Observing across the starry “plains” of space, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken new images of NGC 2392, nicknamed the Lion Nebula. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope previously viewed this planetary nebula in 2000, imaging the lion face-shaped target in visible light and revealing features such as the “mane” of hazy, comet-shaped objects. Now Webb
A first of its kind measurement of a magnetar may have captured empty space behaving in a way physicists have predicted for 90 years, but never directly observed. The results published Wednesday in Nature. Magnetars are a special class of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields, the strongest of any object in the observable universe,
Since their discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, small red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these compact and extremely distant red sources has been a perplexing scientific endeavor. One popular theory is that the small red dots are supermassive black holes known
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured an “orphan” black hole lighting up as it devoured a star on the outskirts of a distant galaxy. For starters, these phenomena are rare and none have ever been seen so far outside the core of a galaxy before. “We were looking for these star destruction events as a
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hidden within one of the most intensively studied planetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy. The nearby young star Beta Pictoris was already known to host two giant planets: Beta Pictoris b, one of the first
Read this press release in Spanish here. How do black holes in the centers of galaxies form and grow over time? To answer this question, scientists need to detect and study supermassive black holes at great distances, which existed much earlier in the history of the universe. New research suggests that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman