that were discovered with Rubin over the span of 1.6 years: 73 were discovered during the first early test observations using Rubin’s Commissioning Camera in late 2024 and released as part of Rubin’s Data Preview 1 in Summer 2025; 1514 were discovered during First Look observations in April and May 2025; and the recent 11,000+ asteroids were discovered using observations taken during Rubin’s early optimization surveys in Summer 2025. These are the locations of objects at the time of each object’s discovery. In the time since discovery, the objects have continued in their orbits around the Sun and dispersed from the narrow “pencil beam” rays seen in this graphic. See this in the animation of the model here

Early Data from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Reveals Over 11,000 New Asteroids

Scientists at NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, have submitted an unprecedented set of asteroid detections to the IAU ...
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a series of 8 greyscale diamond shaped images of a solar flare on a black background in 2 rows of 4.

New Solar Flare Observations Challenge Leading Theories

Using the NSF Daniel k. Inouye solar telescope, scientists captured highly detailed measurements of a fading solar flare. The findings reveal gaps in current models of how flares heat the sun’s lower atmosphere, pointing to ...
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Side-by-side comparison of Saturn observed at different wavelengths and times show how differently it appears in infrared, on the left, versus visible light, on the right. Left image is labeled Saturn, Webb Infrared Light, November 29, 2024. Right image is labeled Saturn, Hubble Visible Light, August 22, 2024. In infrared, Saturn has horizontal bands, with bands at the north and south poles appearing darker orange and lightening to tan as they approach the equator. The north and south poles glow a greenish-grey. The rings appear in an icy neon white. White dots, representing several of Saturn’s moons, are labeled Janus, Dione, and Enceladus. In visible, Saturn’s horizontal bands appear pale yellow, with some bands towards the north and south pole having a light blue hue. The rings appear bright white, glowing slightly less than Webb’s infrared image. White dots, representing several of Saturn’s moons, are labeled Janus, Mimas, and Epimetheus.

NASA Webb, Hubble Share Most Comprehensive Telescopic View of Saturn to Date

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Observing in complementary wavelengths of light, the two space observatories ...
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A time sequence of three panels side by side. From left to right, the panels are labeled November 8, 2025; November 9, 2025; and November 10, 2025. This series of images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the fragmenting comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), or K1 for short, was taken over the course of three consecutive days. The sequence shows the progressive disintegration of the comet over this brief period. Each panel features several bright, fuzzy, blue, streaking lights in a diagonal line from the upper left to the lower right of a black background. In the first panel, four comet-like objects appear. The largest is the second from the upper left. In the second panel, the largest object has broken into two pieces. In the third panel, the pieces appear to be moving away from each other along the invisible diagonal line.

NASA’s Hubble Unexpectedly Catches Comet Breaking Up

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule ...
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This image shows Star PicII-503 in Pictor II ultra-faint dwarf galaxy. The right side is a pullout from the very starry field on the left. In the middle of the pullout on the right is a blurry white light that is Picll-503

Extremely Rare Second-Generation Star Discovered Inside Ancient Relic Dwarf Galaxy

Astronomers have discovered one of the most chemically primitive stars ever identified — an ancient stellar relic that preserves the chemical imprint of the very first stars in the Universe. This star, named PicII-503, resides ...
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An illustration of NSF NOIRLab's follow-up ecosystem. The telescopes pictured are connected by blue beams of light. The telescopes on the bottom have rainbow beam coming from them representing their observations.

First NSF NOIRLab Follow-Up Observations Triggered by NSF–DOE Rubin Alerts

NSF NOIRLab, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, has completed end-to-end runs of its ecosystem for following up on alerts from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The runs demonstrated how multiple NOIRLab-developed software tools, ...
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