Two of the great space observatories, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a unique experiment to smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid. Observations of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact mark... Continue Reading →
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not included in... Continue Reading →
OK, but why can't you combine images from Webb and Hubble? You can, and today's featured image shows one impressive result. Although the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) has a larger mirror than Hubble, it specializes in infrared light and can't see blue -- only up to about... Continue Reading →
This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of IC 4271, also known as Arp 40, is a curious pair of spiral galaxies some 800 million light-years away. The smaller galaxy is superimposed on the larger one, which is a type... Continue Reading →
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang -- the farthest individual star ever seen to date.... Continue Reading →
Stars are born from clouds of gas and dust that collapse under their own gravitational attraction. As the cloud collapses, a dense, hot core forms and begins gathering dust and gas, creating an object called a “protostar.” This Hubble infrared... Continue Reading →
NGC 2438 is a planetary nebula, formed after the death of a Sun-like star. The medium-sized star would have expelled its outer layers of gas into space as it died, leaving behind a white-dwarf core. A halo of glowing gas... Continue Reading →
Wisps like this are all that remain visible of a Milky Way star. About 7,000 years ago that star exploded in a supernova leaving the Veil Nebula. At the time, the expanding cloud was likely as bright as a crescent Moon, remaining visible for weeks to... Continue Reading →
A bright foreground star isn’t enough to distract from the grandeur of the galaxy UGC 3885, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While this foreground star is incredibly bright to Hubble’s eye, it does not outshine the details... Continue Reading →
Scents of Science 