Deep Space

The latest on the missions plunging far beyond of Earth's orbit, including Voyager I, the Parker Solar Probe, and JUICE.

Latest in Deep Space

the tall and straight pillars of creation as seen with two space telescopes. these celestial bodies are finger-like figures of gas and dust
Deep Space

Ethereal Pillars of Creation come to life in new 3D visualization

By Laura Baisas

an illustration of two merging quasars in space. they are round yellow and orange disks, with a black hole in the center. white light is coming out of the center of the black hole.
Deep Space

In a first, astronomers spot merging quasars from the Cosmic Dawn

By Laura Baisas

Pegasus Shooting Star Vodka promo art next to meteorite
Science

The $200 meteorite-infused vodka is refreshingly tasty

By Andrew Paul

Artist concept art of Voyager 1
Deep Space

Voyager 1 defies the odds yet again and is back online

By Andrew Paul

Image of June 3, 2024, solar flare
Science

Watch a wild ‘failed eruption’ solar flare

By Andrew Paul

JWST discovers earliest galaxy ever observed
Science

JWST discovers earliest galaxy ever observed

By Tom Hawking

A spherical collection of stars which fills the whole view. The cluster is dominated by a concentrated group of bright white stars at the center, with several large yellow stars scattered throughout the image. Many of the stars have visible diffraction spikes. The background is black
Science

The 8 most extraordinary JWST images of 2024, so far

By Popular Science Team

an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star
Deep Space

Newly discovered exoplanet may be habitable (or a Venus-like hellscape)

By Laura Baisas

a pink and red galaxy (left). an illustration of the cylindrical euclid space telescope (right)
Science

See 5 dazzling new images from Euclid, the ‘dark universe detective’

By Laura Baisas

This artist's concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies.
Black Holes

Astronomers use wobbly star stuff to measure a supermassive black hole’s spin

By Laura Baisas

An illustration of what exoplanet WASP-39 b could look like. It is also a hot and puffy gas giant like exoplanet WASP 193b.
Science

A massive cotton candy-like exoplanet stumps astronomers

By Laura Baisas

How ‘safe mode’ protects space telescopes like Hubble and TESS
Science

How ‘safe mode’ protects space telescopes like Hubble and TESS

By Briley Lewis

Artist rendering of exoplanet WASP-43b
Science

JWST measures ‘Hot Jupiter,’ a distant exoplanet hot enough to forge iron

By Andrew Paul

Astronomers fight to save a major X-ray space telescope
Science

Astronomers fight to save a major X-ray space telescope

By Briley Lewis

An artist’s concept of NASA’s Voyager 1 traveling through interstellar space–or the space between stars.
Science

Greetings, Earth! NASA can understand Voyager 1 again

By Laura Baisas

Where do all those colors in space telescope images come from?
Science

Where do all those colors in space telescope images come from?

By Briley Lewis

a galaxy that looks like an hourglass pinched at the center with a shining protostar
Science

Plunge into an immersive IMAX movie featuring the James Webb Space Telescope

By Laura Baisas

an illustration of a black hole with a companion star. the star is bright with a blue line indicating where the black hole is.
Science

Humongous stellar-mass black hole is the biggest ever found in Milky Way

By Laura Baisas

An image of the core of our Milky Way galaxy. This view combines the sharp imaging of Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with color imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera (IRAC).
Science

Youth-stealing stars could explain ‘missing giants’ at the Milky Way’s center

By Briley Lewis

LSST Camera Deputy Project Manager Travis Lange shines a flashlight into the LSST Camera.
Science

A 3,200-megapixel digital camera is ready for its cosmic photoshoot

By Andrew Paul

M74 aka the Phantom Galaxy shown in a combined optical/mid-infrared image, featuring data from both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. It is one of the celestial objects featured
Science

Listen to three breathtaking NASA images

By Laura Baisas

A combination of a Hubble Space Telescope image of SN 1987A and the compact argon source. The faint blue source in the center is the emission from the compact source detected with the James Webb Space Telescope. Outside this is the stellar debris, which contains most of the mass. The inner bright “string of pearls” is the gas from the outer layers of the star that was expelled about 20,000 years before the final explosion. The fast debris is now colliding with the ring, explaining the bright spots. Outside of the inner ring are two outer rings, presumably produced by the same process as forming the inner ring. The bright stars to the left and right of the inner ring are unrelated to the supernova.
Science

JWST detects evidence of a neutron star in fiery supernova remains

By Laura Baisas

An artist’s impression of quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a supermassive black hole. This quasar has been found to be the most luminous object known in the universe to date.
Science

Fastest-growing black hole eats the equivalent of one sun a day

By Laura Baisas

Galaxy AM 1054-325 has been distorted into an S-shape from a normal pancake-like spiral shape by the gravitational pull of a neighboring galaxy, seen in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. A consequence of this is that newborn clusters of stars form along a stretched-out tidal tail for thousands of light-years, resembling a string of pearls. They form when knots of gas gravitationally collapse to create about one million newborn stars per cluster.
Science

