For thousands of years, humans looked at Mars and wondered what lay on its surface. Fifty years ago this week, we finally found out when NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft ever to land on the Red Planet and transmit images from its surface. It was humanity's first view from the surface of another planet.

Viking 1 had been programmed to take its first image just 25 seconds after touchdown, according to NASA. It occurred at 7:53 a.m. EDT on July 20, 1976 — exactly seven years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It was supposed to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, but the landing was delayed by the search for a flat landing zone.

Although the spacecraft landed safely at Chryse Planitia, north of the equator, mission controllers still had to wait another 19 minutes for the radio signal confirming success to cross the 212 million miles (340 km) between Mars and Earth.

Forty minutes after touchdown, the confirming image began appearing on monitors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, slowly building line by line from left to right. Dr. Thomas Mutch, leader of the Viking lander imaging team, never forgot the moment.

"I studied the black screen, waiting for that narrow strip that will signal the first few lines of the first picture," he said. "Rocks and sand are visible and — finally at the far right — one of the spacecraft foot pads, a symbolic artifact that stamps our accomplishment with the sign of reality … Time and time again I repeat, 'It's incredible.'"

The image revealed a solid, slightly rocky surface, with dust and pebbles thrown up by the landing already settling back onto the spacecraft. Viking’s first color image came the next day, with a panorama following a few days later.

The Viking mission consisted of four spacecraft: two orbiters and two landers. Viking 1 was joined six weeks later on the surface by Viking 2, which landed in Utopia Planitia, also in the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, the two orbiters mapped Mars and relayed data — including more than 52,000 orbital images and 4,500 photographs from the surface — back to Earth.

Viking transformed our understanding of Mars, but its most intriguing scientific result remains unresolved. The landers carried the first experiments designed to detect life directly in Martian soil. Although the mission's official conclusion was that no convincing evidence of life had been found, some scientists have continued to argue that one of the experiments produced a genuine biological signal; others argue that Viking’s experiments destroyed the very evidence of life that they sought to prove. Discoveries by later missions — including organic molecules detected by Curiosity and perchlorate salts found by Phoenix — have prompted some researchers to revisit the Viking data.

Viking 1 fell silent in 1982, two years after Viking 2, following a software error during an update. The intrepid spacecraft showed us the surface of another planet for the first time, but whether Viking 1 also found the first hints of life off-Earth remains one of planetary science's most enduring mysteries.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

This image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) offers a rare look at the hidden workings of Centaurus A, one of the most unusual and active galaxies relatively near Earth. JWST detected wavelengths of light humans cannot see, revealing a galaxy shaped by violence and chaos.

Centaurus A is relatively close to the Milky Way, which enabled JWST to study the strange galaxy in remarkable detail. It's no quiet, ordinary galaxy; it's the aftermath of a major cosmic collision. At its heart is an actively feeding supermassive black hole, surrounded by vast clouds of dust that trace the galaxy's turbulent history.

In visible light — such as images from the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory and Very Large Telescope in Chile — thick dust lanes obscure Centaurus A's center, blocking part of the story. The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, both of which can see in near-infrared wavelengths, previously imaged Centaurus A, but they also saw mainly dust. But infrared light can pass through that dust, which enabled JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument to see the galaxy's center glowing in white and pale pink, revealing filaments, loops and clouds of warm dust stretching across the scene.

Scientists believe Centaurus A collided with another galaxy roughly 2 billion years ago. That ancient merger left visible scars, which JWST captured in striking detail. Evidence of a galaxy pulled, stirred and reshaped over immense timescales appears throughout the image, from the warped gray-and-white parallelogram-shaped structure cutting across the galaxy, to the pink and lavender ribbons curving above and below it in an S shape. The image reveals how galaxy mergers rearrange dust and gas, trigger star formation and influence galaxy growth over time.

The image also shows how a nearby supermassive black hole can both fuel and limit the birth of stars. As material falls toward the black hole at the center of Centaurus A, it releases enormous energy and launches powerful jets that shape the surrounding gas and dust.

The image comes near the end of JWST's fourth year of science operations, which began with the release of spectacular images in July 2022. The telescope launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and is predicted to operate for about 20 years.

See how much you know about the world's most powerful telescope with our James Webb Space Telescope quiz!

NASA has marked the 250th birthday of the U.S. with a striking new collection of cosmic images from its Chandra X-ray Observatory, presenting four deep-space objects in red, white and blue.

The image set combines X-ray data from Chandra — which has been orbiting Earth since 1999 — with observations from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (JWST), as well as multiple ground-based observatories. Together, the images showcase some of the universe’s most dramatic environments, from the remains of an exploded star to a massive galaxy cluster shaped by dark matter — each rendered in patriotic colors.

Arguably the image most reminiscent of Fourth of July fireworks is that of Cassiopeia A, a famous supernova remnant about 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia (top left). Chandra’s X-ray data, shown in blue and purple, reveal the blast wave from a massive stellar explosion and trace elements such as iron, calcium and oxygen. Meanwhile, infrared data from JWST has been overlaid in red and white, highlighting the expanding shell of debris and cosmic dust. It’s all the result of a massive star that exploded about 340 years ago, according to NASA.

On the top-right is NGC 3603, a giant nebula 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way. Here it appears as a glowing field of highly active, newly formed stars. Chandra’s X-ray observations reveal the light coming from the nebula, while Hubble data in optical, infrared and ultraviolet light show its glittering array of stars, as well as dust and gas. NGC 3603 is the largest nebula seen in visible light in our galaxy.

NGC 4736, also known as M94, is something else entirely. Pictured bottom-right, it’s a spiral galaxy about 19 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. Its famed for the faint arms outside of its oval-shaped core region — known as a "starburst ring," where new stars are forming. It’s shown here with Chandra’s X-ray data layered with visible-light imagery captured by ground-based astrophotographers.

The final image features ZwCl 0024+1652 (bottom-left), a distant galaxy cluster where Hubble data has helped astronomers infer the presence of dark matter. About five billion light-years away in the constellation Pisces, Chandra’s X-rays reveal a vast reservoir of superheated gas in ZwCl 0024+1652 — shown in red — that contains more mass than the cluster’s galaxies combined.

The release of the new photos also includes novel sonifications for NGC 3603, NGC 4736 and ZwCl 0024+1652, transforming astronomical data into sound. The project allows audiences to experience space through both sight and hearing.

See more space photos of the week:

The universe is full of structures that remind us of Earthly objects, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula, a "cosmic hamburger," and the famous Crab Nebula. Now, one more has been added to the list: a radio galaxy shaped like a bow and arrow.

The newly discovered galaxy, dubbed the RAD-Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy (RAD-BAARG), sits roughly 2 billion light-years from Earth.

Radio galaxies are powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes that launch powerful jets of charged particles in opposite directions. As these high-speed jets crash into the surrounding medium, they form huge lobes of magnetized plasma that can stretch for thousands to millions of light-years. Inside both the jets and the lobes, electrons spiral around magnetic-field lines and emit radiation that is detected at radio wavelengths.

As a result, most radio galaxies look roughly symmetrical, like two matching balloon-like radio lobes inflated on each side of the central galaxy. RAD-BAARG, with its lopsided structure, appears to be an oddball.

RAD-BAARG was first spotted by citizen scientist Pranim Limbo while inspecting ultrasensitive radio images from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey. Limbo made the discovery through India's RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, a citizen-science research initiative in India, in collaboration with an international team of researchers.

The new image shows RAD-BAARG in stunning detail, with red tracing the radio emission captured by the LOFAR telescope, combined with an optical image from the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey.

Researchers think the strange shape may have been influenced by the galaxy's environment. RAD-BAARG appears to be falling toward a nearby cluster of galaxies, plunging through the intracluster medium, ‪the hot, thin gas that fills the space between galaxies, the researchers explained in a paper published June 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"The structure of this source is unlike that of any radio galaxy I have seen in the last 25 years," Ananda Hota, principal investigator of the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory and first author of the paper, said in a statement.

When a galaxy moves through this gas faster than the speed of sound within it, it creates a shock front, similar to how a fighter jet generates a sonic boom. This compressed wall of gas piles up ahead of the galaxy as the gas falls inward.

One of RAD-BAARG's jets appears to be running straight into this shock front, causing it to bend and compress into the shape of a drawn bow. The enormous bow-like structure extends nearly 1.8 million light-years across. On the opposite side, the other jet doesn't face the same resistance. Instead, it twists into a distorted S shape before fading into a faint tail forming the "arrow."

According to the study, RAD-BAARG has a length of about 2.3 million light-years. That places it in the category of "Giant Radio Galaxies," which are some of the largest standalone single structures in the universe.

Astronomers have long predicted that infalling galaxies should generate bow shocks as they plunge through the hot gas of a galaxy cluster. But actually catching one has been extremely difficult, since the surrounding gas is too diffuse and faint to detect easily. Sitting in a complex, chaotic environment, RAD-BAARG is rare not only for its unique shape but also for providing a direct, detailed view of this elusive phenomenon. In other words: That’s a bullseye.

See more space photos of the week:

Explosive beams of energy crisscross through rainbow-colored space in a scene that evokes a cinematic sci-fi battle. In reality, it’s a scene of birth; in this single image, astronomers have captured every stage of star formation playing out at once.

This new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image reveals OMC-2, a beautiful and dense star-forming region within the Orion Molecular Cloud. It places viewers inside a turbulent cosmic nursery, where gas, dust and newborn stars are all in motion.

Just south of the famous Orion Nebula, one of the best-known stellar nurseries in the night sky (located within the three-star asterism known as the Sword of Orion), OMC-2 is a cloud of cold gas and dust where protostars — very young stars still gathering mass — are forming.

The scene is filled with layered clouds of gas and dust glowing in blue, green and yellow. Thick clumps of cold dust appear dark brown to black, blocking light completely and creating dark pockets across the field. Inside some of these clumps, stars may still be forming, hidden from view inside thick cosmic cocoons.

Scattered throughout the clouds are fully-formed stars of different colors and sizes, from small orange points to larger white and blue stars shining through the haze.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the image is the network of pale, glowing streams and wave-like structures cutting through the cloud. These are created by protostar jets as they collide with the surrounding material, carving out bright ridges and shock fronts. The result is an image that looks sculpted, with curved streams of whitish gas marking how young stars shape their environment.

Each jet, ridge and shadow provides clues about the movement of material through the region and helps astronomers trace how stars form and how their energy changes the surrounding cloud. Its colors and textures reveal a complex environment where gravity pulls material together, young stars ignite and energetic outflows reshape the cloud that gave rise to them.

It’s a vivid portrait of cosmic creation made possible by JWST’s infrared vision, which allows it to peer through thick layers of gas and dust that block visible light. By detecting that infrared light, astronomers can see structures and embryonic stars that would otherwise remain secret.

OMC-2 is one of four parts of the Orion Molecular Cloud, a massive filament behind the Orion Nebula. OMC-1 sits immediately behind the nebula, OMC-2 and OMC-3 are to its north and OMC-4 lies to its south.

See more Space Photos of the Week

When NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman pointed his camera back at Earth — just as the Artemis II crew's Orion spacecraft departed for the moon on April 2 — he captured what looks, to the untrained eye, like a regular “Blue Marble” image. But look closer, and you will see a series of hidden details that make this one of the mission's most unique and poignant images.

When Wiseman took this photograph (with a Nikon D5 camera), he and his record-breaking crew were on the night side of Earth. Yet it looks very much like daytime, because the globe was lit by bright light from the Pink Moon, which had turned full on April 1 — the day before Artemis II launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

What Wiseman's camera captured was sunlight reflected by the moon onto Earth, a subtle light he could only capture by maximizing his camera's sensitivity. Look at the originals, archived on the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, and you can see what this view looked like to the naked eye.

Being illuminated largely by moonlight allowed nighttime features to stand out in unusual detail. Look carefully, and you’ll see city lights. From the astronauts' position above the mid-Atlantic, urban lights can be seen in parts of Spain, Portugal, northern Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil.

But it’s not just the cities that are aglow. Because this global image includes both the North and South Poles, Wiseman managed to capture an extremely rare display of simultaneous auroras on opposite sides of the Earth. Look at the top left and bottom right segments of the planet, and you’ll spot rival bands of green — the northern and southern lights, generated as charged particles of solar wind race along magnetic field lines and collide with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.

You can also see a sliver of sunlight shining through Earth's atmosphere on the bottom-right limb of our planet; evidence that it’s one day past full moon. In another, otherwise identical image taken with a faster shutter speed, the illuminated atmosphere appears only as a slim blue crescent.

Beyond that crescent is a bright fuzzy patch of zodiacal light, a faint glow caused by sunlight scattering off interplanetary dust. It’s sometimes called “false dawn” and “false dusk” when it’s seen near the horizon in very dark locations on Earth (typically during twilight close to the equinoxes). Beyond that bright patch, in the bottom-right corner, shines the planet Venus.

The image of Earth in the foreground, auroras at the poles, sunlight bending through the atmosphere, glowing cosmic dust and Venus make this shot feel like a family portrait of the inner solar system.

In a single frame, Wiseman turns Earth from a familiar “Blue Marble” into something rarer: a moonlit, solar-charged, living planet seen in its true cosmic setting.

See more Space Photos of the Week

Throughout its history, Earth has been bombarded with countless meteorites. About 80,000 have been found so far, but one specific group is exceedingly rare — and scientists now think they could be evidence for a long-dead proto-world that used to orbit the sun.

That rare group is the "angrites," which account for just 0.09% of all meteorites. They’re among the oldest known rocks in the solar system, forming within just a few million years after the solar system began 4.56 billion years ago. They also contain exceptionally low levels of silica (silicon dioxide), which is a key ingredient of most asteroids and rocky planets.

One angrite meteorite, dubbed NWA 12774, (pictured here in cross-polarized light) was discovered in the Sahara Desert in 2019. And a new study into this space rock suggests that it could be the first definitive evidence of a long-lost protoplanet that once existed in the early solar system. (NWA stands for Northwest Africa, a designation given to every meteorite found in this region.)

The findings, published July 1 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, hint that this “planetary embryo” — if it existed — was made of angrite and may have been as big as the moon or even Mars. It’s thought to have orbited the sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble billions of years ago; cue angrite meteorites falling to Earth.

In addition to its low silica content, NWA 12774 contains clinopyroxene, a mineral commonly found in Earth’s crust and mantle. This clinopyroxene is also unusually rich in aluminum, indicating that it formed under extremely high pressure — possibly a high-energy collision.

Such pressures could not have existed inside a small asteroid, hinting that the parent body of the angrites must have had a radius of at least 621 miles (1,000 kilometers), the researchers wrote. The sharp edges on NWA 12774 further suggest it formed near the surface, implying the parent body was even larger — with a radius of up to 1,118 miles (1,800 km). For comparison, Earth’s moon has a radius of 1,080 miles (1,737 km), and Mars has 2,106 miles (3,390 km).

“It’s incredible to think there was once [another] world this large,” study first author Aaron Bell, a petrologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. “We only know it existed because a few fragments of it happened to land on Earth. These meteorites preserved evidence of a completely different pathway through which early planets developed.”

Due to the lack of silica in the angrites, scientists had previously theorized that these meteorites originated from small asteroids. But the new findings challenge that view.

If they did originate from a protoplanet, then the world that could have formed from this "embryo" would have likely looked much different than the rocky planets we see today.

“The materials that formed the angrite parent body are fundamentally different from the ingredients of Earth and Mars,” said Bell. “It points to a distinct and separate evolutionary path in planetary formation in the early history of our solar system.”

It is unclear exactly what happened to the lost protoplanet. However, the researchers speculate that some of its fragments may have become the building blocks of other terrestrial planets, including Earth.

See more Space Photos of the Week

Hidden in the night sky, just above the hump of Taurus, is a giant crystal ball that shows both the past and the future.

This is the Crystal Ball Nebula (NGC 1514). To look at this orb's gauzy, white light is to see 1,500 years into the past, since that's about how long it's taken the nebula's light to reach Earth. But if you peer a bit deeper into the ball's bright center, you'll see the fiery ghost of a dead star system — and a vision of what awaits our stellar neighborhood about 5 billion years from now.

This view, captured with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, is one of the clearest images ever taken of an object known to science for more than 200 years. Astronomer William Herschel (best known for discovering Uranus, as well as infrared radiation) was the first to spot the Crystal Ball Nebula, in 1790.

Herschel called these types of objects "planetary nebulas," because their spherical shapes looked like planets through his early telescopes. In reality, no planets are involved. Nebulas like these form when stars measuring between roughly one and eight times the mass of the sun reach the ends of their lives and shed their outer layers of gas into space, according to the European Space Agency. As the gas blooms outward, the star emits a final burst of radiation, charging the gas and making it glow — with reliably spectacular results.

While Herschel initially thought the Crystal Ball's glow was powered by a distant cluster of stars, modern telescopes show a single, tight-knit binary star system at its center. These doomed siblings swirl around each other once every nine years, according to an NSF statement, making this the longest-period binary system within a planetary nebula. Their slow dance spews stellar wind asymmetrically through the gas cloud, carving the nebula into the lumpy, popcorn-ified shape we see today.

Long after humanity has likely disappeared, the sun will face a similar fate. As it exhausts its nuclear fuel, our star will swell into a red giant — likely consuming Earth and the other inner planets in the process — before finally ejecting its outer layers into interstellar space.

If any intelligent alien astronomers happen to be watching from across the galaxy, they'll see our solar system disappear inside a glorious planetary nebula and become a new landmark in their sky. Hopefully, they memorialize us with a suitably cool name.

See more Space Photos of the Week

Is it just us, or is the Red Planet looking a lot bluer than usual?

NASA's Psyche spacecraft returned this colorful snapshot of Mars after completing a close flyby of the planet last week, marking a major milestone in the probe's long journey to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche. The spacecraft passed within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the Martian surface on May 15, taking a suite of color images, including this close-up of the double-ringed Huygens crater and the heavily cratered southern highlands surrounding it.

Aside from the image of Huygens crater, Psyche obtained close-ups of wind blowing over craters in the Syrtis Major region and a high-resolution view of the water-ice-rich south polar cap of Mars.

In other spectacular images taken as Psyche approached and departed the planet, Mars appears as a thin crescent — a rare perspective afforded by Psyche's high angle of approach. Researchers also observed sunlight scattering through Mars' dusty atmosphere, creating a brighter-than-expected glow around the edge of the planet. As it left the vicinity of the Red Planet, Psyche got an image of an almost fully lit Mars, which included its south polar cap and the Valles Marineris canyon.

"We've captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet's surface and atmosphere," Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead and a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, said in a NASA statement. It was part of an effort to calibrate Psyche's multispectral cameras well in advance of its arrival at asteroid 16 Psyche. "As the spacecraft continues its journey after the flyby, we'll continue calibration imaging of Mars for the rest of the month as it recedes into the distance," Bell added.

NASA's solar-powered Psyche mission launched Oct. 13, 2023, on a complex route to the asteroid belt. The quickest way to get somewhere in the solar system isn't to use propellant to fly directly but to slingshot around a moon or planet, effectively using gravity and orbital motion to accelerate a spacecraft. 16 Psyche is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it orbits the sun about three times farther away than Earth does.

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the recent Martian flyby increased Psyche's speed by approximately 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h) and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the sun.

Following the maneuver, NASA engineers used the agency's Deep Space Network to confirm that the spacecraft remains on the correct trajectory for its scheduled arrival at asteroid Psyche in August 2029, where it will go into orbit and conduct detailed mapping and scientific observations. The asteroid is thought to be the exposed core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.

The abundant metals on the asteroid are thought to be worth many quadrillions of dollars — though, at the moment, there is no feasible plan for extracting them.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

Stars form when vast clouds of dust and hydrogen gas collapse, creating a dense core that heats up until it transforms into a nuclear fusion reactor. What happens in the moments after a star emerges from its birth cloud, however, is a mystery.

This image of one of the spiral arms in the Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51) gets astronomers closer to solving that mystery — and in doing so, could answer a key question about the early universe.

Made by combining data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope, the image shows that larger groups of stars leave their birth clouds much quicker than smaller ones. It is just one of a series from a paper published May 6 in the journal in Nature Astronomy, which reveals the processes that shape different galaxies.

As more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet light, and powerful explosions called supernovas begin to push the surrounding gas away. This process, called stellar feedback, keeps much of a galaxy's gas from turning into new stars.

In this photo, red-orange threads of gas and dust stretch into lines, while blue bubbles light up some areas from the inside. Gaps in the gas show bright white groups of stars. (JWST's ability to see infrared light uncovered new stars that would be hidden behind dust with normal telescopes.)

When combined with the other images from the study, this showed a clear pattern: the largest groups of stars cleared their birth gas clouds in about 5 million years, while smaller groups took between 7 and 8 million years to fully emerge. That has major implications for how galaxies evolve — and how the universe became hot again about 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

After the universe cooled, electrons and protons combined to form neutral atoms. Later, an unknown energy source separated them again during a period called reionization. Could this have been caused by the intense ultraviolet radiation released into galaxies by massive star clusters?

"It had to be the formation of massive star clusters that helped drive the reionization of the universe," study co-author Daniela Calzetti of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement. "The fact that the most massive clusters can emerge from their natal clouds in just 5 million years means that they had enough time for producing the photons that reionized the universe."

In mid-November 1969, a trio of NASA astronauts launched to the moon on the Apollo 12 mission and would soon become the second group of humans ever to set foot on the lunar surface.

Now, more than half a century later, the crew's historic mission is capturing the public's attention again — not because of what the astronauts did, but because of what they saw.

On Nov. 19, mission commander Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. and lunar module pilot Alan L. Bean descended to the lunar surface in a landing craft dubbed Intrepid. (The third crewmember, Richard F. Gordon, spent a lonely 31 hours piloting the empty command module through lunar orbit.)

While looking through the lander's alignment optical telescope — a small, periscope-like device that offered a narrow, unmagnified view outside the spacecraft — Bean saw something that perplexed him.

"You can see these lights — particles of light, flashes of light… just sailing off in space," Bean told mission control, according to a transcript of the communication. While this transcript has been publicly available for decades, it was resurfaced among a tranche of declassified UFO-related files released by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on Friday (May 8).

Bean initially thought the particles were leaking from the lander's water boiler, but he soon added, "It looks like some of those things are escaping the moon. They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars."

Newly released images from the crew's lunar excursion may reveal what they were seeing. In a series of lightly altered photographs — declassified Friday along with roughly 150 other files, videos and images of alleged UFO sightings from various government agencies — unidentified lights dance in the sky over the lunar horizon, as seen from the Apollo 12 landing site.

The lights, which look bluish in some of the images, appear on their own or in small groups; one particularly packed photo highlights the unidentified lights in five separate regions of the sky.

Like the transcripts, these astronaut images have been publicly available since the Apollo era. But in the newly released versions, NASA has highlighted and zoomed in on the light sources, hinting that they were once the subject of an agency investigation. (NASA has made no conclusions about the source or nature of these lights.)

Later in the transcript, mission control asks the astronauts if the strange flashes could be electromagnetic interference — unwanted signals emitted either from human-made technology or sources of cosmic radiation, like solar flares. The astronauts agree this is possible and leave the investigation at that.

This case, along with all the other newly declassified files, remains unresolved due to poor-quality data. Scant scientific information can be gleaned from these blurry, decades-old images and off-the-cuff remarks.

NASA maintains that unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, the government's preferred name for UFOs) are real but they have nothing to do with aliens. The space agency has been hunting for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence for decades, using the most advanced and expensive telescopes ever created, and so far, they've turned up nothing. Some dancing lights on the moon won't overturn decades of scientific research.

The more likely sources of UAP are far more mundane: airborne debris, photo defects (like glare) and optical illusions are all common, according to a 2022 DOD investigation. Down on Earth, birds, weather balloons and foreign spy craft are regular culprits.

