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
On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The names were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III. The memory card will travel with the Roman observatory
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
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
