A two-panel image split down the middle vertically. At the left is the Vega disk as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The disk is perfectly circular, and at the center is a black spot blocking out the bright glow of a star. Closer to the center, the disk is white. Radial striations extend out from the center, giving a ripple effect to the disk like the end of a sausage casing. The outer edge of the circular disk is blue. At the right, the Webb image of the disk is an orange colored, smooth, fuzzy halo. The inner disk is whiter toward the center, and there is darker lane between the inner disk and the more orange outer disk. The disk is also perfectly circular, with a black circle in the center due to lack of data from saturation.

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson used NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unprecedented in-depth look at the nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircling Vega ...
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Two spiral galaxies take the shape of a colorful beaded mask that sits above the nose. The galaxy at left, IC 2163, is smaller, taking up a little over a quarter of the view. The galaxy at right, NGC 2207, takes up half the view, with its spiral arms reaching the edges. IC 2163 has a bright orange core, with two prominent spiral arms that rotate counter clockwise and become straighter towards the ends, the left side extending almost to the edge. Its arms are a mix of pink, white, and blue, with an area that takes the shape of an eyelid appearing whitest. NGC 2207 has a very bright core. Overall, it appears to have larger, thicker spiral arms that spin counter clockwise. This galaxy also contains more and larger blue areas of star formation that poke out like holes from the pink spiral arms. In the middle, the galaxies’ arms appear to overlap. The edges show the black background of space, including extremely distant galaxies that look like orange and red smudges, and a few foreground stars.

‘Blood-Soaked’ Eyes: NASA’s Webb, Hubble Examine Galaxy Pair

The gruesome palette of these galaxies is owed to a mix of mid-infrared light from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and visible and ultraviolet light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The pair grazed one another ...
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NGC 1270: A Galactic Archipelago is shown as glittering stars on a deep black background with large fuzzy halos of yellow

Gemini North Captures Galactic Archipelago Entangled in a Web of Dark Matter

100 years ago Edwin Hubble discovered decisive evidence that other galaxies existed far beyond the Milky Way. This image, captured by the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, features a portion ...
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Graphic showing a close up of a section of the Sun (in grey) with several filaments in color overlaid on it.

Harnessing AI for Space Weather Forecasting with NSF GONG Data

Solar filaments, dramatic thread-like structures visible in the Sun’s chromosphere, may hold the key to understanding one of the most powerful phenomena in space weather: Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs).  ...
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A bright binary star surrounded by a colorful nebula on the black background of space.

NASA’s Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided a dramatic and colorful close-up look at one of the most rambunctious stars in our galaxy, weaving a huge spiral pattern among the stars ...
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An artist's concept looks down into the core of the galaxy M87, which is just left of center and appears as a large blue dot. A bright blue-white, narrow and linear jet of plasma transects the illustration from center left to upper right. It begins at the source of the jet, the galaxy’s black hole, which is surrounded by a blue spiral of material. At lower right is a red giant star that is far from the black hole and close to the viewer. A bridge of glowing gas links the star to a smaller white dwarf star companion immediately to its left. Engorged with infalling hydrogen from the red giant star, the smaller star exploded in a blue-white flash, which looks like numerous diffraction spikes emitted in all directions. Thousands of stars are in the background.

NASA’s Hubble Finds that a Black Hole Beam Promotes Stellar Eruptions

In a surprise finding, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt along ...
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Artist Illustration of Early-Universe Quasar Cosmic Neighborhood

DECam Confirms that Early-Universe Quasar Neighborhoods are Indeed Cluttered

Observations using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) confirm astronomers’ expectation that early-Universe quasars formed in regions of space densely populated with companion galaxies. DECam’s exceptionally wide field of view and special filters played a crucial ...
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At center right is a compact star cluster composed of luminous red, blue, and white points of light. Faint jets with clumpy, diffuse material extend in various directions from the bright cluster. Above and to the right is a smaller cluster of stars. Translucent red wisps of material stretch across the scene, though there are patches and a noticeable gap in the top left corner that reveal the black background of space. Background galaxies are scattered across this swath of space, appearing as small blue-white and orange-white dots or fuzzy, thin disks. There are two noticeably larger points, foreground stars, with diffraction spikes: an orange-white point on the left, and a blue-white point in the top right.

NASA’s Webb Peers into the Extreme Outer Galaxy

Astronomers have directed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists call this region the Extreme Outer Galaxy due to its location more than 58,000 light-years away from the Galactic ...
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Purple and yellow image shows flaring off the sun. Actual data is insert in black and white

Groundbreaking Achievement: NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope Produces its First Magnetic Field Maps of the Sun’s Corona

Maui, Hawaii – The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, designed, built, and operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in ...
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Artist’s concept of spiral galaxy at the center of a much larger spherical halo of stars, with ground-based photograph pulled out to show details of the central core and spiral arms. View of the galaxy is halfway between face-on and edge-on, with disk oriented 45 degrees counter-clockwise from horizontal. Artist’s Concept: Galaxy core is whitish yellow, circled by a brownish purple disk. Grainy white halo enveloping the disk is dense and bright near the center, becoming more diffuse and fading out with distance from the main disk. Halo is mottled with a wispy cloud-like appearance, suggesting variations in density of stars. Halo covers an area of sky about 250 times greater than main disk. Photo: Telescope zoom into galaxy core and disk, outlined in yellow, shows brown dust lanes tracing spiral arms that wrap clockwise around fuzzy core; cloud-like patches of blue and red; star-like points of light of various size and brightness. Galaxy is 45 times larger in zoom than in illustration.

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope to Investigate Galactic Fossils

The universe is a dynamic, ever-changing place where galaxies are dancing, merging together, and shifting appearance. Unfortunately, because these changes take millions or billions of years, telescopes can only provide snapshots, squeezed into a human ...
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Hundreds of small galaxies against the black background of space. Several white spiral galaxies are near image center. Most of the galaxies are various shades of orange and red, and many are too tiny to discern a shape. A handful of foreground stars show Webb's six diffraction spikes.

Webb Finds Early Galaxies Weren’t Too Big for Their Britches After All

When astronomers got their first glimpses of galaxies in the early universe from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they were expecting to find galactic pipsqueaks, but instead they found what appeared to be a bevy ...
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A multitude of stars and galaxies on a dark background. In the center are two brighter galaxies with a yellow glow around them.

Queen Berenice II’s Hair Tied Together by Dark Matter

The Dark Energy Camera captures an image of the dazzling Coma Cluster, named after the hair of Queen Berenice II of Egypt. Not only significant in Greek mythology, this collection of galaxies was also fundamental ...
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