A striking new image from NASA's newest space telescope reveals vast reservoirs of water ice stretching across one of the Milky Way's most chaotic stellar nurseries, offering a glimpse into where much of the universe's water — including that found in Earth's oceans — may originate and be stored.

The observations, captured by SPHEREx, map icy material across the turbulent Cygnus X region, a massive star-forming complex filled with dense clouds of gas and dust where new stars are rapidly emerging. The snapshot, based on data collected in 2025 and released this week, highlights water ice in bright blue alongside intertwining dark dust lanes that weave through the region, dotted with pinpricks of light from newborn stars.

The findings show that these ice reservoirs are composed of molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, marking key ingredients in the chemistry that can ultimately lead to life as we know it. Scientists think these ices, frozen onto the surfaces of tiny dust grains, represent a major source of the universe's water. Furthermore, the same processes that form and preserve the reservoirs are thought to seed planetary systems. This means the water in Earth's oceans and ices found on comets and other planetary bodies likely originated in such regions.

"These vast frozen complexes are like 'interstellar glaciers' that could deliver a massive water supply to new solar systems that will be born in the region," Phil Korngut, a SPHEREx instrument scientist and researcher at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement.

"It's a profound idea that we are looking at a map of material that could rain on nascent planets and potentially support future life."

Researchers say they expected SPHEREx to find these ices only in front of individual bright stars, where starlight acts like a spotlight revealing any intervening material.

"But this is something different," study lead author Joseph Hora, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard & Smithsonian in Massachusetts, said in the same statement.

To the surprise of the mission team, SPHEREx captured diffuse background light passing through "entire dust clouds" along the galactic plane, where most of the galaxy's stars, gas and dust are concentrated.

"SPHEREx can see the spatial distribution of the ices they contain in incredible detail," said Hora.

The study supports a long-standing idea that interstellar ice forms on the surfaces of tiny dust grains "no larger than particles found in the smoke from a candle," the NASA statement says.

The findings also show that water ice is not evenly distributed but instead concentrates in the densest regions of cosmic dust, which act as protective shields and block harsh ultraviolet radiation from nearby newborn stars and allow those fragile molecules to survive across eons.

As SPHEREx continues its planned two-year all-sky survey, researchers say they are excited to build an increasingly detailed map of how water and other molecules, like carbon dioxide, are distributed across the Milky Way, and how they respond to varying levels of ultraviolet radiation.

"This is just the beginning for the mission," the NASA statement read.

A study about these results was published on April 15 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have unveiled the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever created, offering a sprawling cosmic panorama that reveals supernova remnants, stellar nurseries, pulsars and the intricate glow of gas and dust weaving through our galaxy’s heart.

Built from data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia, the image combines observations from two massive surveys — known as GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM-X (GLEAM eXtended) — to produce a portrait that is twice as sharp, 10 times more sensitive and twice as wide as its predecessor released in 2019, according to a statement from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

"This vibrant image delivers an unparalleled perspective of our galaxy at low radio frequencies," Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student from ICRAR’s Curtin University team and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "It provides valuable insights into the evolution of stars, including their formation in various regions of the galaxy, how they interact with other celestial objects and ultimately their demise."

Over 18 months, the team used about one million computing hours at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Australia to process and merge data from the two surveys into the final image, cataloging nearly 100,000 radio sources.

The map — a full, zoomable version of which you can find here — captures a wide range of radio wavelengths, or "colors" of radio light across the Southern Galactic Plane, offering an unprecedented look at the Milky Way's hidden structure. By observing the galaxy in low-frequency radio light, astronomers can peer through the dense clouds of dust and gas that block visible wavelengths, exposing supernova remnants — the immense, expanding shells of gas and radiation that mark the explosive death of a star — and regions of ionized gas where new ones are being born.

"You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles," Mantovanini said in the statement. "The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming."

This expansive view of the Milky Way may also shed new light on pulsars — rapidly spinning neutron stars whose powerful radio pulses and unpredictable behavior remain a mystery, the researchers said.

The newly released image is fully interactive. Viewers can pan across the bright horizontal band charting the star-packed Southern Galactic Plane and zoom in on the Milky Way’s turbulent stellar activity, glowing nebulae, compact pulsars and even distant background galaxies beyond our own.

"This low-frequency image allows us to unveil large astrophysical structures in our galaxy that are difficult to image at higher frequencies," Natasha Hurley-Walker, associate professor at Curtin University and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy."

This map sets the stage for the Square Kilometre Array Observatory’s SKA‑Low telescope — the world’s largest low-frequency radio array — which, after it's completed within the next decade, will probe the Milky Way and beyond with unprecedented sensitivity and detail.

Their findings were published Oct. 28 in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

This visualization of data from ESA's Planck satellite is reminiscent of the soft tones and delicate quality of an artist's painted masterpiece. The image presents a visual of interstellar dust in the Milky Way interacting with the structure of our Galaxy's magnetic field.

Astronomers love their sky maps, and this latest is a doozie. It reveals thousands of previously undiscovered knots of cold cosmic dust, each a potential star waiting to be born.

The new atlas of dust covers the inner regions of our Milky Way Galaxy, where stars, gas and dust are all packed tightly together, where chaos reigns, where massive stars are born.

It's so dusty in there that optical telescopes can't see anything.

But cosmic material emits and reflects various forms of radiation besides the visible. The new observations were made in submillimeter-wavelength light, which is between infrared light and radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum.

The data was collected by the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). It is the largest map of cold dust made so far, astronomers said.

