A stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a vast star factory located in a neighboring galaxy in vibrant colors and incredible detail. The orange, yellow and blue image from the powerful space telescope features the interstellar atomic hydrogen of the 1,630-light-year-wide nebula N79, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a […]
Images created by NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope may allow scientists to search for dark matter between stars. An international team of researchers believes that gaps present in strings of stars hanging from tightly packed balls of ancient stellar bodies, called globular clusters, could be influenced by dark matter clumps. Thus far, astronomers […]
Many small galaxies that existed early in the universe’s history are elongated in a surfboard-like shape, pointing to the influence of the cosmic web of matter and constant mergers with other small galaxies, deep observations with the James Webb Space Telescope have found. New research using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found that dwarf […]
A team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover the most distant and oldest black hole ever seen as it feasts upon its host galaxy. The discovery could be a massive step forward in understanding how supermassive black holes reached masses equivalent to millions of billions of times that of […]
A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows the tiny galaxy UGC 5189A, located about 150 million light-years away in the constellation Leo, in stunning detail. The space telescope, which has been observing the universe in infrared since 1990, has been studying this galaxy since 2010, with scientists using this investigation to learn more about a […]
Clouds of dust and gas not far from our solar system are giving astronomers a rare glimpse into the earliest stages of planet formation. These clouds, which are between 200,000 and 500,000 years old and lie within 700 light-years of Earth, have been spotted hosting dusty, gas-rich disks around a central star — the birthplaces […]
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has seen Beta Pictoris as never before, capturing a previously unseen structure that gives the young planetary system a dusty cat’s tail. Located 63 light-years away, from us Beta Pictoris is a star around twice the size of the sun and eight times as bright, surrounded by a disk […]
The brightest fast radio burst ever observed emerged from a group of ancient galaxies that appear to be merging, observations by the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed. The finding surprised astronomers, as the vast majority of known fast radio bursts (FRBs) has come from single galaxies much closer to Earth. The FRB in question brightened […]
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have spotted a “failed star” or brown dwarf that shows signs of possessing an aurora. Auroras are more familiar as the northern and southern lights, which are caused by charged particles from the sun striking molecules in Earth’s atmosphere. They’re usually seen only at high latitudes, because […]
The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) — a space telescope led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in collaboration with NASA with additional contributions from the European Space Agency — has produced its first test images: one of supernova remnant N123D and one of galaxy cluster Abell 2319. Launched in September 2023, on the same rocket as Japan’s […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has seen cyclones raging in the dynamic atmosphere of a hot Jupiter located 880 light years away, thanks to observations and computer modeling that could one day be applied to characterize weather on smaller, rocky exoplanets. The planet, dubbed WASP-121b, has a mass about 1.16 times greater than our solar system’s […]
When it comes to detecting the presence of liquid water on planets outside the solar system, and thus the conditions needed for life, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might want to looking for what is missing rather than what is there. Here’s what that means. A team of researchers, including scientists from the Massachusetts […]