Located 12 million light-years away and undergoing rapid star formation, edge-on spiral galaxy Messier 82 (M82) is a scientifically unique sight to behold, and now NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed previously unseen details. M82’s intense star formation, thought to be the result of a galaxy merger, will be a short-lived event in astronomical […]
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 components. The comet was freshly warmed from its closest pass by the Sun, and its ancient ice had been converted […]
A new study of two supernova remnants, the debris left behind after stars explode, suggests the explosions came from stellar siblings that once orbited each other. The first star’s detonation sent its binary companion hurtling through space, and then, after traveling for thousands of years, the surviving star blew up too.
Researchers using two of humanity’s most powerful observatories — NASA’s James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes — have definitively shown that Terzan 5 is not a globular star cluster as it was once classified, offering new insight into how galaxies like our own form and evolve over time. A globular star cluster typically has only […]
Looking somewhat like a swarm of bees returning to their hive, this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy cluster MACS0329-0211.
The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot’s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces. A team of astronomers led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin identified the […]
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities. But it’s hard […]
The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) is a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission designed to detect the most energetic particles in the universe.
Look closely at this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and you’ll see galaxies of various shapes and sizes clustered together toward the center-left of the image. A few foreground stars shine brightly and are easily distinguished by the spikes that appear to extend outward from each star. These spikes, called diffraction spikes, are the […]
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy’s full face, while red, blue, and orange light from distant galaxies shines through its diffuse outer […]