Latest from Space.com in Galaxies

Our Milky Way galaxy appears to have flipped 90 degrees long ago. But why?

Keith Cooper — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:00:00 +0000

The Milky Way's spiral disk may have flipped over by 90 degrees, in turn altering the solar system's orbit around the center of the galaxy.

Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have two main, visible, structural components: a disk that encapsulates most of its stars, gas and the central black hole, and a more diffuse halo of older stars that encapsulates the disk.

However, the Milky Way's stellar halo has always been a bit of an oddity. The European Space Agency's Gaia mission measured the motion of the halo's stars to find they rotate slowly compared to other material within the spiral disk. Now, supercomputer models led by Kirill Batrakov of the University of Durham have found what triggers this: galactic mergers and spiral disks becoming flipped over.

In their simulations, Batrakov and colleagues tracked the evolution of 25 Milky-Way-like galaxies across billions of years. They found that those which had slowly spinning haloes also experienced head-on mergers with other galaxies and had their disk flipped at some point.

"We already know that the Milky Way had a massive head-on collision in the past with a galaxy known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus," Batrakov said in a statement. "So, we think that the Milky Way disk likely flipped in the past."

Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus was a dwarf galaxy with more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun that slammed into the Milky Way between 8 billion and 11 billion years ago. The evidence for this collision was also found in Gaia's measurements of the motions of stars. The colliding galaxy's strange name comes in part because as it was ripped to pieces by the Milky Way's gravity, its stars were channeled onto highly elongated, sausage-shaped streams that our galaxy incorporated into its halo.

This collision was the last major impact that our Milky Way galaxy experienced, but maybe not the last major event that it experienced. At some point, the Milky Way's disk seems to have also flipped, but what caused this is uncertain. Also of note: The simulations showed that galaxies whose disks flipped hadn't always experienced a merger.

"We think that there might possibly be different mechanisms driving the disk flips," Batrakov told Space.com. "At this point, we are not sure which scenario applies to the Milky Way specifically and a further investigation is needed on the precise mechanics of disk flips."

These two mechanisms — the merger and the flip — would both contribute to the slower spinning halo. The head-on merger sees lots of stars from the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus galaxy get thrown into the halo but on trajectories strongly misaligned with the disk. So, relative to the disk, they collectively rotate more slowly.

An example of the history of a simulated galaxy that has experienced a head-on merger and a disk flip (seen between redshifts – denoted by z – 1.4 and 0). (Image credit: Auriga Project)

The disk flip leads to a similar situation. In the simulations, the flip is measured with respect to the space around the galaxy, but as the orientation of the disk changes relative to the halo, the halo doesn't immediately reorient with it and takes its time to synchronize its rotation with the disk. Hence, this misalignment results in the halo having less coherent rotation relative to the new orientation of the disk.

If the disk flip occurred during the solar system's lifetime, then it could have impacted our own orbit around the galactic center.

"A disk flip means that most of the Milky Way's stars once moved on very different trajectories than they do today, possibly even our sun, meaning our 'stable' spot in the galaxy might not have been so stable for the solar system's whole lifetime," said Batrakov.

Much of what we understand about other galaxies comes from our knowledge of the Milky Way and its story.

"Finding that its disk flipped adds a new chapter to that story, one we must account for when placing the Milky Way in a broader context of other galaxies," said Batrakov, who recognizes just how incredible it is that we can infer this story through careful observations billions of years after the fact.

"What excites me most is that this complex history can be reconstructed just from present-day observations," he said.

Batrakov presented his work at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting, being held at the University of Birmingham between July 20 and July 24.

Galaxy cluster's magnetic field reconstructed for 1st time with record-breaking astronomy map

Robert Lea — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0000

For the first time, astronomers have reconstructed the magnetic field of an entire cluster of galaxies, from its central nucleus to its outer limits.

The record-breaking achievement is the product of the deepest-ever observations of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255, located around a billion light-years away — and those observations are thanks to the European radio telescope LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).

Abell 2255 has long been known for its complexity in radio waves. Its vast, diffuse radio emissions are created by particles called electrons racing at near-light, or relativistic, speeds and interacting with magnetic fields of galaxies in the cluster. Thus, using Abell 2255 as a cosmic laboratory to study the universe in radio waves could lead scientists to a better understanding of how magnetic fields come about and evolve. These observations could also help paint a picture of the dynamics of hot gas in galaxy clusters. This could reveal how the largest structures in the universe are constructed.

As part of the LOFAR Galaxy Cluster Ultra-Deep Field project, this team used 224 hours of radio image collection to discover that the distribution of large-scale magnetic fields throughout Abell 2255 (which itself stretches out for several million light-years) are not randomly distributed. Instead, these magnetic fields seem to be organized by the motion of gas that occurred during the formation of this galactic cluster.

"Obtaining very sensitive images of galaxy clusters at radio wavelengths is crucial to understanding how electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds and magnetic fields are amplified on large cosmic scales," team leader Andrea Botteon, of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), said in a statement. "The complexity of these studies is due to the elusiveness of the radio signal from electrons moving in very weak magnetic fields. We believe that the mechanism that 'turns on' these gigantic radio emissions is linked to the formation process of galaxy clusters."

Botteon added that for this research he and his colleagues combined the deepest radio observations ever made with an innovative data analysis technique that allowed them to reconstruct the shape of a galaxy cluster's magnetic field for the first time.

"The coherence of the magnetic field lines observed in some regions of the cluster suggests that the morphology of the field is intimately linked to the dynamics of the gas in which it resides, where it can be 'stretched' or 'compressed' by the motions associated with the formation of the cluster itself," Botteon said.

The invisible texture of the magnetic field in the central region of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255. (Image credit: A. Botteon et al. (INAF), A&A 2026)

This analysis revealed that, in some regions, the magnetic fields follow very specific directions, stretching radially along extended radio emissions. In contrast to this, in regions dominated by shock waves, magnetic fields are orientated at tangents. This suggests magnetic fields in Abell 2255 are carved out by the same dynamics that allow clusters to accrete gas and grow.

This serves as the first observational evidence that the same mechanisms that allow galaxies to grow and cluster, creating the largest structures in the universe, also shape their magnetic fields.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv.

Infant stars celebrate their independence with cosmic fireworks| Space photo of the day for July 3, 2026

Robert Lea — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000

The protostars of the star system FS Tau as seen by the JWST (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

Infant stars or "protostars" celebrate their independence with cosmic fireworks in a stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

NASA released this image to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the U.S. It is a fitting tribute as the protostars break away from the molecular cloud in which they formed to become fully fledged stars in their own right.

Protostars are born when patches in vast molecular clouds cool and form clumps, collapsing under their gravity. Protostars continue to gather material from these prenatal clouds until they have enough mass to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in their cores, the process that defines what a main-sequence star is.

What is it?

The protostars sit in a region known as FS Tau, located around 450 light-years away, which has become a popular target for astronomers aiming to study the evolution of low-mass stars.

Why is it incredible?

Though previously well studied, it has taken the incredible infrared observing power of the JWST to peer through the thick clouds of star-forming gas and dust in FS Tau and visualize the protostars of this region in great detail.

One of the aims of this research is to investigate the impact that radiation and outflows of material from low-mass stars have on their environment. The outflows occur as protostars gather matter from their surroundings, occasionally blasting out some of this matter.

The JWST image of FS Tau reveals gaps between the outflows that support the theory that protostars gather or "accrete" matter in discrete episodes, between which they lie dormant.

A comparison between the observations of FS Tau by NASA’s Hubble and JWST. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

The effect of protostar outflows on their environment can be seen in the JWST image via the prominent blue ridges. These represent gas that has been shunted by outflows, creating dense regions of matter that reflect light from proximate protostars.

The result is cosmic fireworks that put even the most impressive July 4 celebrations to shame. But at least we get hot dogs.

Stunning new NASA space telescope images reveal the universe in red, white and blue for America 250

brett.tingley@futurenet.com (Brett Tingley) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:00:49 +0000

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has released four stunning images of cosmic wonders, depicted in red, white and blue to coincide with the United States' 250th anniversary on July 4.

The four images reveal superheated gas in a distant galaxy cluster, the swirling spiral galaxy known as Messier 94, a glowing nebula found in our own Milky Way galaxy, and the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, respectively.

Along with the colorful cosmic images, the Chandra team produced sonifications in which the data collected by the powerful X-ray telescope was translated into sound. In this case, the sonifications turn these images into celestial music, mapping X-ray data into different audio frequencies and musical instrument sounds.

Galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652

In this image, the galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652 comes alive in vibrant blues and reds. The red in the image is produced from X-ray data collected by Chandra, revealing vast amounts of superheated gas surrounding these galaxies, found some 4 billion light-years from Earth in the Pisces constellation.

This image combines X-ray data from Chandra along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope, depicted here in blue. The Hubble data reveals the presence of dark matter, according to a statement from NASA.