These NASA-altered photos may not be a giant leap for UAP studies, but their declassification — decades after being snapped — is a small step for government transparency.

See more Space Photos of the Week

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

The central bulge and dark dust trail, which together resemble a traditional Mexican hat, give the Sombrero Galaxy (Messier 104, or M104) its nickname — but this new image of the galaxy from the powerful Dark Energy Camera reveals two never-before-seen features.

The defining hat-like shape of M104 is evident here with exceptional clarity. Its central bright nucleus, surrounded by a swarm of about 2,000 globular clusters (balls of ancient stars), glows intensely. The dust lane itself appears sharper and more continuous than in previous observations, cutting cleanly across the galaxy and reinforcing its distinctive "brimmed" silhouette. This dark band of cold dust and hydrogen gas is where stars are being born in the Sombrero Galaxy.

What sets this image apart are features that are usually too faint to detect. Surrounding the galaxy in this wide-angle image is an enormous, diffuse halo that extends far beyond the bright disk, stretching over three times the width of the sombrero itself and significantly increasing the galaxy's apparent size.

The image also captures a faint stellar stream stretching away from one side of the galaxy. This thin, curved feature is barely perceptible at first glance, but a closer inspection reveals it as a distinct arc of light beneath the galaxy as it's shown here. It breaks the galaxy's perfect symmetry and suggests past violent interactions with a smaller satellite galaxy.

The remarkable clarity of the image is due to the capabilities of the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel instrument mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Operated by the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, the system is designed to detect extremely faint light, allowing both the bright core and the dim outer structures of the galaxy to be captured in a single image.

The new image comes in the wake of the James Webb Space Telescope's first-ever mid-infrared observations of the Sombrero Galaxy in 2024, which it improved upon in June 2025.

See more Space Photos of the Week

There are speckles, horns, and a series of colorful, glowing ridges. No, it's not an underwater creature — it's the latest breathtaking portrait of the Trifid Nebula, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This nebula, also known as Messier 20, is a star-forming region located around 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. Nicknamed the "Cosmic Sea Lemon," this zoomed-in portion of the nebula tells a story of the tantrums of young, massive stars blowing a giant bubble of gas and dust. This region is home to several stellar giants (not captured in this field of view) that have sculpted this region for at least 300,000 years.

What makes this image even more special is that Hubble first photographed this exact scene back in 1997 using its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Now, 29 years later, Hubble took a second look at this stunning scenery for its 36th anniversary — this time, with its more powerful Wide Field Camera 3.

In the new image, the mesmerizing orange cloud linings show where powerful ultraviolet radiation from massive stars has stripped electrons from nearby gas, making it glow. Their stellar winds have cleared some surrounding dust, as shown in the bright-blue area where the dust is thinnest. The far-right corner — nearly pitch-black — is where the dust is densest.

The prominent brown-shaped structure in the center left of the image is the "head" of the cosmic sea lemon. Its "body" is a rust-colored cloud of gas. Between two "horns," yellow gas splashes outward like the glow of a volcano's lava, almost as if something were being destroyed there. And that is exactly what's happening; these are regions where the ultraviolet light is eroding gas and dust, according to the European Space Agency.

The main peak, seen left of the sea lemon's head, is accompanied by a jet of energetic gas. This region is part of the Herbig-Haro (HH) object called HH-399, and the jet is ejected by a baby star located within the sea lemon's head. (HH objects are bright regions of nebulosity created by the powerful jets of newborn stars.)

Comparing the new observations with the 1997 image, researchers actually watched the jet expand. This change will allow scientists to estimate the jet's speed, revealing how much energy the young star is injecting into its surroundings. There is also a thick streak of material in bright orange and blazing red that appears to expand to the right — potentially a jet shooting from another newly formed star.

The bright-orange stars scattered across the scene have already won their battle against the nebula. They are fully formed, and their light and stellar winds have cleared the space around them. Over the next few million years, the remaining stars buried in the nebula will do the same. The gas and dust will slowly disappear, and only stars will remain.

With this image, Hubble not only celebrates 36 years of operations but also puts its improved capabilities on full display. The newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile's Atacama Desert, also captured the Trifid Nebula, looking like a giant cloud of cotton candy, in its first batch of images.

See more Space Photos of the Week

This snapshot is just a small part of one of the most comprehensive and spectacular views yet of the universe — a web-like structure formed by millions of galaxies, stretching back to near the dawn of time.

Each tiny point in the image represents a galaxy mapped by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The galaxies aren't randomly distributed; instead, they form in filaments and clusters known as the cosmic web. Between these luminous strands of galaxies are vast empty regions known as voids, where few stars or galaxies exist.

The image is from the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever created. DESI, which is mounted on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, uses 5,000 robotic fiber-optic sensors to capture light from distant celestial objects.

The five-year survey was supposed to gather data on 34 million galaxies and quasars (the bright cores of distant young galaxies). In practice, it detected over 47 million, along with more than 20 million nearby stars in the Milky Way. A visualization published alongside DESI's map shows how it has grown over those five years.

Some of the light captured in this image took billions of years to reach Kitt Peak, so it allows scientists to look back in time to reconstruct how the universe evolved. The result is a three-dimensional view that not only shows where galaxies are but also how they have moved and clustered over time.

Beyond its visual impact, the image plays a crucial role in probing mysterious dark energy, the name physicists have given to a force that appears to be driving the universe's accelerated expansion. It makes up roughly 70% of the universe, and its nature and distribution are among the biggest questions in physics.

By comparing the distribution of galaxies across different epochs, researchers can track how dark energy has influenced the structure of the universe over the past 11 billion years. Early DESI data has already hinted that dark energy may evolve through cosmic history ‪—‬ a breakthrough that would fundamentally reshape scientists' understanding of the universe and its ultimate fate.

The image is the result of a massive international collaboration. More than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions contributed to the project, which was led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

DESI will continue observing the sky through 2028, expanding its map by about 20%. Future observations will target fainter and more distant galaxies, as well as harder-to-observe regions near the Milky Way (where stars get in the way) and in the southern sky (which requires the telescope to peer through more of Earth's atmosphere). The first results from the full dataset are anticipated in 2027.

See more Space Photos of the Week

This striking image shows a crescent Earth slipping behind the moon's rugged limb. This "Earthset" was witnessed by the crew of NASA's Artemis II mission and is arguably the highlight of the first mission around the moon since 1972. Moments after this image was taken, the Orion spacecraft passed behind the moon, beginning a 31-minute communications blackout with Mission Control in Houston, Texas.

In the foreground lies the sharply defined lunar surface, while beyond it, Earth hangs delicately in space, with Australia and Oceania in daylight while the rest fades into night. It's a view that left the crew emotional.

"I'm actually getting chills right now — just thinking about it, my palms are sweating," Commander Reid Wiseman said from the Orion capsule during a live news conference on Wednesday (April 8). "It is amazing to watch your home planet disappear behind the moon. You can see the atmosphere. You can see the terrain on the moon projected across the Earth … it was just an unbelievable sight … and then it was gone. It was out of sight."

The image inevitably invites comparison with the Earthrise captured during the Apollo 8 mission on Christmas Eve 1968 — the mission that took three humans around the moon for the first time. That photograph, taken by pilot Bill Anders, revealed Earth as a fragile, finite world suspended in darkness — a perspective widely credited with helping to spur the modern environmental movement.

The crew of Artemis II later took their own Earthrise image, but it was that initial Earthset — also taken a little farther out, in close up and in wide angle — that deeply affected Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

"The four of us took a moment," Wiseman said. "We shared maple cookies that Jeremy had brought. We took about three or four minutes as a crew to reflect on where we were — and then it was right back into the science."

"There's a lot that our brains have to process," Wiseman added. "Human minds shouldn't have to go through what these just went through, and it is a true gift."

The original Earthrise image announced humanity's arrival at the moon. It was unexpected and improvised. Earthset was intentional — and signals humanity's return to the moon after more than half a century.

One of the oldest recorded astronomical events observed by humans has gotten a fresh look from a new NASA space telescope. In A.D. 185, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a "guest star" in the night sky. The star shone for about eight months in the direction of Alpha Centauri, one of the closest star systems to the sun.

This stellar visitor was a supernova — a large and extremely bright explosion marking the end of a massive star's life. It left a remnant — a ring of glowing debris — in the night sky that's now known as RCW 86. It's all that remains of the exploded white dwarf star, but there's a mystery surrounding it: why it appears to have expanded far more quickly than other supernova remnants.

Although RCW 86 has been imaged many times before — notably by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Dark Energy Camera — new data from NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has delivered a fresh perspective. Launched in 2021, IXPE captures X-ray data and high-energy, short-wavelength light with an all-new level of sensitivity to examine the most extreme objects in the universe, including supernova remnants.

IXPE was put to work on RCW 86 because of the remnant's irregular shape and the strange way it's expanding. Earlier observations from Chandra suggested that the supernova spread into a low-density "cavity," allowing it to grow faster than other supernova remnants. This image combines data from IXPE, Chandra and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope, with low-energy X-rays shown in yellow and higher-energy emissions in blue.

IXPE's data is crucial because it can highlight polarized X-ray emissions, revealing magnetic-field structures in the remnant's outer rim. This region, marked in purple, is particularly significant because it shows where the supernova's expansion likely slowed at the edge of the cavity. IXPE's data reveals a "reflected shock" effect in RCW 86. As the expanding material from the supernova collided with the cavity boundary, shock waves were reflected toward the cavity, offering a potential explanation for both the remnant's shape and the distribution of high-energy particles.

See more Space Photos of the Week

The Hubble Space Telescope's surprising longevity is giving astronomers a chance to see not only what distant objects look like up close but also how they change over time.

This week, NASA dropped a stunning example: A comparison of two Hubble images from 1999/2000 and 2024 shows how the Crab Nebula — the remains of an exploded star — has expanded and evolved over a quarter century of Hubble images.

There are few more iconic objects in the night sky than the Crab Nebula, a cosmic cloud that links ancient astronomy with modern space telescopes. In the year 1054, a supernova in the constellation Taurus lit up the daytime sky for several weeks — an event recorded by early astronomers in Japan, China and the Middle East. This "guest star" eventually faded from view but it remains one of the best-documented cosmic explosions in human history.

Centuries later, in the mid-18th century, the Crab Nebula was discovered in the constellation Taurus. Astronomers, including Edwin Hubble in the 1950s, linked the Crab Nebula to the 1054 supernova. The smoking gun was the discovery of a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star, the typical leftovers of a supernova — at the center of the Crab Nebula.

That pulsar has been busy powering the nebula's expansion in the 25 years since it was first photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope's latest observations of the Crab Nebula, published earlier this year in The Astrophysical Journal, have allowed astronomers to measure the outward movement of the nebula's intricate filaments.

The differences between the two images may seem slight, but the filaments are expanding at about 3.4 million mph (5.5 million km/h). The expansion is driven not by shock waves from the initial explosion — as many supernova remnants are — but by the pulsar, whose powerful magnetic field propels charged particles outward. This energy source drives the nebula's expansion and illuminates its glowing filaments.

The images, which make use of Hubble's high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3 (installed by astronauts in 2009), allow scientists to see 3D structures and details, with blue regions indicating the hottest, lowest-density gas and yellow and red tones revealing energized sulfur and oxygen. (The 1999/2000 photo has also been reprocessed to match the resolution of Wide Field Camera 3.)

"We tend to think of the sky as being unchanging, immutable," William Blair, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the new observations, said in a NASA statement. "However, with the longevity of the Hubble Space Telescope, even an object like the Crab Nebula is revealed to be in motion, still expanding from the explosion nearly a millennium ago."

Hubble is not the only telescope that has managed to snap this spectacular supernova remnant. In 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope also captured a staggeringly detailed shot of the Crab Nebula, which later helped scientists map out the cosmic dust within its expanding shell, according to NASA.

See more Space Photos of the Week

This gorgeous snap, taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted atop the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter (13 feet) Telescope in Chile, shows a glistening field of stars inside the dwarf galaxy Pictor II, which is more than 10 billion years old.

