🦞🌯 Lobster Roll

Nearby Stellar Nursery Sheds Light on Massive Star Formation NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a scene that looks as if it were drawn from the pages of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Yet reality is even more astonishing. What seems like a jagged, star-lit mountain peak shroud...

Planet could be a gas giant, orbiting 1 to 2 times the distance between Sun and Earth. The Alpha Centauri system, our nearest stellar neighbor, has long captured the imagination of science fiction and pop culture — often depicted as a gateway to future interstellar voyages or a home for alien worlds...

What lies within a toe bean? According to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, mini toe beans composed of gas, dust, and stars. Since kicking off full science operations in July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has dazzled researchers and sky-watchers alike by looking deeper into space than any te...

The newfound planet represents Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet. Nearly 6,000 worlds beyond our solar system have been found so far, and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have just added another. The telescope picked up a faint glow from TWA 7 b, a planet about the mass of Saturn ...

First Image Ever Taken of Exoplanet in Extremely Misaligned System NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is not only changing how we understand the universe, it’s also dazzling the world with stunning images of space, from glowing star nurseries to planets in our own solar system. But when Webb turns it...

New surface data from largest Uranian moons are contrary to expectations. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope set out to study how Uranus’ magnetic environment might be affecting its four largest moons. They expected to find one thing, but what they discovered was something entirely diff...

Webb sees the aurora flickering, fluctuating, and undulating at Jupiter’s north pole. Auroras on Earth, better known as the Northern and Southern Lights, create glowing, shifting curtains of color in the night sky. These dazzling displays happen when high-energy particles from the Sun are steered by...

Two new research studies explore how a stellar nursery in the heart of the Milky Way is affected by the region’s strong magnetic fields. Despite decades of research, the process of how stars form is still filled with unanswered questions. Because stars create nearly all the chemical elements in the ...

Lingering Brightness Provides Evidence for How the Planet Met Its Demise Each year, scientists from around the world compete for a chance to use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Proposals go through a rigorous review process, and approved projects are added to Webb’s observation schedule, which is...

Uranus Findings Can Aid the Study of Exoplanets Now more than 30 years into its mission, the Hubble Space Telescope has proven to be a powerful tool for studying the distant and mysterious ice giant Uranus. By observing the planet repeatedly over a span of 20 years, astronomers were able to track lo...

Long-Sought Auroral Glow Finally Emerges Under Webb’s Powerful Gaze Neptune lies in the cold, dark reaches of the outer edges of our solar system, about 3 billion miles from the Sun, at the farthest edge of the planetary lineup. Only one spacecraft has ever flown by: NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989. Since ...

Unexpected, Bright Hydrogen Emission Caught Astronomers by Surprise In the early universe, space was filled with a dense fog of neutral hydrogen gas. Although the first stars and galaxies gave off powerful ultraviolet light, much of that light was trapped by the surrounding hydrogen. It wasn’t until...

Webb’s exquisite details reveal a chance, random alignment of a protostellar outflow and a distant spiral galaxy. When we observe the universe, we’re looking at a three-dimensional space projected onto a two-dimensional image. As a result, objects that appear close together in the sky can actu...

Giant Exoplanets in HR 8799 System Likely Formed Like Jupiter and Saturn The first exoplanet was discovered in the 1990s, but astronomers didn’t capture a direct image of one until more than a decade later. Imaging exoplanets is incredibly challenging because their host stars are often thousands of ...

A Swarm of Dwarf Galaxies Buzz Around Our Milky Way’s Twin Imagine the Milky Way and Andromeda as two massive aircraft carriers, each surrounded by a fleet of smaller warships. These “warships” represent dwarf galaxies, which are much smaller in size and mass than their giant spiral hosts. The...

A newly identified Kuiper Belt trio, possibly only the second of its kind, could provide strong evidence that these distant objects didn’t form from collisions but instead took shape through gravitational collapse—just like stars. The universe is home to many gravitationally bound three-body systems...

Observations revealed ongoing fireworks featuring short bursts and longer flares. Imagine solar flares, but magnified to an unimaginable scale — a continuous sparkle bright enough to shine across 26,000 light-years of space. Scattered among these glimmering flickers, intense bursts of light erupt da...

Hubble’s high-resolution imagery allowed researchers to hone in on more of the Bullseye galaxy’s rings — and helped confirm which galaxy dove through its core. Seabirds like the Northern Gannet dive straight into the ocean to catch fish, sometimes from heights of 100 feet (30 meters). With their sha...

A Triple Star System Yields an Unusual Surviving Star Unlike our Sun, which exists alone, at least half of the stars in our galaxy have a companion. This concept was famously depicted in the Star Wars movies, where Luke Skywalker watched two suns set over his home planet, Tatooine. But imagine a wor...

Astronomers Are Now Rethinking the Underlying Trigger of Quasar Jets Building on the groundbreaking 2020 discovery of newborn jets in several quasars, the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that one of the quasar host galaxies has an unexpected spiral shape. This finding challenges the long-held be...

Panorama of Nearest Galaxy Unveils Hundreds of Millions of Stars On a crisp, clear autumn night, you can see the most distant object visible to the naked eye — the stunning Andromeda Galaxy, our Milky Way’s closest major neighbor. Located just northeast of the Great Square of Pegasus, it appears as ...

Pinpointing a Milepost Marker Star that Opened the Realm of Galaxies At the dawn of the 20th century, astronomers faced a cosmic puzzle. The night sky was dotted with more than 100 nebulous objects cataloged in the late 1700s by French astronomer Charles Messier. Most were identified as star cluster...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have captured the dynamic process of carbon-rich dust formation around Wolf-Rayet 140, a binary star system in our galaxy. How is carbon, a key building block of life, produced and distributed across space? Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astro...

Astronomers compile a large sample of an unusual class of objects in an effort to connect the dots to the early universe. Shortly after NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope began its science operations, astronomers encountered an unexpected discovery in the data: small, red objects scattered across the...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the infrared glow of an ancient supernova’s light echo, revealing unprecedented 3D details of interstellar dust and gas. The space between stars is filled with gas and dust, varying from dense to sparse, and often hidden from view unless ill...

New data confirms Hubble’s finding and refutes current theories of planet formation in the universe’s early days. Thanks to its incredible sensitivity and sharp resolution, NASA’s Webb Space Telescope just cracked a cosmic mystery that has puzzled astronomers for over two decades. Back in 2003...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a galaxy named Firefly Sparkle, existing just 600 million years post-Big Bang and bearing similar mass to the early Milky Way. Like fireflies “dancing” on a warm summer night, 10 distinct star clusters sparkle in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s ob...

From 2014 to 2024, NASA and ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been observing the outer planets through a program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy). This initiative focuses on tracking Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to study their atmospheric dynamics and long-term evolution. Hubble’...

Legendary Active Galaxy Contains a Monster Black Hole Amateur astronomers can observe an extraordinary celestial object known as 3C 273, the most distant target visible through a standard backyard telescope. Shining with the light of trillions of suns, 3C 273 is located over two billion light-years ...

Webb’s Powerful Mid-Infrared Instrument Resolves Clumpy Nature of Dusty Disk Astronomers are known for their precision, but naming celestial objects isn’t exactly their forte. Take, for instance, HD 84406, the first star observed by the James Webb Space Telescope — not the most memorable name. Simil...