NASA’s Hubble space telescope reveals a galactic ‘string of pearls’

By Laura Baisas

Two different versions of the eROSITA map. Extended X-ray emissions (left) and point-like X-ray sources (right).
Science

New map of half the known universe shines with cosmic energy

By Laura Baisas

Face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 628, is split diagonally in this image: The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear at top left, and the Hubble Space Telescope’s on bottom right. JWST’s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light and Hubble’s showcase visible light. Dust absorbs ultraviolet and visible light, and then re-emits it in the infrared. In JWST’s images, we see dust glowing in infrared light. In Hubble’s images, dark regions are where starlight is absorbed by dust.
Science

JWST images show off the swirling arms of 19 spiral galaxies

By Laura Baisas

A bright young star within a colorful nebula. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. A number of other bright spots can also be seen in the clouds, which are shown in great detail as layers of colorful wisps.
Science

Check out JWST’s new image of a star factory

By Laura Baisas

Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot and the surrounding turbulent zones, shown in shades of white and brown.
Science

Earth isn’t the only planet with seasons, but they can look wildly different on other worlds

By Gongjie Li / The Conversation

Four of the best telescopes for deep space side by side on a plain background.
Gear

The best telescopes for deep space in 2024

By Abby Ferguson

Robert Lodder sends Lexington tourism data ad into space at evening launch event with horses in background
Technology

Lexington, Kentucky sent a tourism ad to ‘extraterrestrials’ with a DIY laser rig

By Andrew Paul

Screenshot of cat video sent from Psyche spacecraft to NASA
Technology

Taters the cat stars in first ‘ultra-HD’ video sent from deep space

By Andrew Paul

This image from the Near-Infrared Camera instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope shows the central portion of the star cluster IC 348. The wispy curtains filling the image are interstellar material reflecting the light from the cluster’s stars. The bright star closest to the center of the frame is actually a pair of type B stars in a binary system, which are the most massive stars in the cluster. Winds from these stars may help sculpt the large loop seen on the right side of the field of view.
Science

Record-breaking ‘failed star’ spotted by JWST

By Laura Baisas

Artist art of Voyager space probe against purple cosmic background
Science

Voyager 1 is sending back bad data, but NASA is on it

By Andrew Paul

A new high-definition image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam unveils intricate details of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A and shows the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded.
Science

JWST releases new image of famous supernova remnant—with a twist

By Laura Baisas

International Liquid Mirror Telescope
Science

Looking at the stars through a puddle of mercury

By Briley Lewis

LHS 3154b, a newly discovered massive planet that should be too big to exist.
Science

The planet that should not exist

By Suvrath Mahadevan et al./The Conversation

The sun
Science

Scientists want to use the sun’s gravity to communicate between stars

By Briley Lewis

The full view of the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals a 50 light-years-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense center. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C region, along with some as-yet unidentified features. A vast region of ionized hydrogen, shown in cyan, wraps around an infrared-dark cloud, which is so dense that it blocks the light from distant stars behind it. Intriguing needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen emission lack any uniform orientation. Researchers note the surprising extent of the ionized region, covering about 25 light-years.
Science

Chaotic region shines bright with 500,000 stars in new JWST image

By Laura Baisas

NASA Psyche spacecraft surrounded by engineers in lab
Technology

NASA’s Psyche wins first deep space laser relay

By Andrew Paul

UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12 are the second and fourth most distant galaxy ever observed. The James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) helped confirm their existence within Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). They are shown here as near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated to visible-light colors.
Science

JWST spots two of the most distant galaxies astronomers have ever seen

By Laura Baisas

Space Telescope with visible-light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The resulting wavelength coverage, from 0.4 to 5 microns, reveals a vivid landscape of galaxies whose colors give clues to galaxy distances: The bluest galaxies are relatively nearby and often show intense star formation, as best detected by Hubble, while the redder galaxies tend to be more distant, or else contain copious amount of dust, as detected by JWST.
Science

‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST

By Laura Baisas

This square astronomical image is divided horizontally by a waving line between a white-orange cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively blue-purple-pink upper portion. From the nebula in the bottom half of the image, an orange cloud shaped like a horsehead sticks out. In the bottom left of the image, a white round glow is visible. The clouds from the bottom half of the image shine purple/blue light into the upper half. The top of the image shows the black expanse of space. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing stars of varying sizes and colors. Blue stars are younger and red stars are older.
Science

Euclid telescope spies shimmering stars and galaxies in its first look at the ‘dark’ universe

