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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Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualization from NASA's Hubble and Webb Telescopes

Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualization from NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes

Made famous in 1995 by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty ...
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Gemini North Captures Starburst Galaxy Blazing Bright With Newly Forming Stars

Gemini North Captures Starburst Galaxy Blazing Bright With Newly Forming Stars

A festive array of bright pinks and blues makes for a remarkable sight in this image captured with the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. Resembling a cloud of cosmic confetti, ...
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International Gemini Observatory and Subaru Combine Forces to Discover First Ever Pair of Merging Quasars at Cosmic Dawn

International Gemini Observatory and Subaru Combine Forces to Discover First Ever Pair of Merging Quasars at Cosmic Dawn

Since the very first instant after the Big Bang the Universe has been expanding. This means that the early Universe was considerably smaller and early-formed galaxies were more likely to interact and merge. Galaxy mergers fuel the ...
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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finds Most Distant Known Galaxy

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finds Most Distant Known Galaxy

Over the last two years, scientists have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (also called Webb or JWST) to explore what astronomers refer to as Cosmic Dawn – the period in the first few hundred ...
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An illustration of a star being torn apart by a black hole. To the right of center, there is a black sphere representing a black hole, surrounded by many thick wisps of light. To the left of it, there is a fuzzy, bright white object representing a star. The star has a tail of gas coming off its right, which is brightest near the star, but becomes grayer further away. This tail flows into the black hole’s right side and swirls around the black hole in a horizontal disk. The disk is thicker toward its center and more diffuse farther away. Material in the disk also appears to wrap around the top of the black hole. Above and below the black hole, there are purple rays of light that extend upward and downward in two broad cones. This scene sits amid a black backdrop of space with many dim, white stars in the background.

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Could Help Researchers Detect the Universe’s First Stars

The first stars to form in the universe were very different from our Sun. Known to astronomers (somewhat paradoxically) as Population III, or Pop III, stars, they were made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium ...
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Dark Energy Camera Images Cometary Globule CG 4. Stars in various brightness shine throughout the image which is red and pink on the bottom 2/3 and black along the top.

Dark Energy Camera Spies Cometary Globule Reaching for the Stars

The dark, dusty cometary globule known as CG 4 is spotlighted in this image from the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at ...
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Gemini South Reveals Origin of Unexpected Differences in Giant Binary Stars

Gemini South Reveals Origin of Unexpected Differences in Giant Binary Stars

Using the Gemini South telescope a team of astronomers have confirmed for the first time that differences in binary stars’ composition can originate from chemical variations in the cloud of stellar material from which they ...
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A clumpy dome of blueish-gray clouds rises about a third of the way from the bottom. Above it, streaky, translucent red wisps brush upward to about halfway up the image. The top half of the image is the black background of space with one prominent, bright white star with Webb’s 8-point diffraction spikes. Additional stars and galaxies are scattered throughout the image, although very few are seen through the thick clouds at bottom and all are significantly smaller than the largest star.

Webb Captures Top of Iconic Horsehead Nebula in Unprecedented Detail

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of a zoomed-in portion of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. These observations show the top ...
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Taking up most of the image, is a multi-colored nebula appearing as two translucent orbs attached by a white band.

Hubble Celebrates 34th Anniversary with a Look at the Little Dumbbell Nebula

In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA's legendary Hubble Space Telescopeon April 24, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located ...
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