A new study using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has seen a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper decline over the past 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the naked
The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a spiral galaxy battling titanic forces appearing on galactic scales in space. This is NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). It is classified as “intermediate” because its overall shape falls between spiral galaxies that have a bar in their
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
The enormous globular star cluster Omega Centauri has baffled astronomers for decades. It should be full of black holes left by exploding stars, but the evidence for them is scarce. Now, astronomers using archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and supporting observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have finally located their first stellar-mass
For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to directly measure the magnetic fields of PSR J1101-6101, a pulsar located within what is often known as the Lighthouse Nebula. The results provide new insight into the structure of some of the most extreme objects in the cosmos, as NASA continues