Because dark matter does not interact with light, astronomers can't image it directly; its presence can be detected through the gravitational influence it has on surrounding matter that does interact with light.

An image of galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652 that combines X-ray data from Chandra along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical and Dark Matter: NASA/ESA/M.J. Jee; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare)

Messier 94

Chandra also peered deep into the 'eye' of the spiral galaxy Messier 94 (M94, or NGC 4736), sometimes colloquially referred to as the Cat's Eye Galaxy. This galaxy is found some 16 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, the "Hunting Dogs."

In this swirling image, X-ray data collected in space by Chandra was combined with visible light photography taken by telescopes here on Earth. The images show the distinctive inner region of Messier 94, known as a starburst ring, in which new stars are being born.

M94 is also notable for its curious lack of dark matter, according to NASA. "Astronomers do not know why it lacks the normal amount of dark matter, but the galaxy has been the subject of extensive study as a result," the agency wrote in a statement.

An image of galaxy NGC 4736, also known as Messier 94, produced through a combination of visible light telescope imagery and data collected by NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical:Brian Brennan and Remi Lacasse; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand)

Nebula NGC 3603

This image combines X-ray data from Chandra with optical, infrared, and ultraviolet light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to reveal the twinkling cluster of gases and thousands of stars known as NGC 3603.

This nebula, found in our own Milky Way galaxy, is a vast region of gas and dust surrounding a dense concentration of massive stars. NGC 3603 is located 20,000 light-years away from our solar system in the Carina constellation, a Southern Hemisphere constellation named after the Latin word for a ship's keel.

NGC 3603 contains some of the most massive stars in the known universe, according to NASA. "These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly and ultimately ending their lives in supernova explosions," the agency pointed out in a prior statement about the nebula.

An image of the nebula known as NGC 3603, combining X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory with optical, infrared, and ultraviolet light from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical and Dark Matter: NASA/ESA/M.J. Jee; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare)

Cassiopeia A

When some stars die, they explode in massive events known as supernovas. The light from one of the most well-known examples of a supernova reached Earth in the 17th century, appearing as a bright point of light in the Cassiopeia constellation. But because this exploded star is located some 11,000 light-years away from Earth, it means that the supernova actually occurred over 10,000 years ago, according to NASA.

Today, the leftover gases from that supernova are known as Cassiopeia A. Astronomers believe the star that produced the supernova was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 25 times more massive than the sun.

In the image below, Chandra's X-ray data was combined with infrared light gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope to help visualize the luminous shell of gas in reds, whites and blues.

A new image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A produced by combining infrared light gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope with X-ray data produced by NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand)

The James Webb Space Telescope peered into one of the universe's oldest galaxy clusters, and scientists can't explain what they saw

Robert Lea — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted a massive and densely packed galaxy cluster at "cosmic noon." The fact that this cluster is so highly evolved could change theories of cosmic evolution, as it seems to exist before such structures were thought to be possible.

Designated XLSSC 122 and first seen in 2014, the cluster immediately stood out to the team in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data because, being so large and concentrated, it resembled the galactic clusters found much closer to our own galaxy. However, this cluster is seen as it was around 10.4 billion years, just around 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang, a time when such structures were theorized to have only just begun to assemble.

Even more excitingly, XLSSC 122 is acting as a gravitational lens and is aligned with even more distant galaxies, amplifying their light and making them easier to study.

"When we got those first images back from JWST, we said, 'wow, look at this, there's strong lensing coming from this cluster!' XLSSC 122 has now set the record for the most distant galaxy cluster displaying strong lensing, which is a valuable tool for astronomers," team leader Kyle Finner of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

What is gravitational lensing and why is it so useful?

Gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, known as general relativity. General relativity says that objects with mass cause the fabric of space and time to warp. Think of this as being akin to placing a bowling ball on a stretched rubber sheet. Gravity arises from this curvature.

The greater the mass of the object, the more extreme the curvature and thus the greater the gravitational influence of that object.

But there is another consequence. Light normally travels in a straight line, but spacetime is the track that it follows. If spacetime is curved, then the path of light is also curved. The closer that light travels to an object of great mass, the more its path swerves.

That means when an object of great mass, in this case XLSSC 122, comes between Earth and a more distant light source, light from that background source arrives at our telescopes at different times based on the path it took around the intermediate object. This amplifies light from the background source and has been used by the JWST team to great effect in the study of ancient galaxies.

When the Hubble Space Telescope previously studied XLSSC 122, it wasn't able to capture images that showed it was a strong gravitational lens; it took the tremendous observing power of the JWST to determine this.

Two-panel image shows a distant galaxy cluster as it has been observed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and JWST. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA; Kyle Finner (Caltech/IPAC) Image processing: Robert Hurt (Caltech/IPAC-SELab) )

The strong lensing of this early galaxy cluster could also help unravel the mystery of dark matter. Effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light, dark matter does interact with gravity. Plus, because it outweighs the "ordinary matter" that makes up stars, planets, moons, and gas clouds in galaxies by a ratio of five to one, dark matter makes the largest contribution to the lensing effect of galaxies and galactic clusters like XLSSC 122.

This means that gravitational lensing can be used to study the distribution of otherwise invisible dark matter in galaxy clusters, which is a vital element of galactic evolution, as it is thought that galaxies and galaxy clusters gather along vast filaments of dark matter. The hunt is now on for more lensing clusters like XLSSC 122, and if they are found so early in the universe's history, a major revision of cosmology may be on the cards.

"Strong lensing is a way to measure the dark matter without actually seeing the dark matter. It gives us a sensitive probe of our cosmological models,” said Finner. "It's still early in the JWST era, and if we can start to get data on tens or hundreds of these types of objects at this stage in the universe, then we can really start putting our cosmological models to the test."

The team's results were presented on June 17, 2026, at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The research is available as a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Strange glowing 'bow-and-arrow' structure may be a giant cosmic shock wave created by a supersonic galaxy collision

Samantha Mathewson — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

A bizarre radio galaxy discovered by a citizen scientist has left astronomers puzzled, revealing a never-before-seen "bow-and-arrow" structure that could offer rare insight into how galaxies are reshaped by colossal shock waves as they plunge through galaxy clusters.

Named RAD-BAARG (short for Radio Bow-And-Arrow Radio Galaxy), the object spans nearly 1.8 million light-years across, making it almost 18 times wider than the Milky Way. Its unusual structure was first identified by a citizen scientist participating in the RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, which allows volunteers to review telescope data and flag unusual features that might otherwise be missed.

Astronomers say they haven't seen anything like it. "The structure of this source is unlike that of any radio galaxy I have seen in the last 25 years," the University of Mumbai's Ananda Hota said in a statement published by the Royal Astronomical Society. The statement adds that astronomers believe the structure may be "one of the clearest known radio signatures of a giant bow shock generated by a galaxy falling supersonically into a cluster environment."

Following its discovery, researchers studied the object using observations from the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTSS), one of the deepest low-frequency radio surveys ever conducted and particularly well suited to detecting faint, diffuse radio emissions.

Unlike typical radio galaxies, which produce two relatively symmetrical jets of charged particles powered by supermassive black holes, RAD-BAARG has a dramatically lopsided appearance. One jet feeds a wedge-shaped region that curves backward into an enormous arc, while the other twists into an S-shaped structure before fading into a long tail. Together, the features resemble a bow with an arrow drawn across it, according to the statement.

The radio-emitting plasma from RAD-BAARG appears to illuminate an otherwise extremely faint, extended feature. At these low radio frequencies, aged and diffuse electron populations become more visible, allowing astronomers to trace structures that are otherwise invisible at optical or higher radio frequencies, making surveys like LoTSS especially powerful for identifying and confirming such diffuse emission.

Researchers believe the extreme asymmetry may be linked to the galaxy's motion through a dense galaxy cluster. As it falls toward the cluster's center, it likely moves at supersonic speeds through the hot, diffuse gas that fills the space between galaxies. This motion is thought to generate a bow shock that compresses magnetic fields and charged particles, reshaping the radio-emitting plasma into large-scale structures.

The LOFAR array in the Netherlands is the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope. (Image credit: LOFAR/ASTRON/CC BY 3.0)

The team also found that RAD-BAARG resides in a complex "multi-halo" environment containing several overlapping reservoirs of hot gas, making it an especially valuable system for studying how galaxy clusters influence radio galaxies.

"LOFAR allows us to see this faint, low-surface-brightness emission in remarkable detail," Pratik Dabhade, co-lead author of the study from the National Center for Nuclear Research in Poland, said in the statement.

"With LoTSS DR3 and the future Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), we may find many more systems where radio galaxies reveal otherwise invisible interactions between jets, galaxies, and their environments."

If confirmed, RAD-BAARG could become a key example of how extreme cluster environments reshape radio galaxies, providing new insight into how supermassive black hole jets interact with their surrounding environments.