“ATLASGAL gives us a new look at the Milky Way," said Frederic Schuller from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, leader of the ATLASGAL team. "Not only will it help us investigate how massive stars form, but it will also give us an overview of the larger-scale structure of our galaxy."

The area of the map covers a narrow strip of the galactic plane about two degrees wide (or four times the width of the full moon in our sky).

The interstellar medium -- the material between the stars -- is composed of gas and grains of cosmic dust, rather like fine sand or soot. However, the gas is mostly hydrogen and relatively difficult to detect, so astronomers often search for these dense regions by looking for the faint heat glow of the cosmic dust grains.

Submillimeter light allows astronomers to see these dust clouds shining, even though they obscure our view of the universe at visible light wavelengths. Accordingly, the ATLASGAL map includes the denser central regions of our galaxy, in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius -- home to a supermassive black hole -- that are otherwise hidden behind a dark shroud of dust clouds.

The newly spotted dust clumps are typically a couple of light-years in size, and have masses of between ten and a few thousand times the mass of our sun, according to a statement released by the astronomers. In addition, ATLASGAL has captured images of beautiful filamentary structures and bubbles in the interstellar medium, blown by exploded stars and the winds of bright stars.

The ATLASGAL project is a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, ESO, and the University of Chile.

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The rise and fall of species on Earth might be driven in part by the undulating motions of our solar system as it travels through the disk of the Milky Way, scientists say.

Two years ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley found the marine fossil record shows that biodiversity-the number of different species alive on the planet-increases and decreases on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions-the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago-correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can't be explained by evolutionary theory.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Kansas (KU) have come up with an out-of-this-world explanation. Their idea hinges upon the fact that, appearances aside, stars are not fixed in space. They move around, sometimes rushing headlong through galaxies, or approaching close enough to one another for brief cosmic trysts.

In particular, our Sun moves toward and away from the Milky Way's center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years- suspiciously similar to Earth's biodiversity cycle.

Galactic bow shock

The KU researchers independently confirmed the biodiversity cycle and have proposed a novel mechanism by which the Sun's galactic travels is causing it.

Scientists know the Milky Way is being gravitationally pulled toward a massive cluster of galaxies, called the Virgo Cluster, located about 50 million light years away. Adrian Melott and his colleague Mikhail Medvedev, both KU researchers, speculate that as the Milky Way hurdles towards the Virgo Cluster, it generates a so-called bow shock in front of it that is similar to the shock wave created by a supersonic jet.

"Our solar system has a shock wave around it, and it produces a good quantity of the cosmic rays that hit the Earth. Why shouldn't the galaxy have a shock wave, too?" Melott said.

The galactic bow shock is only present on the north side of the Milky Way's galactic plane, because that is the side facing the Virgo Cluster as it moves through space, and it would cause superheated gas and cosmic rays to stream behind it, the researchers say. Normally, our galaxy's magnetic field shields our solar system from this "galactic wind." But every 64 million years, the solar system's cyclical travels take it above the galactic plane.
 
"When we emerge out of the disk, we have less protection, so we become exposed to many more cosmic rays," Melott told SPACE.com.

How cosmic rays affect life

The boost in cosmic-ray exposure could have both a direct and indirect effect on Earth's organisms, said KU paleontologist Bruce Lieberman. The radiation could lead to higher rates of genetic mutations in organisms or interfere with their ability to repair DNA damage, potentially leading to diseases like cancer.

Cosmic rays are also associated with increased cloud cover, which could cool the planet by blocking out more of the Sun's rays. They also interact with molecules in the atmosphere to create nitrogen oxide, a gas that eats away at our planet's ozone layer, which protects us from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

Richard Muller, one of the UC Berkeley physicists who co-discovered the cycle, said Melott and his colleagues have come up with a plausible galactic explanation for the biodiversity cycle. Muller and Robert Rohde also speculated that our solar system's movement through the galactic plane was behind the cycle, but the pair could not conceive of any reason why conditions on the north and south side of the galactic plane should differ.

"That's where they succeeded," Muller said in a telephone interview. "They came up with something we didn't think of, which puts an asymmetry in. I'm delighted they did that and I congratulate them."

A first-step hypothesis

Richard Bambach, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the study, said he is excited the biodiversity cycle has been independently confirmed, but cautions the galactic hypothesis is still in the early stages of formulation.

"It's a first-step hypothesis," Bambach said. "It's an interesting idea, but we're a long way from knowing if that is really why biodiversity changes."

For one thing, scientists have yet to discover a bow shock around the Milky Way, though such shock waves have been found around other galaxies.

"I think it's a very nice idea," said Philip Appleton, a Caltech astronomer. "I think we're only beginning to come to grips with these kinds of behaviors. We're realizing that not only do galaxies interact with each other gravitationally, but also that the environment they're traveling through-the 'wind' they create-can actually produce noticeable effects."

Last year, Appleton and his team discovered a bow shock surrounding a galaxy in Stephan's Quintet, a galactic cluster located 300 million light years away. The shock wave is traveling about 620 miles (1,000 km) per second relative to the cluster.

The Milky Way is hurtling toward the Virgo Cluster at about 125 miles (200 km) per second, so any bow shock it generates would consequently be weaker, Appleton said.

If future studies confirm the galaxy-biodiversity link, it would force scientists to broaden their ideas about what can influence life on Earth. "Maybe it's not just the climate and the tectonic events on Earth," Lieberman said. "Maybe we have to start thinking more about the extraterrestrial environment as well."

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