But it isn't just a pretty picture. Nestled inside this image is the star PicII-503, a stellar furnace so ancient that it's classed as a Population II, or second-generation, star, making it among the oldest stars in the universe.

Population II stars formed when the cosmos was young and stars had yet to fuse heavier elements into existence, meaning they are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. This means that PicII-503 has roughly only 1-40,000th of the iron contained within our much younger sun.

But what the star lacks in iron it makes up for in carbon. Like many Pop II stars, PicII-503 is unusually rich in the stuff, having a carbon-to-iron ratio that's more than 1,500 times the ratio in the sun, researchers said in a statement.

Astronomers have proposed many theories why this may be the case but because many Pop II stars are spotted after they've migrated away from their birthplaces, these suggestions have been hard to verify.

But PicII-503 is still located within its primordial dwarf galaxy, so astronomers acted as "stellar archeologists," using the star’s composition to test their theories. The star’s carbon-rich makeup lends credence to an idea that, during the violent supernova explosion at the end of a star’s life, lightweight carbon in the star’s outer shell is flung farther away than other elements.

That could also explain why carbon ends up everywhere in the universe, making it an extremely suitable element to act as the key building block for life.

See more Space Photos of the Week

These stunning cosmic snaps show distorted glowing rings of blue, orange and red gas racing away from a dying star. Set against a sea of galaxies and stars, this image showcases the famous Cat’s Eye Nebula, otherwise known as NGC 6543.

As calm and beautiful as it appears, don’t be fooled. This scenic nebula was shaped by the messy interaction between the star’s intense winds, outer layers and powerful jets, thereby creating its intricate, eye-like structure.

Located roughly 4,300 light-years from Earth, the "Cat’s Eye" is a planetary nebula — an expanding cloud of glowing gas expelled by a star of low to medium mass that has reached the final stages of its life. Unlike more massive stars, which die in violent supernova explosions, the central star has gently shed its outer layers into space, creating beautiful and complex shells of discarded material.

These spectacular images were created using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope.

Euclid’s wide-field view, captured in visible and near-infrared light, shows faint arcs and delicate filaments of gas surrounding the bright central region. These wispy structures appear to be flying off the scene, into space, and are thought to have been expelled during an earlier stage of the star’s death, before the outer layers were shed that formed the main nebula.

Hubble has captured the fine details of the bright central region of the nebula. This close-up view was taken using visible light and shows a dead yet bright star surrounded by white bubbles and blue loops of gas. Using its Advanced Camera for Surveys, Hubble has revealed even finer, intricate details at the heart of the nebula, including the complexity of gas bubbles and delicate filamentary structures embedded within those bubbles.

These finer details serve as a "fossil record" of the nebula, according to an ESA statement. Each gas bubble corresponds to an episode of mass loss of the dying star. In the image, these bubbles are followed by concentric circles or rings within a brown halo; each ring marks the boundary of the bubbles. Further, the data reveal jets of energetic and high-speed gas, shown in pink, that shoot out from the top and bottom of the nebula. There are also dense knots formed by shock interactions of high-speed jets and slowly-expanding ejected material.

While Hubble captures the unprecedented details of the dying star’s bright nest and its immediate surroundings, Euclid reveals the faint arcs and colorful gas filaments a little farther from the nebula, along with the wider cosmic landscape dotted with distant galaxies. Together, they present an almost cinematic view of the final act of a dying star.

See more Space Photos of the Week

The powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed never-before-seen details of a cosmic "cranium" made of the glowing remains of a dying star.

This brainy object, named PMR 1, is a planetary nebula — an expanding shell of ionized gas and dust expelled by a star in the final stages of its evolution, when the nuclear fuel within its core is depleted. It was first spotted in 2014 by the Spitzer Space Telescope (a predecessor to JWST) but has been little studied until now.

The colorful cloud is said to resemble a brain encased within a transparent skull, which has led to it being dubbed the "Exposed Cranium" nebula.

The new image comes in two parts, captured by different instruments: the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the left and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the right. By observing the object at different wavelengths, JWST can reveal intricate details that were previously invisible, according to NASA.

In the NIRCam image, the nebula's outer bubble appears with a bright white edge, while the inner clouds glow orange. It highlights a distinctive dark lane that cuts vertically through the center, creating the illusion of two hemispheres, like a brain. Stars and distant background galaxies are also visible through the nebula's outer shell in near-infrared light.

Things look different in the MIRI image, where mid-infrared light shows an outer bubble that appears bluish with a touch of purple. The glowing clouds within the nebula look thicker and more complex, while the central dark lane is less visible because it's partially obscured by dust and gas.

That dark lane is a great example of why Webb's ability to see the universe in multiple wavelengths of light is so valuable to astronomers. While the dark streak is much easier to see in the NIRCam image, it appears to be more closely connected to twin eruptions of gas at the top and bottom of the nebula as seen in the MIRI image. Together, the two images paint a more complete picture of exactly what is happening in this cosmic cranium.

The images also provide an insight into multiple stages of the star's evolution, with an outer shell of hydrogen gas expelled earlier in the star's life and inner clouds of a mixture of gases and dust expelled more recently.

What will eventually happen to the star at the center of PMR 1 depends on its mass: it will either explode as a supernova or continue to shed layers, leaving behind a dense, shriveled core known as a white dwarf star.

See more Space Photos of the Week

The sun orbits the center of the Milky Way wrapped in a protective bubble of its own making, dubbed the heliosphere. And for the first time, astronomers have spotted a similar protective bubble forming around an alien star.

Created by the solar wind — a stream of charged particles constantly pouring out from the sun — the heliosphere acts as a magnetic shield against interstellar radiation. Where the heliosphere ends, interstellar space begins, making it the outermost boundary of the solar system.

A star called HD 61005 has just been confirmed to have its own heliosphere, or "astrosphere.” And since HD 61005 is much younger than the sun (about 100 million years compared to 4.6 billion years), the discovery also offers astronomers a rare glimpse into what our home star may have looked like in its infancy.

This groundbreaking image uses X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple and white in the image) alongside infrared (blue and white) and optical (red, green and blue) observations from other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Combining the data has enabled astronomers to capture a striking portrait of a stellar wind bubble in action.

At the center of the image, there's a brilliant white X-ray core. Surrounding it is a neon-purple glow marking the astrosphere itself.

One of HD 61005’s most distinctive features is a wedge-shaped dust tail trailing behind it that looks like a pair of wings. This debris, left over from the star’s formation, has been swept backward as the star speeds through space, and its unusual shape has earned HD 61005 the nickname the "Moth.”

"There’s a saying about a moth being drawn to a flame," Brad Snios, a physicist formerly from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. “In the case of HD 61005, the ‘Moth’ can’t easily escape from the flame because it was born around it.”

Though similar in mass and temperature to the sun, HD 61005 is far younger and more active. Its stellar winds are estimated to be about three times faster and 25 times denser than those currently emitted by the sun. If it replaced the sun in the solar system, then our heliosphere would be up to 10 times wider, according to NASA.

Capturing the first alien astrosphere has been an ongoing mission since the 1990s. The breakthrough was made possible because HD 61005’s powerful wind collides with an unusually dense region of interstellar material, generating X-rays detectable by Chandra.

It's the first clue to what may have surrounded the early solar system billions of years ago — and perhaps how young planetary systems evolve in their cosmic neighborhoods.

See more Space Photos of the Week

A searchlight shines through concentric circles of fresh stardust ejected by a dying star in this beautiful new image of the Egg Nebula. The dramatic scene, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, also provides tantalizing evidence of exactly what happens to sunlike stars as they reach the end of their lives.

The Egg Nebula is famous among astronomers as the first, youngest and closest pre-planetary nebula ever discovered. Despite the name, a planetary nebula has nothing to do with planets. Instead, 18th-century astronomers gave planetary nebulas their name because they superficially looked like planets in telescopes.

However, they are actually expanding shells of ionized gas and dust expelled by stars during the final stages of their evolution, leaving behind dense stellar remnants called white dwarfs at their centers.

The Egg Nebula is one of the only known planetary nebulas in a very early stage — a pre-planetary nebula. It gives scientists a detailed view of a fleeting transitional phase that lasts only a few thousand years, before the gas and dust are dispersed to form a fully developed planetary nebula.

There are many examples of those, including the Helix Nebula, the Stingray Nebula and the Butterfly Nebula. But the Egg Nebula is one of the only places where astronomers can see what happens as a star exhausts its hydrogen and helium fuel and begins to shed its outer layers into space. The short lifespan of pre-planetary nebulas means that very few exist at any given time in cosmic history, and they're extremely dim.

Hubble has peered at the Egg Nebula before — in 1997, 2003 and 2012 — and it was the latter data, combined with new data, that created this new image. In this early stage of becoming a planetary nebula, the light in the Egg Nebula comes from its star, which expelled a dense disk of dust just a few hundred years ago.

Now blocked by dust, light from the star escapes through polar openings, forming twin beams. The concentric arcs and symmetry are evidence that the star regularly "burps" out mass, and they rule out the possibility of a chaotic supernova explosion.

See more Space Photos of the Week

This stunning image showcases what astronomers think is the most distant galaxy protocluster ever found, and it holds a very important clue about the history of the universe.

Located 12.7 billion light-years away from Earth, the protocluster, dubbed JADES-ID1, appears in this image as a collection of glowing dots and specks embedded within a large blue cloud.

A protocluster is simply a galaxy cluster in its infancy. It is a region with a large number of young galaxies that are being pulled together by gravity, contained within a large cloud of hot gas. Galaxy clusters are vast collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are held together by gravity, and a protocluster essentially shows how such a large structure forms and grows.

However, in protoclusters, galaxies are not as tightly bound together as they are in mature galaxy clusters. Additionally, the surrounding hot gas that usually makes clusters easy to spot is not developed enough to emit detectable X-rays. Therefore, detecting a protocluster is challenging.

Scientists discovered JADES-ID1using the deepest observations from two powerful telescopes: the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST's infrared instruments detected at least 66 galaxies held together by gravity in this region. Because JADES-ID1 possessed enough mass to heat its surrounding gas to very high temperatures, Chandra detected the X-ray emissions from the large cloud of hot gas that contains all these galaxies. This provided further evidence that these galaxies are part of a single entity.

In the annotated version of the image, some of the individual galaxies identified by JWST's infrared observations are circled. The neon blue region represents the hot gas detected in X-rays by Chandra.

A real puzzle surrounding this discovery is its place on the timeline of the history of the universe. Astronomers found that JADES-ID1 has the mass of 20 trillion suns and spans about 1.1 million light-years across. Most models of the universe predict that a protocluster this massive should not form until between 2 and 3 billion years after the Big Bang. However, surprisingly, JADES-ID1 is estimated to have existed when the universe was only about one billion years old.

“This may be the most distant confirmed protocluster ever seen,” lead author of the study Akos Bogdan of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement. “JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was in a huge hurry to grow up.”

Astronomers are now curious about how this protocluster formed so quickly. That’s because, according to current models, there wouldn’t have been enough time or enough galaxies in the first billion years of the universe for a protocluster of such a size to come together.

The study was published Jan. 28 in the journal Nature.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

Just as the mythological Icarus melted his feathers and wax wings when he flew too close to the sun, comets often suffer the consequences of orbiting too close to our star. That was definitely the case for Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), which was caught breaking apart by the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, late last year.

First discovered in May 2025 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), Comet K1 was best seen from the Southern Hemisphere.

As it approached its closest point to the sun on Oct. 8, 2025, at just 31 million miles (50 million kilometers), hopes were not high for the ball of ice and dust to survive; comets that endure a close approach to the sun often brighten significantly afterward, as their component ices sublimate into gas. Surprisingly, Comet K1 emerged from behind the sun intact, but it never brightened enough to be seen with the naked eye.