The findings were published June 22 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

James Webb Space Telescope catches 6 galaxies merging into one of the largest galaxies in the universe

Keith Cooper — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

An intense demolition derby of at least six galaxies smashing into one another has been found lurking in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope. This merger is also expected to fuel the growth of a supermassive black hole and trigger the formation of what will eventually become one of the most massive galaxies in the cosmos.

"What makes this special is that we can follow both the build-up of a giant galaxy and the growth of the black hole at its center," Huub Röttgering, an astronomer at the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory, said in a statement.

The discovery came after a tip-off from radio astronomers who had noticed emissions that seemed to be coming from an undiscovered active black hole. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) looked closer, it found a surprise.

"We didn't find a single galaxy, but an entire complex of at least six galaxies," said Aayush Saxena of the University of Oxford.

These six galaxies sit at a redshift of 4.0, which equates to a time about 12 billion years ago, just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

Through the vision of the JWST's Near-Infrared Camera the six galaxies appear fuzzy, reminiscent of a faraway version of Stephan's Quintet, which is a collection of five galaxies, four of which form a compact group that are on course to merge to become a giant elliptical galaxy.

Similarly, the six galaxies spotted by the JWST, and collectively termed TGSSJ1530+1049, will undergo a series of rapid mergers to become what is known as a 'brightest cluster galaxy,' which is an enormous elliptical galaxy of the kind found at the center of galaxy clusters.

"We call structures like this protoclusters: the precursors of the vast collections of galaxies we see today," said Leiden's Roderik Overzier. "These are places where matter came together very early on. We think we are seeing a rare moment when several massive galaxies still exist separately, but are already in the process of forming one much larger galaxy."

Already a supermassive black hole has formed at the heart of this galactic maelstrom, and radio observations with the European VLBI (very long Baseline Interferometer) Network and the U.K.'s e-MERLIN (enhanced Multi-Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network) at a resolution on the scale of a 100 milliarcseconds have identified radio lobes and hotspots typical of an active black hole's jet interacting with the gas surrounding it.

"Using a network of connected radio telescopes, we were able to produce a very sharp image of TGSSJ1530+1049," said Krisztina Gabányi of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. "The radio emission is produced as material falls into the black hole, while some of it is expelled again at high speed."

The jet doesn't seem to extend as far as all the galaxies in TGSSJ1530+1049 yet, implying that the black hole is still fairly young.

The six galaxies of TGSSJ1530+1049 span a volume only a few tens of thousands of light-years across, which is smaller than our Milky Way galaxy — and yet, they pack in a humungous amount of stars, equivalent to hundreds of billions of solar masses and a star-formation rate somewhere between 70–163 solar masses per year. That's a frenetic pace compared to the Milky Way, which produces much less than ten solar masses per year.

TGSSJ1530+1049 is one of the densest collections of heavyweight galaxies found in the early universe so far, and is giving exciting clues as to how the most massive galaxies, clusters and black holes in the universe formed.

The JWST observations are reported in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, while the radio measurements are described in a paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This is the largest and most detailed image of our Milky Way — with over 60 million stars and 50 exoplanet systems

Robert Lea — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:00:00 +0000

In 2025, the European Space Agency dark universe detective spacecraft Euclid turned its attention to the heart of the Milky Way for just 26 hours. In just over one day, Euclid was able to create the largest and most detailed photo of this region of our galaxy ever made.

The image, packed with 60 million stars, could help scientists hunt for extrasolar planets, exoplanets, in this region known as the galactic bulge.

Euclid is designed to study dark energy, the mysterious force that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe, by studying distant galaxies. That means the space telescope is powerful enough to distinguish individual stars in the central bulge of the Milky Way. Other telescopes fail to do this because they are too blinded by the densely packed stars in this region.

The largest high-resolution photo ever made of our Milky Way galaxy's center in visible light. It was taken on March 23, 2025 by the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay))

Euclid was requested to monitor the central bulge of the Milky Way to assist astronomers in the hunt for exoplanets because this is the perfect region for so-called "microlensing" events to occur.

"To catch microlensing, you need to observe parts of the sky that are crowded with stars, such as close to the center of our galaxy," team leader Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris in France said in a statement.

Microlensing is a weak form of gravitational lensing that occurs when objects with mass cause the very fabric of space to warp. When light from a background source passes through this warping of space, its path is curved. This can be used to study the background source; for example, scientists have used it to great effect with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study some of the most distant and early galaxies. However, the curvature of light from background sources can also be used to detect faint objects like planets.

The location of Euclid’s new image of the galactic bulge is visible on Gaia’s map of the entire sky. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, ESA/Gaia/DPAC,image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay))

Spotting planets using microlensing requires one star to pass in front of another and act as a gravitational lens. The presence of a planet causes a tiny perturbation in the lensing of light from the background star. It's a small effect, but one that has been used very effectively in the detection of exoplanets.

"During the last twenty years, almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique, all with ground-based telescopes and all towards the center of our galaxy," Beaulieu said. "This image from Euclid includes 51 known planetary systems – and it will assist in studying many more that will be found."

This infographic places Euclid’s galactic bulge survey in the broader context of the Milky Way’s structure, using data from ESA’s Gaia mission. (Image credit: Euclid images: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay); Milky Way artist impressions: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar))

Despite Euclid's study of the central bulge pointing the way forward in observing new microlensing events, there are no such events in the data from the ESA spacecraft. That is because detecting such events takes around 20 days.

Instead, it will be up to telescopes like the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to observe this region for longer periods and compare with this day's worth of Euclid data to find microlensing events.

"In 24 hours, Euclid has already captured the stars involved in all the future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, but before the stars and planets involved have aligned," team member Natalia Rektsini of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris said.

"This means that anyone who detects a microlensing event in the same region, for example, with Roman, will be able from now on to use Euclid data as a time reference in the past and see how the stars looked before they overlapped. Since Euclid can clearly separate individual stars, one can then measure how fast they move over time and use that information to confirm the existence of a planet and determine its mass. This would not be possible with data from one point in time."

A diagram shows how microlensing can be used to detect planets (Image credit: ESA)

One reason this is so exciting to exoplanet hunters is that other techniques used to spot these distant worlds tend to excel at detecting hot and massive planets close to their host stars.

Microlensing, however, can be used to detect more diminutive planets much farther from their host stars and with chillier temperatures. That means it could be used to detect ice giants like Uranus and Neptune in wide orbits around central bulge stars.

"This result shows what a relatively small, dedicated team can achieve within a large international mission," says Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at ESA.

"That's why this Euclid data will be a time reference for past and future missions and enable studies of exoplanets and their masses. This data can also be used for other scientific applications, from brown dwarfs and binary stars to stellar motions and dust across our galaxy."

Hubble Space Telescope images galaxy scientists thought was impossible to find

Keith Cooper — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

A bright, dense cluster of hot, massive stars in a galaxy that existed 1.4 billion years after the big bang has been found helping to end the early universe's foggy days during which neutral hydrogen gas was draped across the cosmos, obscuring ultraviolet light from luminous objects.

The cluster was found emitting ultraviolet light in a small but quickly growing galaxy by the Hubble Space Telescope. The presence of this ultraviolet light, and the star-forming history of the cluster producing it, suggests that bursts of star formation contributed to waves of ionizing radiation that gradually cleared out the opaque neutral hydrogen.

In the aftermath of the big bang, the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen gas that is opaque at short wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet. However, this ultraviolet light was the neutral hydrogen's worst enemy, gradually ionizing the gas across the universe. Once ionized, hydrogen gas cannot absorb ultraviolet light — and so, the cosmos became transparent at those wavelengths.

Because of this, the first billion or so years are called the Epoch of Reionization. It is referred to as "reionization" rather than ionization because, technically, the gas had already been ionized once before during the first 379,000 years after the Big Bang.

While investigating what brought about this epoch, astronomers had identified two chief suspects that could have produced sufficient amounts of ultraviolet light to ionize the neutral hydrogen. One is active supermassive black holes and the other is the first generations of hot, massive stars. The problem is, given that neutral hydrogen is adept at absorbing the ultraviolet light, astronomers have had difficulty tracing that ultraviolet back to its source and identifying which of the two suspects are the main culprit.

In 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made a major breakthrough, finding a galaxy that existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang that was producing enough energy to ionize the neutral gas surrounding it.

Now the Hubble Space Telescope has gone further, detecting ultraviolet light from a galaxy called MXDFz4.4. This ultraviolet light should only be visible if the surrounding gas had already been ionized.

"Observing a galaxy like this was thought to be impossible," said Ilias Goovaerts of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, who led the discovery, in a statement. "Researchers expected the 'fog' of neutral hydrogen that filled the early universe would be too thick and obscure our view of its ionizing light. Hubble not only spotted that light, but it also helped reveal incredible details about the galaxy's characteristics."

The full Hubble Space Telescope's view of MXDFz4.4 and its surroundings from our vantage point. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Ilias Goovaerts and Anton Koekemoer (STScI)/Marc Rafelski (STScI, JHU)/ Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

MXDFz4.4 was first identified in the MUSE eXtremely Deep Field (MXDF), with MUSE being the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The "z4.4" part of its name tells us that the galaxy exists at a redshift of 4.4, meaning that it existed 12.37 billion years ago. As the universe has expanded in the time since then, the ultraviolet light has been redshifted into visible wavelengths that were detected by Hubble.

