Welcome to the Universe

Discover the universe: Learn about the history of the cosmos, what it's made of, and so much more.

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Exoplanets

Worlds beyond our solar system.

Stars

Giant balls of hot gas that burn for millions to billions of years. 

Black Holes

Concentrations of matter with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Galaxies

Collections of stars, planets, and vast clouds of gas and dust bound together by gravity.

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NASA’s IXPE Helps Researchers Determine Shape of Black Hole Corona

Scientists have long speculated about the geometry of a black hole’s corona, a region created by strong magnetic fields threading through the accretion disk. Now observations from IXPE help shed light on these obscure environments.

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An illustration of a black hole with a dark circle surrounded by light discs.
This illustration of material swirling around a black hole highlights a particular feature, called the “corona,” that shines brightly in X-ray light. In this depiction, the corona can be seen as a purple haze floating above the underlying accretion disk, and extending slightly inside of its inner edge.
NASA/Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt
Featured Video

Snippet of Euclid Mission’s Cosmic Atlas Released by ESA

ESA (the European Space Agency) has released a new, 208-gigapixel mosaic of images taken by Euclid, a mission with NASA contributions that launched in 2023 to study why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

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Featured News

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2 min read

NASA Reveals Prototype Telescope for Gravitational Wave Observatory

A technician inspects a prototype LISA telescope.
Article
6 min read

NASA’s TESS Spots Record-Breaking Stellar Triplets

6 min read

NASA Successfully Integrates Coronagraph for Roman Space Telescope

Article1 week ago
5 min read

Planets Beware: NASA Unburies Danger Zones of Star Cluster

Image Article
4 min read

NASA Establishes New Class of Astrophysics Missions, Selects Studies

News Release

NASA's Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano

Located 700 light-years away, a binary star system called R Aquarii redistributes products of nuclear energy in violent eruptions of glowing gas.

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A bright binary star surrounded by a colorful loops of nebula on the black background of space. One loop is vertical the other is horizontal across the center of the image.

Universe News

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2 min read

NASA’s NEOWISE Spacecraft Re-Enters Atmosphere, But More Discoveries Await!

A collage of space-themed citizen science project logos, including 'Milky Way Project,' 'Exoplanet Explorers,' 'Cool Neighbors,' 'Disk Detective,' and 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.
Article
2 min read

Sadie Coffin Named Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences/NASA Citizen Science Leaders Series Fellow

A young woman with curly blonde hair wearing a cozy sweater smiles at the camera, standing in a modern hallway with plants in the background.
The top-left half of the image is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around the summer star Vega. The disk is represented in blue. The color trails to white as we get closer to the center of the disk. The black spot at the center blocks out the bright glow of the hot young star. The disk is perfectly circular because we are looking down on top of it. The lower-right half of the image is a view from the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals the glow of warm dust in the disk's halo that is colored orange. The disk is brighter toward the center. There is a notable dip in surface brightness between the inner and outer disk.
6 min read

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

Article4 days ago
6 min read

Why NASA’s SPHEREx Mission Will Make ‘Most Colorful’ Cosmic Map Ever

Article5 days ago
Two spiral galaxies take the shape of a colorful beaded mask that sits above the nose. The galaxy at left, IC 2163, is smaller, taking up a little over a quarter of the view. The galaxy at right, NGC 2207, takes up half the view, with its spiral arms reaching the edges. IC 2163 has a bright orange core, with two prominent spiral arms that rotate counter clockwise and become straighter towards the ends, the left side extending almost to the edge. Its arms are a mix of pink, white, and blue, with an area that takes the shape of an eyelid appearing whitest. NGC 2207 has a very bright core. Overall, it appears to have larger, thicker spiral arms that spin counter clockwise. This galaxy also contains more and larger blue areas of star formation that poke out like holes from the pink spiral arms. In the middle, the galaxies’ arms appear to overlap. The edges show the black background of space, including extremely distant galaxies that look like orange and red smudges, and a few foreground stars.
5 min read

‘Blood-Soaked’ Eyes: NASA’s Webb, Hubble Examine Galaxy Pair

Article5 days ago
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Galaxies

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Black Holes

Stars

Exoplanets