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Illustration of a planet, zoomed in on the planet’s dayside/nightside boundary. The planet encompasses takes up the full image. At the bottom left, the image is dark, depicting the nightside covering the planet in a dark shadow. In the right side of the image, the planet has a fuzzy orange-pink atmosphere with hints of latitudinal wispy cloud bands. The right upper corner is bright, where the star (not illustrated) shines.

NASA’s Webb Investigates Eternal Sunrises, Sunsets on Distant World

6 min read

Near-infrared spectral analysis of terminator confirms differences in morning and evening atmosphere Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39…

Article15 hours ago
Arp 142, two interacting galaxies, observed in near- and mid-infrared light. At left is NGC 2937, nicknamed the Egg. Its center is the brighter and whiter. There are six diffraction spikes atop its gauzy blue layers. At right is NGC 2936, nicknamed the Penguin. Its beak-like region points toward and above the Egg. Where the eye would be is a small, opaque yellow spiral. The Penguin’s distorted arms form the bird’s beak, back, and tail. The tail is wide and layered, like a beta fish’s tail. A semi-transparent blue hue traces the Penguin and extends from the galaxy, creating an upside-down U over top of both galaxies. At top right is another galaxy seen from the side, pointing roughly at a 45-degree angle. It is largely light blue. Its length appears approximately as long as the Egg’s height. One foreground star with large, bright blue diffraction spikes appears over top of the galaxy and another near it. The entire black background is filled with tiny, extremely distant galaxies.

Vivid Portrait of Interacting Galaxies Marks Webb’s Second Anniversary

6 min read

Two for two! A duo of interacting galaxies commemorates the second science anniversary of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which takes constant observations, including images and highly detailed data known as spectra. Its operations have led to a “parade” of…

Article4 days ago
A spiral galaxy seen almost face-on. Large spiral arms whirl out from its center, filling the scene. They glow faintly blue from the stars within, with some small bright patches of blue and pink marking areas of star formation. Thin filaments of dark reddish dust that block light overlay the stars. The galaxy’s center shines brightly white.

Hubble Measures the Distance to a Supernova

3 min read

Measuring the distance to truly remote objects like galaxies, quasars, and galaxy clusters is a crucial task in astrophysics, particularly when it comes to studying the early universe, but it’s a difficult one to complete. We can only measure the…

Article4 days ago
Distant and nearby galaxies dot an inky-black background. Bright foreground stars hold four diffraction spikes.

NASA’s Hubble Traces Dark Matter in Dwarf Galaxy Using Stellar Motions

5 min read

The qualities and behavior of dark matter, the invisible “glue” of the universe, continue to be shrouded in mystery. Though galaxies are mostly made of dark matter, understanding how it is distributed within a galaxy offers clues to what this…

Article5 days ago
The central region of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri. It appears as a collection of myriad stars colored red, white, and blue on the black background of space.

NASA’s Hubble Finds Strong Evidence for Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in Omega Centauri

4 min read

Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively lightweight, with a mass of under 100 times that of the Sun. Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are…

Article6 days ago
A growing protostar embedded within a molecular cloud. The center of the image shows a bright, red region, where the growing protostar resides, with a thin, gray lane of matter cutting through it horizontally, which is the protostar’s accretion disk. Above and below this region are blue triangular-shaped molecular clouds, which give the overall object an hourglass shape. The areas in the molecular clouds closest to the protostar have more pronounced plumes of blue gas. There are red, yellow, orange, blue, and green stars and galaxies scattered across the background.

NASA’s Webb Captures Celestial Fireworks Around Forming Star

4 min read

The colors within this mid-infrared image reveal details about the central protostar’s behavior. The cosmos seems to come alive with a crackling explosion of pyrotechnics in this new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Taken with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared…

Article2 weeks ago
The bright-white, diffuse glow of an elliptical galaxy sits at image center. The galaxy's core appears as an intense-white circle that gets more diffuse as you move outward from the core. A rusty-red, diffuse cloud is visible to the upper-left of the galaxy. It extends to the upper-left corner of the image, where it is very faint. Black background dotted with foreground stars and distant galaxies.

Hubble Examines an Active Galaxy Near the Lion’s Heart

2 min read

It might appear featureless and unexciting at first glance, but NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations of this elliptical galaxy — known as Messier 105 — show that the stars near the galaxy’s center are moving very rapidly. Astronomers have concluded…

Article3 weeks ago
Mosaic of the Pillars of Creation visualization model, composed of 4 rectangular strips oriented 45 degrees clockwise from vertical. Strips alternate between Hubble and Webb views of the visualization model, with each strip labeled: “Hubble” at lower right corners of first and third strips; “Webb” at upper left corners of the second and fourth strips. Webb strips have drop shadows that make it look like they are overlaid on top of larger Hubble image. Mosaic shows 3 vertical structures (pillars) of thick smoke-like material. Pillar edges are glowing, with thin wisps of material moving away into space. In Hubble strips, pillars are dark brown and opaque, on greenish blue background. In Webb strips, pillars are bright orange to brown with a distinct area of bright red at the top of middle pillar. A red star appears at the tip of a peak in the left pillar and the background is deep blue.

Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualization from NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes

6 min read

Made famous in 1995 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty. Now, NASA has released a new 3D visualization of these towering…

Article3 weeks ago
Clouds of gas and dust with many stars. The clouds form a flat, blue background toward the bottom, and become thicker and smokier toward the top. Stars on one side light the nebula. A thick arc of gas and dust reaches around from the bottom-right corner of the image toward the top-left corner. It begins as a dark and obscuring cloud at bottom right and gradually becomes brightly lit by many stars at the upper left. Other large, foreground stars lie between the nebula and the viewer.

Hubble Captures Infant Stars Transforming a Nebula

2 min read

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image presents a visually striking collection of interstellar gas and dust. Named RCW 7, the nebula is located just over 5,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Puppis. Nebulae are areas rich in the raw…

Article4 weeks ago
A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.

First of Its Kind Detection Made in Striking New Webb Image

6 min read

Alignment of bipolar jets confirms star formation theories For the first time, a phenomenon astronomers have long hoped to directly image has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). In this stunning image of the Serpens…

Article4 weeks ago