"Astronomers have found many galaxies that existed at this point in the history of the universe, but we haven't detected ionizing photons from any of them, making MXDFz4.4 one of a kind," said Marc Rafelski, who is the Hubble Deputy Mission Head at STScI.

MXDFz4.4 is 100 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy but is forming stars ten times faster than our galaxy is. Many of those stars are being born in the tight, luminous cluster producing the ionizing ultraviolet.

An artist's impression of the young, distant galaxy MXDFz4.4 and its dense cluster of luminous stars. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/Leah Hustak (STScI))

The cluster contains "A lot of young, hot, massive stars in a small space [that] do a better job of blasting through opaque gas," said Goovaerts.

Furthermore, by comparing Hubble's observations of MXDFz.4.4 with those of the JWST, which probed for cooler, older stars in the galaxy, Goovaerts and Rafelski's team discovered that the stars in the cluster had formed in bursts, each burst producing fresh quantities of ionizing ultraviolet radiation that helped to clear out more and more of the neutral gas over time. We now see the galaxy about 250 million years after it finished reionizing the surrounding gas. These hot, massive stars in the cluster end their lives after a few million years as supernova explosions, the blast waves and radiation from which can create bubbles in the gas light years across, creating further pathways for ultraviolet light to escape and be detected by Hubble.

The observations seem to nail down the theory that clusters of hot, massive, luminous stars in young galaxies in the early universe played a dominant role in ionizing the universe's neutral gas.

"Hubble's observations of MXDFz4.4 let us test our hypotheses much closer to the Era of Reionization than ever before," said Rafelski. "Finding more galaxies, especially at slightly later cosmic times where larger samples are within reach, would let us refine these measurements and figure out what cleared our view as that era was ending."

The results were published on June 23 in The Astrophysical Journal.

James Webb Space Telescope discovers 'galaxy-killing' wind that may explain why some early galaxies lived fast and died young

Samantha Mathewson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:00:00 +0000

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers may have uncovered new clues about a longstanding mystery in galaxy evolution: why so many massive galaxies in the early universe appear to have died far sooner than expected.

Galaxies are often considered "alive" when they are actively forming stars and "dead" when star formation has largely ceased. In today's universe, dead galaxies are common. But astronomers have been surprised to find large numbers of them in the early universe, when galaxies were expected to be rapidly growing and churning out stars.

Using ALMA and JWST observations of a distant galaxy, researchers have detected a "galaxy-killing" wind — an enormous, high-speed outflow of gas — that is powerful enough to strip a galaxy of the raw material needed to make new stars. The discovery could help explain the puzzling population of massive "dead" galaxies found throughout the young cosmos, according to a statement from the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Dense regions of the universe are like very active cities," Rebecca Davies, lead author of the study from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, said in the statement. "Galaxies collide and undergo frenzied bursts of star formation. But when the biggest stars burn out, they explode as supernovas, launching powerful winds that blast away the very gas galaxies need to keep forming stars."

Davies and colleagues observed a galaxy called CRISTAL-02 as it appeared just one billion years after the Big Bang, catching it in the midst of a rapid growth spurt.

The observations revealed that CRISTAL-02 is forming stars at roughly twice the rate of similar galaxies from the same era. At the same time, JWST and ALMA detected a vast plume of cold gas extending far from the galaxy — a telltale sign that material is being blown out into intergalactic space, according to the statement.

"The galaxy has a powerful wind that is ejecting material twice as fast as the galaxy forms stars," Davies added. "If this rapid blowout continues, the galaxy could be dead in less than 50 million years, explaining the origin of the mysterious massive dead galaxies in the early universe."

The 18 galaxies from the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST survey including CRISTAL-02 (Image credit: Andreas Faisst (Caltech) and the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST Survey team)

The discovery is particularly intriguing because CRISTAL-02 is not a single galaxy. Instead, it consists of multiple galaxies in the final stages of a merger. During these cosmic collisions, gas is funneled toward galactic centers, triggering intense bursts of star formation, later followed by supernova explosions that drive powerful winds that prevent any new stars from being born.

What's more, observations suggest that nearly half of massive galaxies in the early universe were interacting with nearby companions, indicating that mergers and their galaxy-killing winds may have been widespread. In turn, many of the universe's earliest giant galaxies may have effectively destroyed their own ability to form stars — helping explain why so many of these galaxies seem to have lived fast and died young.

"If many early galaxies collide and experience rapid growth, then it may not be surprising that we see so many dead galaxies in the early universe," Davies said in the statement. "CRISTAL-02 offers a natural solution to the mystery of why these massive galaxies live fast and die young."

The study was published June 10 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

Do galaxies have a 'kill switch' that makes them stop growing?

Paul Sutter — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Galaxies don't grow forever. At some point, even the most prolific star-forming galaxies start to slow down, then stall, then settle into a long quiet retirement. Astronomers have known about this transition for a long time, but we haven't had a clean physical explanation for why it happens, and why it happens at the particular mass scale that it does.

A new paper led by Preetish Mishra of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, along with an international team of scientists, makes a clear and testable proposal: that the slowdown in galaxy growth is caused by the birth of a stable cloud of hot gas surrounding the galaxy, and that cloud forms at a very specific mass: roughly 10^12.5 solar masses. Above that threshold, galaxies stop being efficient stellar factories, no matter how much raw material they have on hand.

The question is: what flips the switch?

To get to that calculation, the team used the Horizon Run 5 simulation, one of the largest cosmological simulations ever created. It takes a chunk of virtual universe roughly a gigaparsec across, models the full physics of gas, gravity, star formation, supernovas, and supermassive black holes from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day, and lets researchers track individual galaxies through their entire histories. Mishra and colleagues picked out roughly 20,000 of the most massive central galaxies and watched what happened to them over cosmic time.

The key quantity they tracked is the stellar-to-total mass ratio. It's a measure of how much of a galaxy’s entire mass budget (stars, gas, dark matter, black holes, everything) actually ends up locked into stars. Think of it as a galaxy's star-formation efficiency report.

The team found that this ratio peaks sharply in galaxies with total masses between about 10^12.4 and 10^12.7 solar masses. Below that range, galaxies are turning gas into stars roughly as fast as the gas comes in. Above it, they slow down by more than a factor of three. That peak is the critical mass.

Mishra's theory as to why galaxies stop growing is the formation of a hot gas halo that has reached gravitational equilibrium. As a galaxy grows, the gas falling into it gets shock-heated. Up to a certain mass, that gas cools quickly enough to keep raining down and feeding new star formation.

Past the critical mass, the halo gets dense and hot enough to hold itself up against gravity for billions of years. The gas can no longer cool fast enough to fall in and the galaxy is suddenly cut off from its fuel supply. It keeps gobbling up dark matter and dragging in satellite galaxies, but the cool gas that actually makes stars stops arriving.

An artist's impression shows a galaxy in the distant universe, just two billion years after the Big Bang, in the process of pulling in cool gas (shown in orange) from its surroundings. (Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada/ESA/AOES Medialab)

The paper also rules out a competing explanation. One natural guess is that galaxies above the critical mass simply lose more of their normal matter to outflows from supernovas and active galactic nuclei. The team checked this directly by computing how much of each galaxy's baryon budget actually stayed bound to the system. The variation turned out to be no more than 30 percent. That isn't nothing, but it can't account for the factor-of-three drop in star formation efficiency. The decisive change is on the inflow side, not the outflow side.

A few caveats are worth flagging. Horizon Run 5 is a simulation, not a telescope, and its results depend on the sub-grid physics used to model star formation, supernovas, and black hole feedback. The authors did sensitivity tests and the basic result holds up, but the precise numerical value of the critical mass scale could shift as those prescriptions improve.

The analysis also restricts itself to galaxies above 10^10.8 solar masses to make sure each one has enough simulation particles to be reliably resolved. Smaller galaxies are a story for another simulation.

What makes this work satisfying is that it pins a famous observational pattern to a single, specific physical mechanism. Not just that galaxies above a certain mass quench, but that they quench because their hot gas halos become self-supporting. That is the kind of statement that can be checked against future surveys of galaxy clusters and the warm-hot intergalactic medium, the gas and dust between galaxies.

We will know whether they got the right answer once those surveys roll in.

Trouble near the Milky Way: The Large Magellanic Cloud is ripping its smaller neighbor galaxy apart

Keith Cooper — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0000

The Small Magellanic Cloud seems to be coming undone at the gravitational hands of its sibling galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, which has been found to be unwrapping its little brother's stars.

The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC for short) are two dwarf irregular galaxies passing close to the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light years away from us, while the SMC is further away at about 200,000 light-years from us. Both are subject to disruption from the Milky Way's gravity, which triggers bursts of star formation within them and rips away a stream of gas from both, called the Magellanic Stream.

