Action! NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins Capturing the Greatest Cosmic Movie Ever Made

Action! NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins Capturing the Greatest Cosmic Movie Ever Made

he wait is over: NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, is now capturing the cosmos in unprecedented detail, transforming the way we ...
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Thousands of galaxies appear across the black background of space. The galaxies range in size, from big blobs and larger face-on spirals to short lines and tiny dots. The galaxies appear in a variety of colors, including orange, white, pink, and blue. One prominent foreground star appears toward the lower right with several diffraction spikes. A white square highlights one tiny pinpoint of blue light in the top third, which is blown up in a box above it and labeled MXDFz4.4. The galaxy has a light blue core with some yellow and red blotches around its edges.

Hubble Details Early Galaxy Transforming Neighborhood

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found something they never expected — ultraviolet light from a galaxy that existed just 1.4 billion years after the big bang. That galaxy contains tightly clustered young stars that produce ...
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Comparison of three telescope images side by side. They are roughly spherical but pixelated, with more intense color saturation in the center. From left to right: smallest sphere is blue and labeled H2O, orange is larger and labeled CO2, and red is largest and labeled CO. A scale bar at the lower left is labeled 1300 km/1 arcsecond and is about one fourth of each of the three images. A compass at the lower right shows north pointing up to 12 o’clock, east pointing left to 9 o’clock, and a fainter arrow labeled to Sun pointing down to 8 o’clock.

NASA’s Webb Finds Clues to Ancient, Distant Origin of Comet 3I/ATLAS

As interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS began moving away from the Sun in December 2025, astronomers took the opportunity to turn NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope in its direction and capture detailed measurements of its chemical ...
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Composite of Gemini North and ALMA images of "Shadow Blaster"

Tracing a Neutrino Ghost to Distant “Shadow Blaster” Galaxy

A team of astronomers has identified a remarkably bright, gravitationally-lensed, star-forming galaxy as the likely source of the high-energy neutrino event IC 210922A, detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in 2021. The galaxy, nicknamed “Shadow ...
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A full-disk extreme ultraviolet visualization of the Sun rendered in a brilliant, textured cyan-teal hue against a black background. The solar surface is covered in intricate, mottle patterns with darker filimentary structures and multiple smaller bright active regions. On the lower-left edge, a blindingly bright white-cyan eruption—a long-duration M-class solar flare—is actively exploding from the limb, with brilliant hot plasma and detailed magnetic loops extending into the void of space, originating from a region just beyond the Sun's edge.

A 4π Framework for Forecasting Solar‑Limb Flares Using the AFT Model and NSF-NOAA GONG Far-Side Helioseismic Maps

Solar flares are a well-recognized component of space weather, yet operational flare forecasting often fails when the source region of the flares lies near or just beyond the Sun’s visible “edges”, or solar limbs. Two ...
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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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