Many stars and galaxies including two spiral galaxies and three merging galaxies.

Ever-changing Universe Revealed in First Imagery From NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new scientific facility jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, released its first imagery today at an ...
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Dark pink loops rise and fall from a swath of dark pink in the bottom right corner over a light pink background.

“Raindrops in the Sun’s Corona”: New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of our Star’s Atmosphere

The Sun’s corona—the outermost layer of its atmosphere, visible only during a total solar eclipse—has long intrigued scientists due to its extreme temperatures, violent eruptions, and large prominences. However, turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere has ...
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Three panels, each showing a close-up near-infrared image of Jupiter’s north pole, in shades of orange. The planet is mostly dark. Thick, bright arcs and rings caused by auroras cover the pole. The center and right panels each show the aurora a few minutes later in time, as Webb’s field of view slowly scans over the planet.

NASA’s Webb Reveals New Details, Mysteries in Jupiter’s Aurora

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new details of the auroras on our solar system’s largest planet. The dancing lights observed on Jupiter are hundreds of times brighter than those seen on Earth. With ...
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Six-panel illustration marked "Artist's Concept." The upper left panel shows the silhouette of supermassive black hole that is adrift inside a galaxy. The middle upper panel shows a yellow star drifting near the black hole. The three following panels show the star being shredded in bright white concentric streamers followed by a white explosion. the bottom right panel is an external view of the galaxy showing a bright white star-like object that is the site if the explosion as viewed in X-rays and visible light.

NASA’s Hubble Pinpoints Roaming Massive Black Hole

Lurking 600 million light-years away, within the inky black depths between stars, there is an invisible monster gulping down any wayward star that plummets toward it. The sneaky black hole betrayed its presence in a ...
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Composite shows four Hubble images in quarters. At top left is a crisp view of Mars in shades of orange, blues, and browns. At top right is planetary nebula NGC 2899, which is shaped like a single macaroni noodle, with its central torus appearing semi-transparent and blue and green, and its top and bottom edges in orange. At bottom left is a tiny portion of the Rosette Nebula. Very dark gray material shaped like a triangle takes up the center. At bottom right is barred spiral galaxy NGC 5335 with a milky yellow center that forms a bar surrounded by multiple blue star-filled spiral arms that wrap up counterclockwise.

Hubble’s Window on the Universe: NASA Celebrates Hubble’s 35th Year in Orbit

In celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35 years in Earth orbit, NASA is releasing an assortment of compelling images recently taken by Hubble, stretching from the planet Mars to star-forming regions, and a neighboring galaxy ...
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An overall red glittery image with a dark back crack running diagonally through it.

Circinus West: A Dark Nebula Harboring a Nest of Newly Formed Stars

A celestial shadow known as the Circinus West molecular cloud creeps across this image taken with the Department of Energy-fabricated 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) — one of the most powerful digital cameras in the ...
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Undulating waves of gold, orange and red fill this image. Dark black areas are surrounded by deep red and orange indicating sunspots.

Largest Imaging Spectro-Polarimeter Achieves First Light at the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope

The U.S. National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO) near the summit of Maui’s Haleakalā, reached a major milestone: achieving ...
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image with 4 sections

NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope’s Cryo-NIRSP instrument offers unprecedented look at Alfvén waves

Over the last decade, scientists have confirmed the presence of a an important type of magnetized waves called Alfvén waves in the Sun’s outer atmosphere – i.e., the corona. These waves, specific to plasma environments ...
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The image is split into 2 parts. On the right is a fuzzy orange galaxy on a black background on the left is a start filed shoeing where the galaxy is on the sky.

NSF NOIRLab Astronomer Discovers Oldest Known Spiral Galaxy in the Universe

An international team led by NSF NOIRLab astronomer Christina Williams has discovered the most distant spiral galaxy known to date. Named Zhúlóng, meaning ‘Torch Dragon’ in Chinese mythology, this ultra-massive system existed just one billion ...
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What looks like a single large, bright star but is two shines with bright purple diffraction spikes at the center of a large, diffuse cylinder of gas and dust that is tipped to the right. At the center is a bright pink clumpy cloud that takes up about 25% of the view. The pink region has some holes. Beyond that are two large rings tipped at a 60-degree angle that mark the ends of the cylinder. They appear joined at top left and bottom right. The edges form shallow V-shapes that go inward. The rings appear orange at top left and bottom right, and are blue at bottom and center right. There is diffuse orange material around the body. The black background of space is speckled with tiny stars and galaxies mostly in blues and yellows. A bigger blue star with spikes is just below and to the left of the central stars, but it is slightly smaller. Areas Webb did not observe appear black along the top edges, a thin vertical near the nebula at top left, and at the bottom left and right corners.

With NASA’s Webb, Dying Star’s Energetic Display Comes Into Full Focus

Gas and dust ejected by a dying star at the heart of NGC 1514 came into complete focus thanks to mid-infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Its rings, which are only detected in ...
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black background with multicolor streaks . One very bright streak is top right.

Gemini South Observes Shape and Origin of Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 YR4

Using observations from the Gemini South telescope in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, astronomers have constructed a 3D representation ...
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Graphic titled “Hubble Space Telescope – Observations of Uranus,” with 16 images of Uranus, arranged in a 4 by 4 grid showing changes in appearance of Uranus as observed by Hubble between 2002 and 2022. Columns are labeled with observation year, from left to right: 2002; 2012; 2015; and 2022. Rows are labeled from top to bottom: visible light; visible and near infrared; aerosols/haze; and methane depletion. In the visible light images in the top row, Uranus appears blue-green with faint vertical bends of slightly lighter or darker color. In the visible and near infrared images in the second row, Uranus is very colorful, with deep neon blue to neon green bands within an orange-red glow that outlines the edge of the planet. In the two bottom rows of images, Uranus appears in grayscale, with vertical bands ranging from dark gray to almost white. All four rows of images show changes from observation to observation (left to right). For a given year, all four images in the column show similar banding patterns.

20-Year Hubble Study of Uranus Yields New Atmospheric Insights

The ice-giant planet Uranus, which travels around the Sun tipped on its side, is a weird and mysterious world. Now, in an unprecedented study spanning two decades, researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered new insights ...
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