However, new results from the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal mountaintop site in Chile have shown the Milky Way isn't the only galaxy affecting the SMC. It turns out that the diminutive galaxy's bigger brother, the LMC, is also a disruptive influence.

As part of VISTA's Survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC), the four-meter aperture telescope has spent the past 11 years carefully mapping the motions of millions of individual stars in the Magellanic Clouds. VISTA's near-infrared vision sees through some dust in the Magellanic Clouds, giving it a clearer view of the stars.

"When I saw the results for the first time, I was amazed by the quality of the measured stellar motions," said Florian Niederhofer of Germany's Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in a statement. "By combining observations that have been taken over a time baseline of more than a decade, we were able to map the internal kinematics of the Small Magellanic Cloud with a level of detail that is outstanding for observations from the ground."

Niederhofer's team published the results from the LMC in 2022, revealing how stars moved through the dwarf galaxy's off-center bar feature, which is similar to a galactic bar often found in the center of large spiral galaxies including the Milky Way. There were no major shocks there, but the results of the SMC measurements have caught everyone by surprise.

Previous measurements implied that the motion of stars in the SMC were indicative of the rotation of the dwarf galaxy, but according to these new results, that was a misinterpretation. Instead, stars are moving en masse outwards from the core of the SMC, in directions generally aligned along an axis pointing from (as seen from Earth) southeast to northwest. Extend that line, and it points all the way back to the LMC. This is exactly what we would expect if gravitational tidal forces from the LMC were tugging on the part of the SMC closest to it, stretching the SMC.

The average velocity of these stars is 10.6 miles (17 kilometers) per second, and over the course of a few hundred million years these stars could travel several thousand light-years. This gives an indication of how much the SMC has been distorted perhaps over billions of years. In the past its structure must have been more compact and defined, as opposed to its amorphous shape today.

An animation indicating the radial motion of the stars in the SMC. (Image credit: ESO/VISTA VMC/AIP/S. Vijayasree)

"The results reveal large-scale tidal expansion throughout the SMC and challenge long-standing assumptions that the Small Magellanic Cloud behaves like a rotating disk," said the AIP's Sreepriya Vijayasree, who is the lead author of the research paper describing the findings. "The study shows that the internal motions of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud are dominated not by orderly rotation, but by gravitational disturbances caused by repeated encounters with the LMC over billions of years."

The motions of the stars are like a time machine, a legacy of past events that have become imprinted on how the stars travel through space. Another case in point is that VISTA has also detected that older red giant stars in the SMC all seem to have their own bulk motion northward. These red giants are stars that were born around two billion years ago, and their motion is the result of some other gravitational interaction dating back to that time. Given that astronomers believe the Magellanic Clouds to be passing close to our galaxy for the first time, this mysterious interaction two billion years ago may not have even taken place near the Milky Way.

As for the future, the Magellanic Clouds are slowing as they interact with the Milky Way's halo, and recent simulations have shown that then Magellanic Clouds are destined to merge with the Milky Way in billions of years' time. Until then, the two dwarf galaxy siblings will stick together, even if the big brother does continue to pick on the little one.

The findings were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astrophotographer captures breathtaking view of 548 galaxies from a balcony

Anthony Wood — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The Leo Triplet shines in deep space. (Image credit: ing. Cornelis van Zuilen)

Astrophotographer ing. Cornelis Van Zuilen has shared a staggeringly detailed image of the galaxies known as the "Leo Triplet", after spending 60 hours capturing the light of the cosmic heavyweights from his balcony in the Netherlands.

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The Leo Triplet is made up of the spiral galaxies M65, M66 and NGC 3628, which are located about 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo. The group lies close to the bright star Chertan, which forms part of the hind leg of the great lion represented in the stellar formation, according to NASA.

"At the end of 2024, I bought my Askar 103APO telescope, giving me enough focal length to seriously focus on galaxies and begin my long-term project of photographing the entire Messier Catalogue," Van Zuilen told Space.com in an email. "After finishing my first image of the Leo Triplet in 2025, I really wanted to see the gigantic tidal tail of NGC 3628 and decided to return with a much more ambitious goal."

For 2026, Van Zuilen aimed to create a detailed composite shot of the galactic trio created from at least 60 hours of light data. "Beginning on April 6, I photographed the Leo Triplet over 18 clear nights, collecting 85 hours of data, of which exactly 60 hours and 3 minutes met my quality standards," continued Van Zuilen.

Having met his target, Van Zuilen set to work combining and editing the data using the astronomy software PixInsight. The end result was a striking galactic portrait that revealed the intricate spiral structures of M65 and M66, along with the edge-on profile of NGC 3628, which is also colloquially known as the "Hamburger Galaxy" by dint of its distinctive dust lane.

An annotated image of the Leo Triplet ing. Cornelis van Zuilen

The Leo Triplet shines in deep space.ing. Cornelis van Zuilen

An image of the Leo Triplet annotated with the positions of distant galaxies contained within the field of view.ing. Cornelis van Zuilen

A catalogue of galaxies contained within the Leo Triplet image.ing. Cornelis van Zuilen

Van Zuilen's image also reveals a 300,000-light-year-long "tidal tail" of stars and galactic material stretching away from NGC 3628. This structure is thought to have formed during a gravitational interaction with a galactic neighbor, according to the National Science Foundation's Noir Lab.

"Using a PixInsight galaxy identification script, no fewer than 548 catalogued galaxies were identified within the image, highlighting the incredible depth achieved through 60 hours of integration time from my balcony here in Heiloo, a village in the Netherlands," concluded Van Zuilen. "I hope you like this final image as much as I do!"

Interested in capturing your own images of the night sky? Then be sure to read our beginner's guide to photographing the Milky Way, along with our picks of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The Milky Way may have devoured another galaxy named Loki, and astronomers think they've found its remains

Julian Dossett — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Our home galaxy didn't pop into existence all at once. The Milky Way was formed gradually, as smaller galaxies, or dwarf galaxies, were subsumed into our own galaxy over billions of years.

It turns out that the stars leftover from these dwarf galaxies still share characteristics, and scientists are getting better at identifying them. By studying their similarities, scientists use these stars to determine their galaxies of origin. A team of astronomers say that they have identified a sample of these 20 stars that — due to their similar features — may have grown up together in a dwarf galaxy which the researchers have dubbed "Loki."

"We might have detected one of the various small systems that contributed to form our Milky Way," astronomer Federico Sestito, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Hertfordshire and study coauthor, told Space.com via email.

The study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, builds on previous work from Sestitio. He had already identified the stars that they ended up surveying for the new study. But now, Sestitio and the team have new features that they can use to identify stars' original galaxies.

"This work can be thought of as a sort of follow-up of previous works," Sestitio said. "In the past, we had to look at these old stars with peculiar motion; however, we lacked chemical information, which is now available with this work."

Growing up together

Helium and hydrogen were main ingredients for the early stars that were formed in our universe. Once formed, the stars fused these two elements together, which created heavier elements that made later generations of stars. This process happened again and again over many generations.

Those early stars are considered "metal-poor." Because they formed so early, the stars only have traces of the heavier elements, like iron. Being metal-poor is one of the identifiers the scientists used to figure out which stars formed in the same dwarf galaxy.

"We think these old and metal-poor stars were formed in one small galaxy that was ingested by the forming Milky Way," Sestitio says.

But it's not just that these 20 stars are metal-poor; scientists have identified many stars in our galaxy that share this feature. The stars' elemental makeup isn't sufficient for determining the galaxy. To narrow it down, the team considered other features like location and orbit.

"[The stars] orbital motion is peculiar as they are confined close to the Milky Way disc, which is usually populated by younger and metal-rich stars," Sestitio says.

The Milky Way disc is the circular flowing whirlpool-like structure, where most of our galaxy's stars, including our own sun, are located. The 20 stars' unique positioning was another indication that they might all be related.

"This was possible thanks to precise orbital motion and chemical information of metal-poor and old stars," Sestitio says.

While the orbital motion of these stars has been previously identified and studied, the chemical information is new, and it gave the researchers a much stronger indication for the stars' shared galaxy of origin.

Artist's conception of the Milky Way galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt)

Chemically unique

The features that the team needed to study were diverse, so they used a patchwork of methods.

"I think my favorite part of this research is having put together various techniques and methodologies to better understand the origin of these stars," Sestitio said.

The astronomers used high-resolution spectroscopy, orbital motion, and even theoretical simulations to interpret the stars' chemical and orbital characteristics.

"We are providing a complete picture, as much as we can, of the properties of these stars," Sestitio said.

The team compared the chemical properties in the stars to those of stars in the galactic halo, dwarf galaxies, as well as simulated populations. They found that the chemical signatures from the 20 stars indicated enrichment from high-energy supernovas, hypernovas, fast-rotating massive stars, and neutron star mergers.

However, they found no indication of white dwarf explosions. The researchers say that this means the origin of stars was likely "short-lived, energetic dwarf galaxy."