By Laura Baisas

Astronomers found the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays (in a galaxy dubbed UHZ1) using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope. X-ray emission is a telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole. This result may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. These images show the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 that UHZ1 is located behind, in X-rays from Chandra and infrared data from JWST, as well as close-ups of the black hole host galaxy UHZ1.
Science

Farthest black hole ever recorded by astronomers is nearly as old as our universe

By Laura Baisas

The gold mirrors of JSWT sit in front of an extremely large, circular door in a vast room with scientists working.
Technology

This NASA photographer documented the 30-year journey to build the James Webb Space Telescope

By Abby Ferguson

An artist's rendition of the infrared aurora superimposed on a Hubble Space Telescope photograph of Uranus. The planet is blue with a white ring around it and the aurora is shown in red at its poles.
Science

Uranus has a weird infrared aurora

By Laura Baisas

Dark black holes merge together in a brown, star-studded illustration.
Science

Gravitational wave detector now squeezes light to find more black holes

By Rahul Rao

Artist rendition of Voyager 1 in space
Technology

Voyager probes get virtual tune-up to keep decades-long missions going and going

By Andrew Paul

A radio telescope in Australia beneath the Milky Way.
Science

Oldest radio burst ever found could tell us what exists between galaxies

By Rahul Rao

An image of Jupiter taken with the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIR Cam in July 2022. Researchers recently discovered a narrow jet stream traveling 320 miles per hour sitting over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks. The numerous bright white "spots" and "streaks" are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Auroras, appearing in red in this image, extend to higher altitudes above both the northern and southern poles of the planet.
Science

Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists

By Laura Baisas

The planet Earth, as seen from the DSCOVR satellite. Earth appears as a bright blue dot against the darkness of space, with the shadow of an annular solar eclipse over much of North America.
Science

What the ‘Ring of Fire’ eclipse looked like to a satellite nearly 1 million miles from Earth

By Laura Baisas

This new infrared image of NGC 346 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) traces emission from cool gas and dust. In this image blue represents silicates and sooty chemical molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. More diffuse red emission shines from warm dust heated by the brightest and most massive stars in the heart of the region. Bright patches and filaments mark areas with abundant numbers of protostars.
Science

Star-making hot spot looks like a glowing raven in new JWST image

By Laura Baisas

A purplish spiral galaxy with red and yellow space objects.
Science

JWST takes a jab at the mystery of the universe’s expansion rate

By Briley Lewis

Artist conception of early starbursting galaxies. The image is rendered from FIRE simulation data used for this research that can explain recent JWST results. Stars and galaxies are shown in the bright white points of light, while the more diffuse dark matter and gas are shown in purples and reds.
Science

Bursting stars could explain why it was so bright after the big bang

By Laura Baisas

Solar sail concept art from NASA
Science

How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly

By Andrew Paul

Rendering of Firefly Space's Blue Ghost lunar lander on moon surface
Technology

Why astronomers want to put a telescope on the dark side of the moon

By Andrew Paul

An artistic representation of the TRAPPIST-1 red dwarf star, featuring its very active nature. Exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 b is the closest planet to the system’s central star and is featured in the foreground with no apparent atmosphere. The exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 g is in the background to the right of the star.
Science

JWST just scanned the skies of potentially habitable exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 b

By Laura Baisas

A metal sphere under construction as workers climb over it.
Science

A massive detector in China will try to find a supernova before it happens

By Briley Lewis

Internet data server farm with green and pink glowing LED lights
Science

Nature generates more data than the internet … for now

By Rahul Rao

Iridescent Running Chicken Nebula with glowing gases and stars
Science

31 award-winning astronomy photos: From fiery horizons to whimsical auroras

By Annie Colbert

An optical image of the galaxy in which the new event occurred, taken from archival PanSTARRS data. The X-ray object was located to somewhere inside the white circle, which is about the size a pinhead 100m away would appear. The position of a 2 year old supernova is also shown.
Science

A newly spotted black hole keeps munching on a star the size of our sun

By Laura Baisas

A blue semi circle on the right with a ball of blue light on the left on a black background. The orientation of the magnetic field in the distant 9io9 galaxy, seen here when the universe was only 20 percent of its current age and the furthest ever detection of a galaxy’s magnetic field.
Science

Astronomers detect a distant galaxy’s magnetic field for the first time

By Laura Baisas

Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured this detailed image of SN 1987A (Supernova 1987A). At the center, material ejected from the supernova forms a keyhole shape.
Science

See the stunning Supernova 1987A in a whole new light

By Laura Baisas

A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s center, but it is tightly limited to the core. The rings feature colors of deep red and orange and highlight filaments of dust around cavernous black bubbles.
Science

The Whirlpool Galaxy’s buff, spiral arms grab JWST’s attention

By Laura Baisas

A purple galaxy cluster against a black background of space, studded with stars.
Science

When two stars orbit each other, gravity gets weird

By Briley Lewis

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