In early November, the comet's nucleus began to break up. This is not unusual for comets; extreme solar heating causes the nucleus to release jets of gas and dust — called outgassing — which combines with gravitational forces from the sun to weaken the comet's structure. Most comets either survive or never emerge from behind the sun, but Comet K1 did — and in just the right place for telescopes across the world to image its spectacular breakup.

A zoomable version of Gemini North"s image clearly shows three fragments.

Another high-stakes encounter with the sun may soon follow the dramatic disintegration of Comet K1. Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS), a "Kreutz sungrazer comet" discovered Jan. 13, is now hurtling toward the sun and will make a perilously close pass on April 4, when it gets within 465,000 miles (748,000 kilometers) of the sun's surface.

If it survives that dangerous encounter, some astronomers predict the comet could reach magnitude -4, about the same brightness as Venus. That would be a spectacular sight, but like Comet K1, Comet A1 will have to face searing heat and intense gravity and could either blaze brilliantly or succumb to the sun's fury.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A tranquil-looking cloud of gas and dust might not sound like much to get excited about, but it's home to one of the most fundamental phenomena in astronomy: star formation.

This is the star-forming region Lupus 3, a nebula where bright, hot stars are being born from a dense molecular cloud. Our own star, the sun, likely formed in a region just like this one more than 4 billion years ago.

Look carefully at this hauntingly beautiful image of Lupus 3 captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Serene yet full of energy, bluish fingers of gas and dust curl toward a dark dust cloud in the lower-left corner. Those fingers are where young stars of a particular type are born, but they can be spotted throughout the image, chiefly at the center left, bottom right and upper center. Called T Tauri stars, they're young — less than 10 million years old, so newborns in a cosmic sense — and show dramatic variations in brightness as they grow and evolve.

T Tauri stars are special. They're rare to spot in the Milky Way and excite astronomers because they represent the earliest stages of a star's life, during which they continue contracting under gravitational forces.

They also gradually begin the nuclear fusion process that will define them as stars. But the chaos all around them — from powerful stellar winds to material falling onto the stars — causes the light reaching Hubble's 7.8-foot (2.4 meters) mirror and Wide Field Camera 3 to fluctuate. T Tauri stars often unleash massive flares and change in brightness over longer periods because giant "sunspots" on their surface rotate in and out of view.

Most of Lupus 3 is dark, with starlight from those T Tauri stars lighting up some of the molecular cloud to create the blue reflection nebula called GN 16.05.2 or Bernes 149. By observing in multiple wavelengths of light, Hubble can pierce through the obscuring dust to see what's going on inside molecular cloud complexes like Lupus 3, as well as the iconic Orion, Rho Ophiuchi and Taurus molecular cloud complexes, and the Eagle Nebula (M16).

Such images have helped astronomers glimpse processes that are invisible to ground‑based telescopes to refine our models of how stars and planetary systems originate.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A spectacular new image of the Helix Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals the death throes of a sunlike star — and perhaps a harbinger of our own solar system's fate.

The Helix Nebula, also called the "Eye of God" or "Eye of Sauron," is one of the closest, most colorful and most studied planetary nebulas in space. The well-known and nearby starscape was destined to get JWST's near-infrared treatment, which reveals cosmic structures only hinted at by other space telescopes.

A planetary nebula is the slightly confusing name for a cloud of gas (primarily hydrogen and helium) and fine cosmic dust ejected by a dying, sunlike star as it sheds its outer layers, according to NASA. That star, a dense and hot white dwarf at the center of the cloud, ionizes the surrounding gas, causing it to glow in vibrant colors — in this case, in a helix-like (or corkscrew-like) structure, as seen from the solar system. (These bright, often circular nebulas resembled planets when viewed through early telescopes, earning them their title.)

Within this colorful scene, a vital process is unfolding: A star's former outer layers, now expanding into interstellar space, are seeding the galaxy with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen — the same elements that make life on Earth possible.

Using its Near-Infrared Camera, JWST pierced the Helix Nebula deeper than ever before. In this close-up of a small section of the nebula around the white dwarf, thousands of orange and gold, comet-like pillars stream upward. These features, technically called "cometary knots," separate high-speed stellar winds from the dying star and older, cooler layers of gas shed earlier in its life.

A partial orange semicircle at the bottom, where the pillars are more densely concentrated, is the circumference of the shell. The blackness of space hovers above, along with some blue background stars.

As is typical in space telescope images, filters have teased out the temperature and chemistry of the nebula, which changes according to its distance from the white dwarf. Close to the star, a blue glow is produced by ultraviolet radiation, igniting hot, ionized gas. Farther from the star, it gets cooler, with molecular hydrogen shown in yellow and deep-red dust even farther out.

As the potential seeds of the next generation of stars and planets, that dust is, in part, what makes this image so exciting — the image shows the life cycle of matter. Radiation and expelled material from a dying star create regions where more complex molecules can survive and grow.

It may be beautiful, but the Helix Nebula is a cosmic recycling center and, ultimately, a blueprint for what will happen to the sun when it expands into a red giant, sheds its outer layers, and leaves behind a white dwarf in about 5 billion years.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Bordered by orange and brown clouds of gas and dust and filled with shimmering stars, this new image from the James Webb Space Telescope appears to show a portal to a cosmic wonderland.

In reality, it features a prominent star cluster known as Westerlund 2, which is located within a star-forming nebula known as Gum 29. The entire scene is playing out 20,000 light-years from Earth, within the Milky Way galaxy.

The sparkling cluster is compact, measuring between 6 light-years and 13 light-years in diameter, and it is home to approximately 3,000 stars, according to a statement from the European Space Agency. Seen here at a young age of about 2 million years, this cluster contains some of the hottest, brightest and most massive stars in our galaxy.

Westerlund 2 was also captured by the Hubble Space Telescope 10 years ago to commemorate Hubble's 25th anniversary in orbit. That image, created using visible light and some near-infrared data, revealed the complex features of the cluster and its surrounding nebula, showcasing a stunning landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys of dust.

Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an even more vibrant view of the cluster, which is teeming with bright young stars. This latest portrait combines infrared data from the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument.

The stunning image highlights not only the young, massive stars but also the clouds and walls of dust shaped by their intense light. These sculpted regions are surrounded by wisps of orange and red gas, brilliantly illuminated by the powerful light of the nearby stars.

The entire scene is interconnected by a network of blue and pink wisps that appear to be material drifting off the scene. Several tiny stars look like they have just begun shining, still embedded in the thick cloud in which they formed. Larger and brighter stars that are much closer to us display an eight-pronged diffraction pattern created by the interaction of starlight with the telescope's instruments.

The twinkling display of countless stars is a result of a continuous cycle of star formation in which the baby stars in the stellar nursery blast out intense radiation that then heats the surrounding nebula and triggers new stars to form.

The new observations, taken across a wide range of infrared wavelengths, include bands that are sensitive to methane and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission. While PAH emission traces heated gas and dust, methane traces low-mass cold objects. As a result, astronomers identified a population of brown dwarfs — or "failed stars" — including objects only about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Brown dwarfs are peculiar objects that straddle the line between stars and planets. They have masses in between those of typical stars and those of planets, ranging between 10 and 90 times the mass of Jupiter. However, they do not have enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion in their cores. The James Webb telescope's new observations could reveal insight into the different stages in a star's life and how planet-forming disks around massive stars work.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new image of the largest and most unusual protoplanetary disk ever observed around a single star. The object, officially known as IRAS 23077+6707 and nicknamed "Dracula's Chivito," is a dusty disk that resembles a sandwich.

Rich in gas and dust, a protoplanetary disk is where planets — both rocky worlds, like Earth, and gas giants, like Jupiter — can form around young stars. Dracula's Chivito could, in theory, contain a vast planetary system. Its name references both its appearance and its discoverers, who come from Transylvania, Romania (home of the fictional Dracula), and Uruguay, where the national dish is the chivito, a sandwich of sliced beef, ham, mozzarella, tomatoes and olives — which resembles the layers of gas and dust in the protoplanetary disk.

In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers estimate that the cosmic sandwich spans nearly 400 billion miles (640 billion kilometers) — more than 100 times the diameter of our inner solar system, where all the known planets orbit. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, the object was first identified in 2016 and has now been confirmed as a massive planet-forming disk.

Thought to contain a hot, massive star or a pair of stars at its center, the enormous disk is surprisingly chaotic, with bright wisps of material seen far above and below the disk.

"The level of detail we're seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging," Kristina Monsch, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "These new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected."

The system contains bright, vertically stretched filaments of gas on only one side, while the opposite side has a sharp edge.

"We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is," co-investigator Joshua Bennett Lovell, also an astronomer at the CfA, said in the statement. "Hubble has given us a front row seat to the chaotic processes that are shaping disks as they build new planets — processes that we don't yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Go outside after dark this winter and look to the southeast, and you'll see some of the brightest stars in the night sky — Orion's Belt, Betelgeuse, Sirius, Aldabaran and Capella. Just above this melee is the quieter constellation Perseus, which lacks bright stars but hosts something extraordinary that the naked eye can't see — the explosive birth of new stars.

Lurking within the Perseus Molecular Cloud is NGC 1333, nicknamed the Embryo Nebula because it contains many young, hot stars that are teaching astronomers just what goes on when a star is born. NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula, meaning a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the intense light coming from newly forged stars, some of which appear to be regularly spewing jets of matter. It's one of the closest star-forming regions to our solar system. On Dec. 16. astronomers published the most detailed images ever of a jet launched by a newborn star, called SVS 13, which revealed a sequence of nested, ring-like structures. The finding is evidence that the star has been undergoing an outburst — releasing an immense amount of energy — for decades.

The discovery, which the researchers described in the journal Nature Astronomy, marks the first direct observational confirmation of a long-standing theoretical model of how young stars feed on, and then explosively expel, surrounding material.

The researchers captured the high-resolution, 3D view of a fast-moving jet emitted from one of SVS 13's young stars using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope array in Chile. Within the image, they identified more than 400 ultra-thin, bow-shaped molecular rings. Like tree rings that mark the passage of time, each ring marks the aftermath of an energetic outburst from the young star's early history. Remarkably, the youngest ring matches a bright outburst seen in the SVS 13 system in the early 1990s, allowing researchers to directly connect a specific burst of activity in a forming star with a change in the speed of its jet. It's thought that sudden bursts in jet activity are caused by large amounts of gas falling onto a young star.

"These images give us a completely new way of reading a young star's history," said study co-author Gary Fuller, a professor at the University of Manchester. "Each group of rings is effectively a time-stamp of a past eruption. It gives us an important new insight into how young stars grow and how their developing planetary systems are shaped."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Stars form in molecular clouds — molecular clouds — regions that are cold, dense, rich in molecules and filled with dust. One enormous cloud responsible for forming half of the stars in the Milky Way's central region is the Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2) molecular cloud, located a few hundred light-years from our central supermassive black hole.

Boasting a total mass between 3 million and 10 million times that of the sun and stretching 150 light-years across, it is one of the largest molecular clouds in the galaxy. It lies roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius. It is also chemically rich, with several complex molecules discovered so far.

But this giant star-forming region is shrouded in a mystery: how it has managed to produce 50% of the stars in the region, despite containing just 10% of the galactic center's gas.

Astronomers observed this super-efficient stellar factory using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), in the hope of finding some clues about its unusual productivity. This spectacular image is the telescope's mid-infrared view, captured by JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

In the image, the clumps of dust and gas in the molecular complex glow in shades of pink, purple and red. These clumps are seen surrounded by dark areas. Dark does not mean that these regions are empty or emit nothing; instead, light in these areas is blocked by dense dust that the instrument cannot detect.

In star-forming regions like this one, warm dust and gas and only the brightest stars emit in the mid-infrared. This contrasts with the near-infrared image captured simultaneously by JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which reveals an abundance of stars because stars emit more strongly in the near-infrared light.

In this MIRI image, the clumps on the right that appear redder than the rest of the cloud complex correspond to one of the most chemically complex areas known, as revealed by previous observations using other telescopes. Astronomers think this unique region may hold clues to why Sgr B2 is more efficient at star formation than the rest of the galactic center.