Artist's impression of a dwarf galaxy losing stars to a larger, more energetic galaxy. (Image credit: NOIRLab)

Hidden galaxies

Sestitio has been working on identifying these old galaxies, because understanding more about them helps us learn more about the Milky Way as a whole.

"The most metal-poor stars in our galaxy, which are also among the oldest stars, are extremely important celestial objects," Sestitio said. "They can open a window on the early processes related to the formation of the Milky Way (and galaxies in general), the origin of the elements, and the properties of the very first stars."

There could be many more of these 'Loki' galaxies hidden around the Milky Way. While it's fairly easy to find small galaxies that are disrupted and accreted in the Milky Way's periphery, Sestitio says, finding them in our galaxy's disc is a much harder task.

The disc is crowded with younger stars that are comparably metal-rich. So, surveying and picking out the right stars in the disc takes time. But Sestitio is looking forward to discovering new insights into the Milky Way's formation.

"While this work might be limited in the number of observed stars, the future is looking great," he says. "We will have multi-object spectroscopic facilities that will obtain chemical information for thousands of stars.

"At that point, we will be able to better understand the properties of many building blocks that formed our galaxy."

The universe's 'most relaxed' galaxy cluster was shaped by cosmic violence, new study finds

Sharmila Kuthunur — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

For decades, astronomers have described the galaxy cluster Abell 2029, a vast city of galaxies in the Virgo constellation, as "the most relaxed clusters in the universe." But beneath that placid exterior, scientists have now found, the cluster is still reverberating from an ancient cosmic collision.

New observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest giant "sloshing" motions in the cluster's gas — triggered by a merger roughly 4 billion years ago — may help heat the cluster alongside energy released by the supermassive black hole at its center. That could help explain why the gas in galaxy clusters does not cool as quickly as expected, the researchers say. But of note, Chandra's new data also revealed massive substructures still visible today, including gigantic spirals, shock fronts and waves of superheated gas rippling through the cluster, according to a statement released last week by Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"Overall, our results suggest that A2029 is still settling from past interactions," a team of researchers led by astrophysicist Courtney Watson of Boston University write in the new paper, "showing that even the initially most relaxed-looking clusters can be hiding a rich history of dynamical activity."

Hosting more than a thousand galaxies, Abell 2029 is among the largest known galaxy clusters, which are sprawling collections of galaxies bound together by gravity and immersed in enormous clouds of heated gas. At its center sits IC 1101, a colossal elliptical galaxy estimated to span nearly 6 million light-years across, making it one of the largest galaxies ever discovered.

Astronomers have since the 1990s regarded Abell 2029 as unusually tranquil. Most recently, two studies published in 2025 using the XRISM observatory, which studies the universe in X-ray light, found extremely low levels of turbulence in the superheated gas filling the space between galaxies, suggesting the cluster had not experienced a recent major disruptive interaction such as a merger.

But a third XRISM study, also published in 2025, hinted that all was not entirely calm.

Researchers at that point had detected cooler pockets of gas embedded within the hotter cluster atmosphere — possible leftovers, they said, from ancient "sloshing" motions triggered by a long-ago collision.

The new Chandra X-ray Observatory observations add fresh evidence to that more turbulent history, revealing that — like ripples lingering long after a stone strikes water — the scars etched into Abell 2029's superheated gas continue to tell the story of a violent cosmic encounter billions of years ago.

Using 21 new X-ray observations collected in 2022 and 2023, along with archival data gathered earlier, Watson and her colleagues traced enormous structures hidden within the cluster's hot gas, including one of the longest continuous "sloshing spirals" ever observed, the study reports. The spiral stretches nearly 2 million light-years from the cluster's center.

The observations also revealed a concave "bay"-like depression south of the cluster core, a broad "splash" of cooler gas extending southeastward, and evidence of a possible shock wave propagating through the cluster outskirts, according to the paper.

Abell 2029 with "splash" and "bay" features labeled. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/C. Watson et al.; Optical: PanSTARRS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk and P. Edmonds)

To uncover the array of hidden substructures, the team used image-processing techniques that removed the cluster's otherwise smooth and symmetrical X-ray glow. Computer simulations that then traced the cluster's history suggest the structures likely formed after a smaller galaxy cluster plunged through Abell 2029 billions of years ago, the study notes.

That collision would have displaced the hot gas, causing it to oscillate and swirl through the cluster's gravitational field, "similar to how wine moves in a wine glass," the statement read.

The study suggests those giant sloshing motions may help regulate how the cluster cools over time by redistributing heat through the intracluster gas, alongside energy injected by the active supermassive black hole at the center of IC 1101, which is one of the most massive known to date.

That matters because the gas inside galaxy clusters constantly radiates energy away in X-rays and should gradually cool over time, and scientists suspect energy released by supermassive black holes, known as AGN feedback, helps reheat that gas and prevent runaway cooling.

But the new findings suggest black hole activity alone may not fully explain what is happening in Abell 2029, and that the large-scale sloshing caused by the ancient merger may also play an important role in stirring and heating the gas, the new study notes.

Meanwhile, the splash feature of cooler gas may trace a wake of material left behind after the smaller cluster made a second pass through Abell 2029, the study suggests. Simulations indicate the smaller cluster initially swept through the larger one, dragging gas sideways and generating the enormous spiral. Gravity from the larger cluster would have then slowed the smaller object and pulled it back for another encounter, producing shock fronts and additional disturbances in the gas.

The bay structure may represent overlapping gas flows where the outer edge of the spiral intersects with material stripped from the smaller cluster during the collision, according to the study.

Alternatively, the study notes, the bay feature could be associated with the edge of a giant "ghost bubble" — an ancient cavity carved into the gas by activity from the supermassive black hole at the center of IC 1101.

Although Watson and her colleagues found no clear evidence of previously undiscovered radio bubbles in the cluster gas, they note that projection effects could make such structures difficult to detect if they are partially aligned along our line of sight.

This research is described in a paper published December 2025 in The Astrophysical Journal.

James Webb Space Telescope maps our universe's largest structure in unprecedented detail

Robert Lea — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have mapped the "cosmic web" of galaxies — the largest structure in the universe — with unprecedented detail.

This is the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted to date, and is known as COSMOS-Web. It traces a network of galaxies back to when the universe was about 1 billion years old.

The cosmic web is the term scientists use to describe a skeleton-like framework of filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas along which galaxies gathered and evolved over time, which is punctuated by nearly empty voids. Thus, the cosmic web forms the architecture of the universe — it's a singular, intricate, far-reaching structure that traps galaxies and galactic clusters like flies strung along the sticky silk web of a greedy spider.

The results obtained by the COSMOS-Web team further demonstrate the power of the JWST to refine and redefine our view of the universe since the $10 billion space telescope began beaming data back to Earth in the summer of 2022.

"JWST has completely changed our view of the universe, and COSMOS-Web was designed from the start to give us the wide, deep view we need to see the cosmic web," leader of this research, Hossein Hatamnia of the University of California, Riverside (UCR), said in a statement. "For the first time, we can study the evolution of galaxies in cluster and filamentary structures across cosmic time, all the way from when the universe was a billion years old up to the nearby universe."

By the "nearby universe," Hatamnia means up to a distance of around 1 billion light-years. The solar system is estimated to be around 2 light-years wide, giving you an idea of just how far astronomers consider our cosmic backyard to extend. COSMOS-Web extends this by another 13 or so billion light-years.

That kind of depth of view is the only way astronomers can get a true picture of the cosmic web.

A slice through the COSMOS-Web cosmic-web map, showing galaxies across nearly 14 billion years of cosmic history. The vertex on the left marks the present day; moving outward, each galaxy is placed at its distance in cosmic time, reaching back to when the universe was less than a billion years old. Bright yellow regions show the dense clusters and filaments of the cosmic web, while dark regions mark the near-empty voids in between. (Image credit: UCR/Hossein Hatamni)

The large-scale structure delivered by COSMOS-Web provides a wealth of information greater than that provided by earlier maps of the same region of sky captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Team member and UCR scientist Bahram Mobasher explained that comparing Hubble and JWST shows that many cosmic structures had been "smoothed over" in data from the JWST's space telescope predecessor.

"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," Mobasher said. "What used to look like a single structure now resolves into many, and details that were smoothed away before are now clearly visible."

The impressive leap in detail provided by the JWST and COSMOS-Web is the result of the unification of two of this powerful new space telescope's key strengths.

"The telescope detects many more faint galaxies in the same patch of sky, and the distances to those galaxies are measured far more precisely," Hatamnia said. "Each galaxy can therefore be placed into the correct slice of cosmic time, sharpening the map's resolution."

The team's research was published on May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal.

New James Webb Space Telescope images reveal how massive star clusters can reshape galaxies

Samantha Mathewson — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have captured an extraordinary new look at the hidden birthplaces of star clusters, uncovering fresh clues about how galaxies evolve — and how young planets may be shaped by their stellar environments.

