Space telescope image showing hundreds of bright objects of different size, color, and shape on the black background of space. Colors range from white to deep red. Shapes include elliptical, spiral, dot-like, dash-like, and arcuate. Many of the large objects near the center of the image are fuzzy white, with bright white cores. Many smaller objects scattered throughout the image are pink to red. Three objects in the central part of the image are called out with small white boxes: A box labeled “C” at about 12 o’clock; one labeled “B” at 3 o’clock; and a box labeled “A” at 4 o’clock. Images of the three objects are enlarged in boxes running vertically along the right. From top to bottom these are labeled QSO1A, QSO1B, and QSO1C. At the center of each box is a tiny, circular red dot. QSO1A (top) is notably larger, brighter, and clearer than the other two. QSO1B, in the middle, is smallest and fuzziest, and is somewhat washed out by the light of a larger white object next to it.

NASA’s Webb Reveals Black Hole That Formed Before Its Galaxy

Now, researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host ...
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A large white and tan fuzzy object sits on a dark background dotted with stars. The object is convoluted with protruding areas and a bright white star in the center.

Gaze into the Crystal Ball Nebula and See the Light Emitted by a Dying Star 1500 Years Ago

The 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope, located on the summit of Maunakea in Hawai‘i, has captured NGC 1514, nicknamed the Crystal Ball Nebula, in awe-inspiring detail ...
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An observation (labeled “VISTA V V V Survey, Near-infrared) of the Milky Way’s center pointing toward its supermassive black hole, which is labeled Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A star”). At 7 o’clock from center is a small region, outlined with 5 fields of view from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that are stacked together in a horizontal rectangle. This region is about a third of the image in length and a fifth of the image in width. Within that same region are diagonal lines that alternate between orange and blue. A legend at the bottom left shows two Hubble instruments. One of them, marked with an orange diamond, is labeled “W F C 3 / U V I S.” The other, marked with a blue diamond, is labeled “A C S / W F C.” The background is a field of stars, gas, and dust that appear grey, except the center third that runs from the left to the right of the frame, which is composed of brown filaments of dust and gas. The tiny region surrounding Sagittarius A star appears orange.

Hubble Survey Sets Up Roman’s Future Look Near Milky Way’s Center

One of the core community surveys of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, is expected to locate over a thousand exoplanets that orbit far away from their stars, beyond the orbital ...
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Illustration showing a small circular white object on the black background of space speckled with dim stars. The object is glowing, and rays of soft light emanate in all directions. The words “Artist’s Concept” are at the lower right.

NASA’s Roman Poised to Transform Hunt for Elusive Neutron Stars

NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will search for, and could measure the mass of, isolated neutron stars using astrometric microlensing ...
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Illustration showing orange looping ribbons over a pink area that fades to yellow. There are purple curling lines over the pink/yellow area.

Reading the Sun’s Fireworks: How Flare Ribbons Reveal Hidden Solar Explosions

A new study by a team led by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope Ambassador Marcel Corchado Albelo takes an unexpected approach: instead of looking directly at where the energy is ...
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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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