Additionally, an in-depth analysis of the masses and ages of the stars in this stellar factory could reveal further insight into the star-forming mechanisms in the Milky Way's center.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A stark new portrait of two colliding spiral galaxies combines different kinds of light to evoke the colors, shapes and moods of autumn. The image, which shows the galaxies NGC 2207 (lower right) and IC 2163 (upper left), was created by combining infrared light captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are locked in a slow gravitational merge that, by chance, is seen face-on from the solar system. The larger galaxy, NGC 2207, dominates the field, while the smaller IC 2163 overlaps its outer regions. The gravitational pull of each galaxy distorts the other's spiral arms, stretching out streams of stars and gas and compressing gas and dust in ways that can ignite new stars. The result is an intricate web of chaos.

One of JWST's core tasks, according to NASA, is to provide scientists with a clear view of the centers of merging galaxies and thereby inform a new generation of models that will describe how galaxies interact and merge. NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are the perfect targets.

In the image, JWST's midinfrared data appear in white, gray and red, primarily showing the dust and cooler material within the galaxies' cores and spiral arms. Chandra's X-ray data are shown in blue, highlighting high-energy regions of the two galaxies — binary stars, the remnants of dead stars, and regions where supernovas have occurred.

The spectacular layered image of NGC 2207 and IC 2163 is one of four Chandra-based composites that were published at the same time. The other three include NGC 6334, a star-forming region known for its arcs of glowing gas and dust; supernova remnant G272.2-0.3, where hot X-ray-emitting gas fills an expanding shell; and a star system called R Aquarii, where a white dwarf star sucks material from a red giant star.

Each image merges Chandra's view of the high-energy universe with data from JWST (launched in 2021), the Hubble Space Telescope (launched in 1990) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (active between 2003 and 2020), as well as from ground-based telescopes.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A gamma-ray burst (GRB) — the most energetic type of explosion in the universe since the Big Bang — is detected once every day, on average. But what happened on July 2, 2025, was highly unusual: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has been orbiting Earth since 2008, recorded an unusually long-lived GRB that continued emitting in bursts for more than seven hours.

Astronomers leaped into action, using the world's telescopes to detect the explosion's afterglow and discover where it came from.

The event, called GRB 250702B, was the longest-duration gamma-ray burst ever recorded. Astronomers now think it came from a previously unobserved or rare type of explosion that launched a narrow jet of material in the direction of the solar system, traveling at least 99% the speed of light.

GRB 250702B was not easy to figure out. Researchers used all kinds of telescopes to track its origin in all wavelengths of light, including the twin 8.1-meter Gemini telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Hubble Space Telescope.

GRBs come from the depths of the universe; even the closest one originated more than 100 million light-years away, according to NASA. GRB 250702B came from a massive galaxy 8 billion light-years distant that, critically, is so dusty that it blocked all visible light.

The only light detected by telescopes was infrared and high-energy X-ray wavelengths. Due to thick dust in its host galaxy, the GRB was almost invisible in ordinary visible light, the researchers reported in a study published Nov. 26 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This was the longest gamma-ray burst that humans have observed — long enough that it does not fit into any of our existing models for what causes gamma-ray bursts," Jonathan Carney, lead author of the study and doctoral student in physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement.

Analysis shows that GRB 250702B may have been caused by the death of a massive star, a star being ripped apart by a black hole, or the merger of a helium star and a black hole, where the black hole spirals into the core of the massive star, triggering an explosion from within.

"But we can't yet tell which explanation is correct," Carney said. "In the future, this event will serve as a unique benchmark — when astronomers discover similar explosions, they'll ask whether they match GRB 250702B's properties or represent something different entirely."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

This spectacular image of an emission nebula — a cloud of gas and dust lit up by nearby stars — and a nearby star cluster has been published by the Gemini Observatory to mark its 25th anniversary.

Reminiscent of the iconic "Pillars of Creation" image of the Eagle Nebula taken in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope and more recently by the James Webb Space Telescope, the anniversary image shows the emission nebula, NGC 6820, as well as the star cluster NGC 6823.

The image, which is available as a zoomable version online, captures the hot, massive stars in NGC 6823 — shown as specks of blue-white light — illuminating the veil of red gas that comprises NGC 6820. The pillars in the image are gas and dust sculpted by the stars' intense radiation.

NGC 6820 and NGC 6823 lie in the middle of the Summer Triangle, the famous asterism created by the bright stars Deneb, Vega and Altair. They’re visible low in the west immediately after dark, as seen from the Northern Hemisphere.

In Hawaii — home to the Gemini North telescope, which began operations in June 1999 — the Summer Triangle is known as Mānaiakalani, the Great Fishhook of Maui. As part of the image’s release, it’s been named Ua 'Ōhi'a Lani, which means the Heavenly 'Ōhi'a Rains, by four local high school students participating in the University of Hawaii's Project Hōkūlani summer internship.

The image was taken using the Gemini North telescope on the summit of Maunakea, a shield volcano on Hawaii that hosts 13 large telescope observatories. However, the International Gemini Observatory comprises twin 8-meter telescopes, with the other — Gemini South — located on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. It achieved first light in November 2000. Together, the two scopes give astronomers access to nearly the entire night sky.

"This image is crimson and red like lava because of the abundance of hydrogen gas present in the nebula," Hope Arthur, one of the Gemini interns, said in a statement. The name comes from a story about Pele, the goddess of volcanoes and fire in Hawaiian religion and the creator of the Hawaiian Islands.

"One of Pele's most well-known stories is that of 'Ōhi'a and Lehua. Their story is about regrowth after tragedy and the act of new beginnings, which we felt was evocative of the cycle of stellar life, death, and rebirth," Arthur said.

"The baby blue stars in the image reminded us of rain and how, in the story of 'Ōhi'a and Lehua, when you pick the lehua blossoms, it rains," added Iolani Sanches, an intern at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

On April 10, 2024, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected first light from an explosion of a massive star with roughly 12 to 15 times the sun’s mass. Just 26 hours later, astronomers pointed the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile at the supernova, as this early and brief window provided a rare opportunity to study the initial phase of a star’s death.

The stunning image is an artist's interpretation, showcasing the supernova explosion as revealed by the VLT data. Thanks to some quick observations, astronomers were able to detect the explosion’s shape during its earliest moments — a phase that would not have been seen if observed just one day later.

Known as SN 2024ggi, this supernova explosion took place in the galaxy NGC 3621, which is located approximately 22 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra. An image captured by the VLT on April 11, 2024 shows the location of this explosion within the galaxy.

A massive star maintains its near-perfect spherical shape due to a delicate balance between the inward pull of its own gravity, and the outward force of the nuclear fusion-powered radiation generated at its center. When this balance is lost, the star dies — gravity finally overpowers the pressure holding its core up, causing it to collapse under its own weight.

This collapse pulls all the outer layers inward. These outer layers then rebound and create a powerful shock wave that rips the star apart. Once the shock breaks through the star’s surface, it releases a lot of energy, increasing the supernova’s brightness dramatically. But how that shock forms and travels outward has long been one of the most debated fundamental questions.

There is a short-lived window, after the explosion has occurred but before it starts to interact with its surroundings, during which astronomers can catch a glimpse of its initial "breakout" shape. Using spectropolarimetry — a technique that sorts light by its wavelengths and reveals the direction in which the light waves vibrate — scientists with the VLT captured this shape for the first time.

Data from the VLT’s FORS2 instrument, the only facility in the Southern Hemisphere that is capable of making such a measurement, showed that the first light from the exploding star wasn’t emitted in all directions equally. Instead, the initial shock was stretched along one axis, like an olive — meaning the explosion wasn’t perfectly spherical.

As the blast expanded, its light began to reveal the supernova’s interaction with the gas surrounding the star. Around day 10, the hydrogen-rich outer layers of the star became visible, and these layers were found to be aligned with the same axis as the first-day shock. This means the core explosion had a stable, directional shape from the very beginning, suggesting an underlying mechanism that drives a consistent orientation.

Study of the unprecedented view has ruled out some of the current supernova models while supporting others, and provides new details about the catastrophic deaths of massive stars.

The study was published Nov. 12 in the journal Science Advances.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

This striking image reveals a glittering cosmic formation dubbed a "diamond ring" — a vast, glowing structure of gas and dust appearing as a circular loop with a bright clump on one side.

About 20 light-years across and located in the Cygnus X star-forming region, the ring is what's left of a bubble of ionized carbon gas, created by the intense radiation and stellar winds of a hot, massive star. But unlike typical spherical bubbles, this one expanded within a flat molecular cloud — a dense cloud of gas and dust where stars are born — before eventually rupturing and losing its symmetry. At just 400,000 years old, it's also exceptionally young — at least relative to the lifespan of massive stars.

Initially, a glowing clump of young stars appears to form the "diamond" in the ring, but researchers found that this grouping is actually a separate object. It lies a few hundred light-years in front of the ring and is merely aligned by chance when viewed from Earth.

The ring demonstrates how stars can affect far larger areas around them.

"The 'diamond ring' is a prime example of how enormous the influence of individual stars can be on entire cloud complexes," Nicola Schneider, co-author of the study published this week (Nov. 17) in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, said in a statement. "Such processes are crucial for understanding the formation of stars in our Milky Way."

The image was captured by NASA's flying Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observatory, a 2.7-meter (106-inch) telescope in a Boeing 747SP aircraft that flew at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,700 meters) — above 99% of Earth's atmosphere — enabling it to capture the cosmos in infrared wavelengths that are invisible to ground-based observatories. SOFIA first flew in 2010 and was canceled in September 2022 due to budget constraints. However, its vast archive of infrared observations is still being analysed by astronomers, as it was in this latest discovery.

Though unrelated, the term "diamond ring" in astronomy also refers to a dramatic event during a total solar eclipse — when one drop of sunlight shines through the moon's valleys. The cosmic version shares that visual drama, even if the mechanisms are vastly different.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Even before its full science operations have begun, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has already helped astronomers find something remarkable. The observatory's first images, revealed in June, contained a deep view of the Virgo cluster, the closest and best-studied cluster of galaxies. And in the bottom-right of the image, eagle-eyed astronomers saw something unexpected — a razor-thin stream of stars arcing away from one of the cluster's galaxies.

The barred spiral galaxy Messier 61 (M61, otherwise known as NGC 4303) is well known and has been studied for decades. However, only Rubin's unique sensitivity to objects with low surface brightness has been able to reveal this newfound star stream.

The stream stretches roughly 50 kiloparsecs (about 163,000 light-years), which is comparable to the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. That makes it longer than most known stellar streams in our galaxy, which are mostly only a few tens of thousands of light-years in length.

The faint, galaxy-length breadcrumb trail is thought to consist of the leftovers of a dwarf galaxy that was torn apart by M61's gravity. This breakup may also have been the catalyst for a starburst — a massive increase in new star formation — that began in M61 about 10 million years ago.

The feature is reminiscent of the Sagittarius Stream — a long, looping structure that encircles the Milky Way and whose stars originated in the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, scientists wrote in a study uploaded Oct. 28 to the pre-print server arXiv, which is due to be published in the journal Notes of the American Astronomical Society.

A satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is thought to have caused new spiral arms of stars to form within the Milky Way. All of this suggests that most large galaxies may form by consuming other, smaller galaxies around them.

"It is remarkable that the stream went long unnoticed around a Messier galaxy," the authors wrote in the study. "We expect a treasure trove of substructures to be unveiled around other galaxies with future Rubin data."

Rubin is about to embark on its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time mission, during which it will create a high-definition time-lapse record of the universe.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

We cannot see or image the entire Milky Way galaxy, because we are located inside it. From Earth, we can observe only a portion of the galaxy, and when we look up at the dark, clear night sky from a place free of light pollution, the Milky Way appears as a complex, busy band of stars and dust. This is our edge-on view of the dense galactic plane of our galaxy. And that's just the visible light view.

Imagine the sheer extravagance of this structure were it to be captured in radio colors, which can penetrate the thick clouds of dust and gas that block visible wavelengths. Fortunately, astronomers have now successfully captured a stunning view of the galactic plane as seen from the Southern Hemisphere using a wide range of radio wavelengths.

Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at Curtin University in Australia, took nearly 40,000 hours to compile the data from two surveys called the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM eXtended (GLEAM-X). The GLEAM and GLEAM-X surveys, conducted using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope, yielded abundant data over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014, and 113 nights from 2018 to 2020.

Thanks to significant improvements in sky coverage, resolution and sensitivity, the new image provides twice the resolution, has 10 times the sensitivity and covers double the area of the previous GLEAM image released in 2019, according to a statement from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). Researchers say that only the SKA-Low telescope, an array of tens of thousands of radio antennae set to be completed next decade, can surpass this level of sensitivity and resolution.

This extensive survey view is the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever created. Since most of the imaged region had never been observed at these frequencies, this galactic landscape marks a significant milestone, the researchers said.

The low-frequency radio waves revealed remnants of exploded stars and regions of ionized gas where new stars are forming. The "colors" of radio light captured in the image help astronomers distinguish between different objects in the sky. The large red bubbles reveal dead stars and their expanding shells, whereas the compact blue regions are where new stars are born.

The surveys contain more than 98,000 radio sources — including pulsars, planetary nebulae and compact star-forming regions — across the Milky Way's plane as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. The new image captures the stellar life cycle from start to finish: the evolution of stars, their formation in different regions of our galaxy, their interactions with other objects and, ultimately, their death.

The team's work was published Oct. 28 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

If you own a small backyard telescope, there's a good chance you've seen the Cigar Galaxy (M82) with your own eyes. Not only is it relatively close to the Milky Way and one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky, but it's visible beside Bode's Galaxy (M81). A spiral galaxy about four times smaller than the Milky Way, M82 shines five times more brightly and forms stars at 10 times the rate, earning it the title of a starburst galaxy.

This image from the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) reveals a glowing core teeming with billions of stars. The shot is a follow-up to a close-up image published in 2024. Despite being a side-on view of M82, the photo shows its brilliant core exuding a blue-white glare, with red and orange dust clouds being pushed out above and below. The gas clouds contain cavities and ridges — details that are only possible to spot because of JWST's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), which can see straight through them.

M82's core is a busy place, containing more than 100 super star clusters, some still being born within dense gas clouds. Each super star cluster hosts hundreds of thousands of stars. The reason for M82's burst of star formation is probably its neighbor, M81, whose gravity it has likely interacted with. As a result, gas from M81 has found its way into M82's center, spurring an uptick in star formation despite the galaxy's small size.

Scientists can also see the glow from plumes of organic molecules in this image. The broad plumes, which are 160 light-years across, are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and are being pushed away from the galactic disk by powerful outflowing winds produced by M82's super star clusters.

For stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere, M81 and M82 are a spectacular sight in the northern sky during fall and winter. Both galaxies can be spotted as small, diffuse patches of light northwest of Dubhe — the bright star marking the lip of the Big Dipper's bowl. Through a small backyard telescope, these two galaxies next door appear together in the same field of view.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Even as a brilliant, naked-eye comet slices through Earth's sky (cheers, Comet Lemmon!), the most famous object in the solar system right now is hidden on the far side of the sun: the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

This alien visitor, which most astronomers believe to be a comet originating from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is only the third interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. It is the largest, fastest-moving, and quite likely the oldest interstellar object ever seen.

Though it was just confirmed by NASA in early July, the freewheeling ball of ice and dust is already nearing the halfway point on its tour of our solar system. This Wednesday (Oct. 29), 3I/ATLAS will reach perihelion — its closest point to the sun — before beginning its months-long departure from our cosmic neighborhood.

We'll miss our interstellar friend, but at least we'll always have the photos. The image above, captured Aug. 27 by the National Science Foundation-operated Gemini South telescope in Chile, may be the clearest image we have so far. As 3I/ATLAS zooms closer to the sun, radiation from our star heats the ice on the comet's body (its nucleus), causing geysers of gas and dust to shoot outward and form a glowing plume (a coma) around it. Radiation pressure from our star's unrelenting solar wind pushes this material into a long, prominent tail angled away from the sun.

As 3I/ATLAS reaches perihelion this week — coming within 1.4 astronomical units, or 130 million miles (210 million kilometers) of the sun, according to NASA — it may start releasing gas in overdrive. When the comet becomes visible to telescopes again in early November, it may look both bigger and brighter than how it appeared two months ago. Instruments on the ground, in orbit and even on their way to Jupiter will snap to attention, making 3I/ATLAS an even bigger space celebrity as it zooms away from our solar system forever.

Studying the interstellar comet with the full range of humankind's astronomical instruments could yield untold secrets about the outer reaches of our galaxy and its mysterious history. Until then, all we can do is wait, feel the warm sunlight on our faces, and know that a trove of cosmic information lurks just on the other side of our star.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Most events in the universe are not fully understood, including the relatively simple process of star formation. Stars form in dense clouds of cold gas and dust. When these clouds reach a threshold mass, they collapse under their own gravity, leading to the birth of a baby star, or protostar.

As these young stars form, they pull matter from their surroundings, developing a swirling disk of gas and dust around them known as an accretion disk. This material rotates, clumps together and gradually falls into the star, enabling it to grow bigger.

If the accretion disk spins too fast, the material can't easily fall toward the star. Astronomers believe that baby stars blast away some material in the accretion disk in the form of energetic jets — known as protostellar jets — which may ease the process of some material moving into the star.

But the main challenge in confirming this is that these jets come from regions very close to the star, which means the jets can't be seen or imaged, even by some of the most powerful telescopes. Therefore, astronomers don't know how they are ejected or where these jets start.

Researchers have previously proposed that the magnetic field in the protostellar system could help launch these jets. And a new image has helped shed light on this for the first time.

In a study published Aug. 13, in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to investigate an object called HH 211, located 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. HH 211 is a Herbig-Haro object — a bright region of nebulosity created by the powerful jets of newborn stars. This protostellar system is only 35,000 years old, with a tiny central protostar weighing only 0.06 times the sun’s mass.

HH 211 features a bright bipolar jet — two beams of energized ionized material emerging in opposite directions. This system is one of the few known instances where a magnetic field has been detected, offering a rare opportunity to explore the magnetic field-driven ejection models.

The ALMA observations of this system showed that the jet is rocketing at speeds of around 66 miles per second (107 kilometers per second), but interestingly, it rotates quite slowly, with a specific angular momentum. This suggests that the bipolar jet has carried away excess rotational energy. By factoring in the conservation of angular momentum and energy, the researchers calculated that the jet comes from the very inner edge of the accretion disk, just 0.02 astronomical units, or close to 1.85 million miles (3 million kilometers) away from the star.

Their results align with one of the models that explains how a magnetic field can act like a slingshot to launch gas outward.

In the spectacular image, the colorful display of the bipolar jet is captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in near-infrared wavelengths. However, JWST's view is blocked by the thick dust surrounding the central region.

This hidden region is crucial as this is where the jet originates. Thanks to the new study, the ALMA data revealed the crucial thin part in the center in the submillimeter wavelengths. The ALMA data is overlapped here with the JWST data to create a complete picture of how new stars form. The zoomed grayscale image captured by ALMA clearly shows the jet being launched from the accretion disk.

This is the first time that the launch location of a protostellar jet has been captured. The discovery also confirms that these jets play a crucial role in the growth of newborn stars by removing angular momentum from the accretion disk, enabling material to fall easily onto the star.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Here’s a story for the ages — or maybe a story of the ages.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image, of barred spiral galaxy NGC 6000, is rich in yellow at its center and blue on its outskirts, but it’s what these colors reveal about the ages, masses and temperatures of the galaxy’s stars that makes the portrait truly fascinating.

The yellow tells the story of the center of NGC 6000, where stars are old, small and relatively cool. These stars have been shining for billions of years. In astronomy, cool stars are red, while the hottest stars are blue. The latter dominate the outskirts of this galaxy, where its spiral arms are filled with stars that are younger, hotter and larger. These stars are cosmic newborns.

The image, which is also available as a panning video, was produced while Hubble searched for supernova explosions — hence the incomplete framing. The aging space telescope targeted the faint glow of supernovas called SN 2007ch and SN 2010as, stars that exploded in 2007 and 2010, respectively.

However, while imaging NGC 6000, Hubble also captured something else entirely. Look on the right-hand side of the image, and four faint broken lines can be seen — the path of an asteroid that drifted across Hubble’s field of view as it took four long-exposure images of NGC 6000. The broken lines are red and blue because Hubble used red and blue filters to collect visible light, which makes it easier for astronomers to compare stars by their colors.

Although it’s in the constellation Scorpius, which is visible in summer from the Northern Hemisphere, NGC 6000 lies south of the celestial equator, according to The Sky Live. That means it’s more easily visible from the Southern Hemisphere. However, to glimpse it requires at least a 10-inch aperture telescope and a dark sky.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

As telescopes peer into the universe, they sometimes see quirks of nature that magnify faraway objects. These eight galaxies recently imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appear stretched, warped or even bent into perfect circles.

The odd shapes aren't camera tricks. They're caused by a cosmic effect called gravitational lensing, which turns massive galaxies into natural magnifying glasses.

Imagine space as a stretchy fabric. When a massive object, such as a galaxy, sits on that fabric, it bends the space around it. When light from a more distant galaxy passes through this warped space, its path curves. When the alignment is just right, that background galaxy's light is distorted into arcs or rings. The effect can create a glowing circle of light called an Einstein ring, named after Albert Einstein, who predicted this strange phenomenon more than 100 years ago. However, partial arcs and rings are more common.

Gravitational lensing helps astronomers see farther and clearer than ever before. These lenses magnify and amplify light from very distant galaxies that would otherwise be invisible. They also allow scientists to measure the mass of galaxies, including mysterious dark matter that can't be seen directly.

These spectacular new deep-field galaxy images come from a project called COSMOS-Web, one of the largest observing programs carried out with JWST. Scientists spent 255 hours pointing the telescope at more than 42,000 galaxies and found more than 400 possible examples of Einstein rings. The eight here are some of the most dramatic.

Perhaps the standout is the second image along the top. It shows COSJ100024+015334, a perfect circle that reveals a galaxy as it existed when the universe was just a billion years old — a fraction of its current estimated age (more than 13 billion years old).

Some of the galaxies had been seen before with the Hubble Space Telescope, but JWST's sharper infrared vision reveals details that were completely hidden until now. Others are brand-new discoveries, including galaxies made red by dust and distance.

The rare alignments that create Einstein rings allow astronomers to study the building blocks of galaxies, star clusters and exploding stars. These windows into the distant past reveal how galaxies formed and how dark matter shaped the cosmos in its early years.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Why it's so special: Stars in the Milky Way galaxy are born in huge molecular clouds. The most massive is Sagittarius B2, which is just a few hundred light-years from our the galaxy's central black hole (called Sagittarius A*). This black hole is much more bountiful than you might first think — it has 10% of the galactic center's gas, but accounts for about half of the region's ongoing star formation. Why star formation is so disproportionate within the galactic center region is a conundrum for scientists.

Cue the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which recently observed Sagittarius B2 in two wavelengths of light to help astronomers find out why. This breathtaking new image (above) of the molecular cloud comes from the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). In it, we see stars shine brightly between orange clouds of gas and dust shining in near-infrared light.

However, even within the infrared spectrum, the difference in what can be seen is considerable, as proven by another image of the cloud by the JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

The MIRI image is entirely different, revealing the region's dust clouds illuminated by its stars. It shows pink and purple clouds surrounded by very dark regions studded with stars. The JWST cannot see everything:. Even its infrared vision can't penetrate the densest clouds, which remain dark and opaque in the MIRI image. Within those regions, hidden from view, are the raw ingredients for stars.