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers studied nearly 9,000 young star clusters across four nearby galaxies: Messier 51, Messier 83, NGC 628 and NGC 4449. The newly released images reveal glowing clouds of gas and dust where thousands of stars are actively forming, while also highlighting the JWST's growing ability to uncover hidden galactic structure. Brilliant knots of newborn stars, dark rivers of dust and glowing cavities carved by stellar winds combine to create a vivid portrait of galaxies in constant motion.

While the JWST's infrared vision allowed scientists to peer through thick cosmic dust, Hubble traced older, fully exposed clusters in visible light. Together, the observations allow researchers to study star clusters from their earliest, dust-shrouded stages to fully emerged stellar groups, according to a statement from NASA.

Composite observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope reveal glowing star-forming regions and dust-filled structures in this image. (Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Pedrini, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team)

"This work brings together researchers simulating star formation and those working with observations, as well as groups researching planet formation," Alex Pedrini, lead author of the study from Stockholm University and the Oskar Klein Centre in Sweden, said in the statement. "Using Webb, we can look into the cradles of star clusters and connect planet formation to the cycle of star formation and stellar feedback."

By developing simulations that account for stellar dynamics in emerging star clusters, researchers discovered the universe's largest star clusters break free from their birth clouds much faster than expected, dramatically altering their surroundings in the process. The team found that the most massive clusters cleared away their natal gas clouds in about five million years, while smaller clusters took up to eight million years to emerge — a relatively small difference that could influence how star formation unfolds within galaxies over time.

"Simulations of star formation and stellar feedback have struggled to reproduce how star clusters form and emerge from their natal clouds," said Angela Adamo, co-author of the study and Principal Investigator of the FEAST (Feedback in Emerging Extragalactic Star Clusters) program, which collected the observations used in the research as part of a broader effort to investigate how newly formed stars shape the galaxies around them. "These results give us important new constraints on that process."

Once freed from their birth material, these giant clusters unleash intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds that heat and disperse nearby gas — a process known as stellar feedback. Because cold gas is the raw material needed to form new stars, stellar feedback can effectively regulate future star formation inside galaxies.

The findings could also reshape scientists' understanding of planet formation. Young planetary systems developing around stars inside these clusters may become exposed to harsh ultraviolet radiation earlier than expected. That radiation can erode the disks of gas and dust surrounding newborn stars, potentially limiting how large planets are able to grow, according to the statement.

Their findings were published May 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Our Milky Way's 'Zone of Avoidance' holds a galaxy supercluster with 30,000 trillion times the sun's mass

Keith Cooper — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000

An enormous supercluster made up from over 20 individual galaxy clusters hiding behind our dusty Milky Way is even larger than astronomers had thought, affecting the motion through space of all the galaxies and galaxy clusters in our corner of the cosmos.

The Vela Supercluster was discovered in 2016 thanks to a team led by Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Some 870 million light-years away, it lurks close to the plane of the Milky Way. Extragalactic astronomers refer to a region behind our Milky Way as the 'Zone of Avoidance' because dust between our galaxy's stars blots out, or deeply reddens, light from more distant galaxies behind it.

Given that this Zone of Avoidance takes up about 20% of the entire sky from our vantage point on Earth, that's a lot of celestial real estate inaccessible to us.

Fortunately, astronomers have their ways and means of bypassing the Zone of Avoidance, and now, Kraan-Korteweg and her team have done just that to discover the true scale of the vast Vela Supercluster.

Gravity from huge superclusters tugs on the motions of galaxies across the universe, drawing them closer. We see these subtle galaxy motions as 'cosmic flows', like tides and eddies that carry galaxies this way and that.

However, while we knew the Vela Supercluster was exceptionally massive when it was discovered, it didn't seem massive enough to account for all the cosmic flows seen by astronomers.

The CosmicFlows catalogue, organized by astronomers in France and Hawaii, is a record of measurements of the 'peculiar' motions of galaxies, or rather, their motions that deviate from that expected by the continuous expansion of space. Once gravitational interactions with nearby galaxies have been accounted for, any excess peculiar motion is therefore the result of 'cosmic flows' — the gravitational attraction across hundreds of millions or even billions of light-years towards large centers of mass.

There are many cosmic flows across the universe as streams of galaxies head in one direction or another. The 'Great Attractor,"–– the romantic name given to one large supercluster also hidden by the Zone of Avoidance and connected to the Laniakea supercluster of which the Milky Way is a tiny part — is just one source of cosmic flow. The Shapley Supercluster, located 650 million light-years away, is another.

A map of the galaxy superclusters in our neck of the cosmic woods. The two main dense cores of the Vela Supercluster can be seen. (Image credit: Dr Jérôme Léca, RSA Cosmos, St Etienne, France.)

Now, Kraan-Korteweg and her astronomers, in a study led by Amber Hollinger of the Lyon 1 Claude Bernard University in France, have discovered the origin of the excess cosmic flow: the Vela Supercluster is larger than was thought.

By using 65,518 galaxy distance measurements from the latest CosmicFlows catalogue, coupled with 8,283 new galaxy redshifts close to the plane of our galaxy, Kraan-Korteweg's team were able to identify other galaxies and galaxy clusters that apparently are part of the Vela Supercluster. The extra data came from observations with SALT, the Southern African Large Optical Telescope, and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa. In particular, MeerKAT was able to detect galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance because radio waves from their hydrogen gas can pass through our Milky Way's dust lanes relatively unhindered.

They found that the Vela Supercluster is comparable in mass to the Shapley Supercluster, and contains 33,800 trillion solar masses worth of material spread across a volume approximately 300 million light-years wide. It is so huge and massive that its gravitational influence over galaxies in the universe exceeds even that of the Great Attractor. It is made from two walls of galaxy clusters, each with a dense, massive core, moving towards one another under gravity.

"This discovery helps complete our map of the nearby Universe," said the research team in a statement. "For the first time we can clearly see one of the major gravitational players hidden behind our own galaxy."

Kraan-Korteweg's team have nicknamed the Vela Supercluster "Vela-Banzi," which means 'revealing widely' in the isiXhosa language of South Africa.

The findings are described in a paper on the arXiv pre-print paper repository.

Why were galaxies so active in the early universe? We may be getting close to the answer

Paul Sutter — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

In its infancy, the universe had a bit of an identity crisis.

For the first few hundred million years, the vast cosmic gas between galaxies was primarily a chilly, dense affair. But then, it seemed to wake up, deciding to get all warm and fuzzy.

This strange shift in the cosmos’ early disposition is a crucial clue to how the very first galaxies burst into being, shaping everything we see today. The early universe, a mere whisper after the Big Bang, just a few hundred million years old — that's when the first stars and galaxies were starting to flicker on, like fairy lights across a cosmic dark.

The fuel for all this grand production: gigantic clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Astronomers have always suspected these baby galaxies were busy, but new glimpses from the James Webb Space Telescope are showing them to be even brighter and larger than our wildest dreams. They're like finding teenagers sitting in a kindergarten class, way ahead of their expected development.

This cosmic precociousness means our existing models of how galaxies form might need a serious tune-up. We thought we had a pretty good handle on how gas falls into dark matter halos, cools down, and then ignites into stars. But the JWST data suggests a much more aggressive, faster-paced star-making frenzy in those early days. The question becomes: How did these young galaxies manage such a booming business so quickly?

To untangle this mystery, Umberto Maio from the INAF-Italian National Institute of Astrophysics and the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, working with Céline Péroux at the European Southern Observatory, decided to dive into the virtual cosmos. They created incredibly detailed computer simulations, a sort of cosmic time machine called ColdSIM, to rewind the clock and watch how gas behaved in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Their goal was to make predictions about the early universe’s baryon budget — that's the accounting sheet for all the "normal" matter, the stuff stars and planets are made of, and where it ended up.

Artist's concept showing a galaxy forming only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when gas was a mix of transparent and opaque during the Era of Reionization. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI))

What they found was a universe in flux. Before a pivotal moment called the epoch of reionization — when the universe finally became transparent to ultraviolet light — the gas was indeed mostly cold. It was the perfect, dense environment for star formation. But as star formation really picked up, and that intense ultraviolet light started zipping around, things changed. The simulations showed that the gas quickly shifted, becoming dominated by a warm, less dense phase. It’s like the universe went from a quiet, cool morning to a bustling, sun-drenched afternoon, with all that energy from new stars and radiation heating things up.

This wasn't just a minor temperature change. It fundamentally altered the rhythm of galaxy evolution. The team's clever simulations traced the journey of various types of gas, carefully avoiding the usual shortcuts in models that can often lead to fuzzy answers. They found some eye-opening things about how these infant galaxies put themselves together.

For starters, the stellar return fraction was surprisingly low. This is the amount of material that stars eject back into the surrounding gas when they die, essentially recycling fuel for the next generation of stars. In the early universe, it seems, stars were less efficient at this recycling. Lower quantities of old stellar material returned to the gas, meaning that new stars largely formed from fresh, pristine gas constantly falling in from the cosmic web. It's a bit like a construction site that keeps getting new materials delivered rather than reusing much from demolished buildings.

