Astrophysics Stories

NASA’s Hubble Dazzles With Young Stars in Trifid Nebula

This shimmering region of star-formation, a close-up of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in intricate detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The colors in Hubble’s visible light image, which marks the 36th anniversary of the…

NASA Finds Young Stars Dim in X-rays Surprisingly Quickly

Scientists have found that young stellar cousins of our Sun are calming down and dimming more quickly in their X-ray output than previously thought, according to a new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. A paper describing the results published…

NASA’s Webb Redefines Dividing Line Between Planets, Stars

Planets, like those in our solar system, form in a bottom-up process where small bits of rock and ice clump together and grow larger over time. But the heftier the planet, the harder it is to explain its formation that…

Hubble Spies an Active Spiral

A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation…

NASA Webb, Hubble Share Most Comprehensive View of Saturn to Date

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Observing in complementary wavelengths of light, the two space observatories provide scientists with a richer,…

NASA-JAXA’s XRISM Telescope Clocks Hot Wind of Galaxy M82

For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the speed of superheated gas billowing from a cauldron of stellar activity at the heart of M82.

Optical Vortex Phase Masks for the Detection of Habitable Worlds 

A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to pick out very faint habitable exoplanets from the far brighter…

NASA’s Hubble Revisits Crab Nebula to Track 25 Years of Expansion

A quarter-century after its first observations of the full Crab Nebula, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a fresh look at the supernova remnant. The result is an unparalleled, detailed look at the aftermath of a supernova and how it…

NASA’s Hubble Unexpectedly Catches Comet Breaking Up

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings published Wednesday in the journal Icarus. The…