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Space Telescopes
As the world teeters on the brink of nuclear war, distant, advanced civilizations would never know it. Earth appears peaceful from far away.
The 1st generation of stars formed, lived, and died very early on. But 2nd generation stars could still persist today. Did we just find one?
The path to exploring the high-energy Universe was clear and compelling. Here's how 2025's cuts are still causing NASA casualties in 2026.
Resembling a cosmic brain, the Exposed Cranium Nebula instead shows a dying, massive star, as JWST reveals. Its fate remains uncertain.
One big goal of science is to find an inhabited, Earth-like planet. But if we find an Earth-like world, will we even recognize it?
Before Sun-like stars die, they transition from AGB red giants into preplanetary nebulae. Here's how Hubble sees the famous Egg Nebula.
Here in our modern Universe, it's cosmic dust that forms planets, complex molecules, and enables life. But how did the Universe create it?
Many collaborations have used JWST to take deep-field images: some wider and some deeper than others. Here's how it can surpass them all.
With unprecedented resolution, wavelength sensitivity, and light-gathering power, JWST reveals our cosmos like no other observatory ever.
The VENUS survey isn't about planets at all, but about finding multiply-lensed supernovae. The ambition? To save the expanding Universe.
Even the youngest galaxies are often dust-rich, even with very low levels of heavy elements. Nearby dwarf galaxy Sextans A explains why.
Finding alien Earths requires seeing Earth-sized planets at Earth-like distances from Sun-like stars. A new discovery completes the roadmap.
Spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars are all more common than ring galaxies. At last, we know how these ultra-rare objects are made.
Planets grow from protostellar material in disks, leading to full-grown planetary systems in time. At last, the final gap has been filled.
Observations with the Hubble space telescope helped cement dark energy and reveal the Hubble tension. How are these two things so different?
By deeply imaging a large volume of space, COSMOS-Web provides JWST's widest cosmic views. Its gravitational lenses reveal a big surprise.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
At the end of July, hundreds of scientists convened to plan NASA's upcoming astrophysics flagship mission. Will the US allow it to happen?
Originally, the abundance of bright, early galaxies shocked astronomers. After 3 years of JWST, we now know what's really going on.
For hundreds of millions of years, a cosmic fog blocked all signs of starlight. At last, JWST found the galaxies that cleared that fog away.
Massive galaxy cluster Abell S1063, 4.5 billion light-years away, bends and distorts the space nearby. Here's what a JWST deep field shows.
Different methods of measuring the Universe's expansion rate yield high-precision, incompatible answers. But is the problem robustly real?
Viewing Uranus's largest moons with Hubble, astronomers hoped to find darkening on the trailing side. They found the exact opposite instead.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will image the southern sky using the largest digital camera ever built.
Many were hoping that JWST would find the first stars of all. Despite many hopeful claims, it hasn't, and probably can't. Here's how we can.
Coming from just 280 million years after the Big Bang, or 98% of cosmic history ago, this new, massive galaxy is a puzzle, but not a mirage.
NASA astrophysics, which gave us Hubble, JWST, and so much more, faces its greatest budget cut in history. All future missions are at risk.
Long before the search for biosignatures, scientists imagined a cosmos teeming with intelligent life.
The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, was originally seen as a colossal mistake. This one image, taken in 1995, changed everything.
The most famous Hubble images show glittering stars and galaxies amidst the black backdrop of space. But more was captured than we realized.