Why Sagittarius B2 is so much more productive than the rest of the galactic center remains puzzling, but there are clues. On the right-hand side of the MIRI image is a very bright, red region known to be rich in molecular material. It could hold the key to why the cloud outpaces the star production of the entire galactic center, potentially reshaping theories of how galaxies grow and evolve. Scientists plan to use Webb's new data on Sagittarius B2 to figure out how long it has been forming stars and whether a specific event triggered its prolific activity.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Sweeping wisps of fuchsia form an ethereal backdrop to millions of bright white pinpricks in a new image made from Gaia Space Telescope data. The glorious image is a peek into the vibrant cosmic kindergartens for newborn stars, which was previously hidden from view.

These are reddish-pink nebulas and sparkling stars in the star-forming regions of the Milky Way, made as part of the three-dimensional map of stars up to 4000 light-years from the sun.

Within the collection of 44 million "ordinary" stars Gaia captured lies 87 O-type stars — rare infant stars, which are both extremely massive and hot. They emit bright ultraviolet light that oozes so much energy that the rays blast electrons off of any hydrogen atoms they hit, ionizing them. This process creates a cloud of charged hydrogen gas around the O stars, called HII regions.

Scientists can look for patches of this ionized gas to identify where the starry seedbeds reside within the galaxy. They can also see how far the impacts of the O stars reach.

Astronomers already had a good idea of what these nurseries looked like while peering at them from Earth, but how they looked from other directions was a blindspot. Using the 1 billion pixel camera of the Gaia Space Telescope, which was launched Dec. 19, 2013 and remained operational until Jan 15, 2024, scientists made a 3D map of these regions.

Now, anyone can sweep through the Milky Way and get a glimpse of these stellar nurseries from various perspectives, the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image. The map includes the Gum Nebula, the North American Nebula and the California Nebula. ESA also released a video to accompany the image, showing a three-dimensional tour of the newly mapped regions.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

A craggy mountain peak, a tower, perhaps even a finger — in this new celestial dreamscape from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), something seems to be pointing at a cluster of bright stars above, as if a stargazing session were going on deep in the Milky Way.

This is Pismis 24, a small open star cluster at the core of the Lobster Nebula in the constellation Scorpius. This vast region of interstellar gas and dust is one of the closest sites to the solar system where our galaxy's most massive and extreme stars burn fast and die young.

The orange and brown craggy peaks are huge spires of gas and dust, the European Space Agency wrote in a description of the image. The tallest, in the center of the image, is 5.4 light-years from base to tip — as wide as about 200 solar systems placed side by side out to Neptune's orbit. Erosion within these spires is caused by powerful stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation from the massive newborn stars in the star cluster above. It's all part of the process — as the gas is eroded and compressed by young stars' radiation, new stars are born within the spires.

It's a self-sustaining nursery, but there's nothing ordinary about the stars in Pismis 24, which are among the most massive known stars in the galaxy. The brightest star in the cluster, Pismis 24-1, was once thought to be a single star with a mass of 200 to 300 suns. That's almost twice the generally accepted upper mass limit for stars.

However, in 2006, the Hubble Space Telescope found that Pismis 24-1 is actually at least two separate stars orbiting each other. At 74 and 66 solar masses, respectively, the two stars remain among the most massive and luminous stars in the Milky Way. Their intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds have produced the dusty dreamscape captured in infrared by JWST's Near Infrared Camera.

As with all of JWST's images, there's a color code to understand before you can fully appreciate what you're seeing. Astronomers assign different color filters to different wavelengths of light: Cyan is hot, ionized hydrogen gas; orange is dust; deep red is cooler and denser hydrogen; and white is starlight scattered by dust. The darker, blacker regions show gas and dust so thick that even JWST's infrared sensors cannot penetrate it.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

This spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a star cocooned within a massive disk of gas and dust. It's a protoplanetary disk — a ring of dense gas and dust surrounding a young star — where planets are likely forming.

The star is IRAS 04302+2247, better known as the "Butterfly Star" because of how our edge-on view separates the bright nebula into two lobes.

The star system is about 525 light-years away, in the Taurus star-forming region, or Taurus Molecular Cloud, which is within the constellation Taurus in the night sky. It's the closest star-forming region to the solar system, and it's rich in molecular hydrogen, dust and heavier elements from past supernovas. These are raw materials for new stars and planets.

Much of this region is invisible to optical telescopes but is revealed in infrared light. This image is a combination of mostly optical data from the archive of the Hubble Space Telescope and new infrared data from JWST's Near Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) , the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

MIRI revealed a dark, dusty lane — the protoplanetary disk — that divides the nebula. It blocks the star's light, while surrounding gas and dust scatter the star's light. It's huge — about 40 billion miles (65 billion kilometers) across, or several times wider than the solar system, according to ESA.

The line of sight determines what astronomers can learn from images like this. In face-on images of protoplanetary disks, scientists can sometimes see rings, spirals or gaps where planets are forming. With an edge-on view like this, it's possible to study the thickness of a protoplanetary disk and how dust is distributed around it, both of which are key to understanding how planets form and accumulate mass. Here, dust is expected to settle toward the midplane, creating conditions where grains can clump and grow into planetesimals.

The image comes from a paper published last year in The Astrophysical Journal. The study found that the brightness of the nebula changes, which suggests the inner disk may be warped or misaligned. It's a glimpse into processes that may have shaped our own solar system billions of years ago.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Humanity's first look at Earth from the moon didn't come until Aug. 23, 1966, when this grainy, black-and-white image showed our planet as a crescent above the lunar horizon, appearing to rise as the camera-toting spacecraft moved in orbit.

At the time, it was a landmark image — and totally unplanned, according to NASA. The first view of Earth from the moon came from NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1, which transmitted the image to a tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid.

Lunar Orbiter 1, the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit the moon, launched on an Atlas-Agena D rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Aug. 10, 1966, and entered lunar orbit four days later. It was on a cartographic mission, designed to photograph potentially safe landing sites on the moon for NASA's Surveyor and Apollo missions, according to NASA. Although the spacecraft's camera system wasn't highly detailed, it took far more detailed views from lunar orbit than were possible from Earth through even the largest telescopes at the time.

Lunar Orbiter 1's camera, manufactured by Eastman Kodak, featured an automated system that developed exposed film, scanned the images, and transmitted them to Earth. The camera was originally developed by the National Reconnaissance Office and was flown on the Cold War-era Samos spy satellites that were launched by the U.S. in the 1960s, according to NASA.

Lunar Orbiter 1 orbited the moon for 76 days until it deliberately crashed into the moon on Oct. 29, 1966.

Related: James Webb telescope captures one of the deepest-ever views of the universe

Lunar Orbiter 1's camera snapped photographs of nine potential Apollo landing sites and seven backup sites. Earth as a crescent was photographed Aug. 23, 1966, at 16:35 GMT, when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit, moments before it passed into the darkness of the moon's far side.

Over two years later, on Christmas Eve, 1968, Bill Anders, a lunar module pilot on Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission, snapped the iconic "Earthrise" photo. This higher-resolution color image captured humanity's attention as a cultural milestone, but it was Lunar Orbiter 1's very similar photo of Earth as a crescent rising behind the moon, taken over two years earlier, that was the technical first.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Mars has a huge network of canyons that stretches about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) across its equator. This canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the largest in the solar system, dwarfing Earth's largest canyon, which covers 460 miles (750 km) under Greenland's ice sheet. (Condolences to the Grand Canyon and its mere 277-mile length.)

First imaged by NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1972, Valles Marineris has been captured by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter many times in its 19 years in orbit. However, this geological wonder still holds many secrets.

This latest photo, taken May 24 and published last week, is of the eastern side of Candor Chasma, one of the largest canyons within Valles Marineris. What it reveals could change how planetary geologists think about Mars' ancient environment.

Using its ability to see detail down to the size of a kitchen table, HiRISE produced an image that shows layered deposits of sediment several meters thick, scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, which developed and operates the camera, said in a description of the image. Crucially, these layers of sediment must date to after the canyon itself formed, because they appear to have been eroded, warped and bent by tectonic movements.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

Mars doesn't have plate tectonics like Earth does. Instead, its crust is like one giant plate, according to NASA. But faults and fractures still form in the Martian crust as it cools. Unlike Earth's Grand Canyon, which was carved by a river, Valles Marineris — including Candor Chasma — is thought to have formed by volcanic activity, with landslides, floods and erosion later sculpting it into its present form.

In 2021, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a collaboration between ESA and the Russian space agency, had found water beneath the surface in Candor Chasma. It's thought that up to 40% of the near-surface material in Valles Marineris could be water. That would make it akin to Earth's permafrost regions in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.

With its steep walls and chaotic landscapes, Candor Chasma would be challenging for a Mars rover to explore. However, the German Space Agency's Valles Marineris Exploration project would study the possibility of sending a swarm of autonomous rovers, crawlers and uncrewed aerial vehicles to this treacherous terrain.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

This stunning image from astrophotographer Petr Horálek captures two of the night sky's most glorious sights in one — the glowing heart of the Milky Way and the elusive "zodiacal light." Despite appearing alongside one another, these two streaks of light could not be more different in origin and composition.

Astronomers have constructed some of humanity's best telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere to better see the bright core of the Milky Way — dense with stars and nebulae. That core passes through constellations including Scorpius, Sagittarius and Ophiuchus, which are higher in the sky the farther south they're viewed from.

This image was taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), located at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) in the Chilean Andes within the southern Atacama Desert. At this height, above the densest and warmest part of Earth’s atmosphere, incredibly clear and dark skies are the norm, enabling observers to see not only the bright band of the Milky Way but something less obvious that resides in the solar system — zodiacal light.

The biggest visible solar system phenomenon in the night sky, zodiacal light is a faint, diffuse glow in the night sky that casual observers often miss. It consists of sunlight reflecting off dust in our cosmic neighborhood, possibly from passing asteroids and comets or from the leftovers of planet formation. In 2020, a paper also claimed that zodiacal light may be primarily made of dust blown off Mars. Either way, the glow of the solar system is an arresting sight, but hard to see.

Zodiacal light is at its brightest around the equinoxes and is visible along the ecliptic — the apparent path the sun takes through the sky — as a triangular beam of light on the horizon a few hours before sunrise or after sunset. That timing has led to it being called either the "false dawn" or "false dusk," though its name comes from the fact that it’s visible over the 13 constellations that make up the zodiac.

Horálek’s spectacular image was taken in 2022 when he was an audiovisual ambassador for NOIRLab, which operates CTIO. In the photo, from left to right, are the U.S. Naval Observatory Deep South Telescope, the DIMM1 Seeing Monitor, the Chilean Automatic Supernova Search dome, the UBC Southern Observatory and the Planetary Defense 1.0-meter Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) latest extragalactic survey has revealed fainter and more distant objects than ever before, some dating back to the earliest periods of the universe. But it stands on the shoulders of a giant: When NASA published the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image in 2004, it stunned the world of astronomy. A composite of 800 images from exposures totaling 11 days, the deep image of an otherwise unremarkable part of the night sky revealed nearly 10,000 galaxies, many among the most distant known.

Now, JWST has observed that same patch of sky with different eyes — and found 2,500 more objects. Crucially, they're even more distant.

JWST's new take on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, named the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS), is the deepest-ever mid-infrared image of that part of the night sky.

The extraordinary new image is the result of nearly 100 hours of observing time using the space observatory's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). It includes hundreds of extremely red galaxies, some of which may date back to less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

Related: 42 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images

At the core of the composite image is one ultralong exposure. Using just one of MIRI's filters, JWST took an exposure of the night sky for 41 hours — the longest single-filter observation it has performed of an extragalactic field to date. The plan was to capture galaxies in mid-infrared light — something neither Hubble nor human eyes can detect — which also revealed previously unseen regions of dust and old, red stars.

Capturing light in wavelengths beyond the capabilities of human vision always brings a problem: How can we even begin to look at it? Processing such images requires filters that assign a different color to each different wavelength of light. In this image, galaxies rich in dust and star-forming activity are orange and red, extremely distant compact galaxies are greenish, and galaxies bright in the near-infrared are blue and cyan.

Researchers described the image in a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, along with a slider tool, a pan video and a transition video with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field for comparison.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.