But even with less recycling, these galaxies were burning through their gas at an astonishing rate. Maio and Péroux discovered that the depletion times — the time it would take for a galaxy to convert all its gas into stars at its current rate — were incredibly short. Much shorter than we see in galaxies today. This means that early galaxies were true star-forming machines, gobbling up gas and spitting out stars with a furious intensity. It paints a picture of baby galaxies throwing one heck of a tantrum, furiously making stars with every available bit of gas.

So, why does any of this matter? Because it rewrites a part of our cosmic origin story. Our initial predictions for these early galaxies, based on observations of later, more mature galaxies, simply weren't capturing this dynamic, rapidly evolving picture. It turns out that you can't just take what you know about middle-aged galaxies and apply it to their energetic youth. The physical processes, from gas dynamics to stellar feedback, are just too different when the universe itself is so young and compact.

Of course, this cosmic detective story is far from over. Numerical simulations are powerful, but they’re always battling with the sheer complexity of the universe. Modeling everything from the intricate, multi-phase structure of gas to the powerful winds blown out by massive stars and black holes is a huge challenge. There are still big uncertainties, like the exact initial mass function of stars (how many big stars versus small stars are born) and the precise amount of "metals" needed to kickstart cooling. Our models still have plenty of room to grow.

But the good news is, we’re armed with ever more powerful tools. The James Webb Space Telescope is out there, giving us sharper and sharper images of these distant, ancient galaxies. And coming down the pipeline are next-generation radio telescopes, like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will let us peer even deeper into the cold gas reservoirs of these early galaxies. These new eyes on the sky will give us the crucial real-world data needed to test these new theoretical predictions, helping us refine our models and paint an even clearer picture of the universe's chaotic, yet beautiful, beginnings.

The journey to understand how the universe built itself, one galaxy at a time, is still unfolding before us.

Galaxies, Artemis 2, space telescopes and stormtroopers: Here are the best photos from our staff

Anthony Wood — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Here at Space.com, we love the night sky, rocket launches and sci-fi just as much as you do. Each month (from here on out) we want to celebrate that love by bringing you a collection of eclectic staff photos that show you a little of what we've been up to.

Expect launch photos, snaps of historic hardware destined for space, images of the night sky and, from time to time, photographic evidence of our entertainment editor Ian Stokes infiltrating Amazon's London office to sneak a peek at their May the 4th Star Wars offering … allegedly.

Don't forget! We love nothing more than seeing your discussions in the comments section under each article and, of course, featuring and enjoying your astrophotography, which you can share with us and the readers at spacephotos@space.com!

Photos from Space (.com)

We'll kick off with our spaceflight writer Josh Dinner, who took a road trip down to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to report first hand on the historic launch of the Artemis 2 mission to the far side of the moon!

"Witnessing SLS launch from the press site was more than just seeing the rocket liftoff — it was feeling it," Dinner told Space.com. "The shake and crackle of the solid boosters and legacy shuttle tech ripping through the sky is truly one to behold, and shooting Artemis 2 was an absolute experience. Whenever I photograph a launch, I always shoot at least a little underexposed. Accounting for the flame is important, especially when it comes to those blindingly bright solids."

Photos of the Artemis 2 rocket launch captured by Space.com's Josh Dinner on April 1.Josh Dinner

"From farther away, you don't want to set your shutter too fast, but for my launchpad cameras, up close, that's where I'll plan for minimum exposure time. It makes your RAW images dark everywhere else, but that's all easily brought out in minor edits. I love getting to see the details of the flames as they explode from the rocket's engines.

"And with Artemis 2 I got extra lucky with some small water droplets that didn't quite dry off the lens as my cameras braved a rain storm the night before liftoff. They created some nice flares I think really add some uniqueness."

Managing editor Brett Tingley, meanwhile, set his sights further afield to photograph a stunning spiral galaxy shining 11.6 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major.

"On March 28, 2026, I hiked out to a dark area in the Appalachian mountains to capture some deep sky objects," explained Tingley. "Bode's Nebula (Messier 81) was positioned perfectly overhead during the evening hours, allowing for a perfect long-exposure shot. Despite its name, Messier 81 is actually a galaxy - one of the brightest in the night sky."

Bode's Galaxy shines in the early spring sky. (Image credit: Brett Tingley)

"This was taken with a Celestron Origin Mk II using a nebula filter, enabling me to capture its spiral shape in great detail. It's incredible to be able to set up a smart telescope and watch images like this one develop in real time, putting deep space objects out in the cosmos right at our fingertips"

Space.com astronomy editor Monisha Ravisetti was lucky enough to spend a little time with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland earlier this month, ahead of its planned September 2026 launch.

"As a space journalist, it's tremendously routine for me to write about space telescopes," said Ravisetti. "I've pored over vast cosmic landscapes imaged by the tried and true Hubble Space Telescope, but what sticks out is this instrument launched before I was born. More times than I can count, I've tried to make sense of ancient black holes or glowing nebulas that sit millions of light-years away from me, but often, I owe these sights to the James Webb Space Telescope.

"Indeed, I've only seen the JWST in photos. My iPhone lock screen used to be a Euclid image, but again, I've never seen Euclid itself. These physical observatories have therefore remained in my imagination just like the universe they observe — places I'll never be able to explore."

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope pictured at Goddard Space Flight Center. (Image credit: Monisha Ravisetti)

"The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the first observatory headed beyond Earth that I got to see in person. It was a surprising experience. Did it look as grand as you'd expect something so pivotal to look? Not really, honestly. It was relatively compact, industrial and most importantly, comprehensible. It appeared as a piece of real, mechanical equipment.

"But while I looked on, I started to realize why it seemed profound to be this telescope's witness. It's surreal to remember a very reasonable object will eventually show us corners of our universe we haven't yet reasoned with. It's surreal to remember that these telescopes really aren't just intangible items in my imagination, and neither are those cosmic places I'll never explore."

Skywatching editor Daisy Dobrijevic captured a gorgeous view of the Triangulum Galaxy, using a smart telescope that cut through the light-polluted city sky to reveal fantastic detail on the deep sky object.

"I captured this view of the Triangulum Galaxy (M33) from my garden in Nottingham, U.K., using the Vaonis Vespera Pro," said Dobrijevic. "Despite working under Bortle 6 skies, I built up 3 hours of total exposure time across multiple nights, taking advantage of the Vespera Pro's multi-night observing mode — an invaluable feature when clouds inevitably roll in."

The Triangulum spiral galaxy shines in the depths of space. (Image credit: Daisy Dobrijevic)

"I was genuinely surprised by just how much detail I could pull out in such a short amount of time, especially given the light pollution!"

Space.com editor-in-chief joined Dinner in Florida to witness the launch of Artemis 2 first hand, before heading out to Houston to report on the astronaut's progress as they broke the record for the most distant crewed spaceflight in human history, ahead of their safe return to Earth.

"I have waited my entire life to see astronauts launch to the moon," recalled Malik. "It was worth it. For just about my entire career, NASA has been trying to send astronauts back to the moon. First, it was Project Constellation and a goal of 2020. Then, maybe it was 2024. Then Constellation was cancelled and I instead watched dozens of space shuttle and rocket launches stay in low-Earth orbit. Even Artemis 1 in 2024, I missed. It was scrubbed several times (I saw them all) and when it finally did fly, I couldn't be there."

Photos captured by Space.com editor-in-chief Tariq Malik over the course of the Artemis 2 mission.Tariq Malik

"But a month ago, Artemis 2 was something else. I've seen the largest rocket on Earth — SpaceX's Starship — launch (and explode) and that was loud. But watching four astronauts launch on NASA's most powerful rocket since the Saturn V hits different. First, it was SO LOUD. Much louder than the Starship launch because we were just 3 miles away (about 2 miles closer). You felt it in your bones and it drowned out all sound. But also because there were PEOPLE on this one. Four astronauts that I have spoken with personally at one time or another. Then they went to the moon.

And for the first time in my 49 years, more than half of that as a space reporter, I feel like a new space age is finally beginning, one in which astronauts finally reach the moon to stay, then Mars, and then who knows where else? (I vote for Titan and Venus, but that's just me.)"

Our senior producer/video wizard Steve Spaleta chose to reminisce over a collection of legendary aircraft — and the creation of a legendary photo.

"After covering the unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship Unity at the Mojave Air and Space Port in February 2016, Dave Brody (Space.com’s former exec. producer) and I visited the Joe Davies Heritage Airpark in Palmdale. The photo here shows a retired Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a Boeing 747-100SR—one of only two ever used to ferry space shuttles.

Space.com's Steven Spaleta pictured with NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. (Image credit: Steven Spaleta)

"The outdoor aerospace museum, free to the public, also features a Lockheed JetStar used by NASA, along with several military aircraft, including a B-52 Stratofortress. Dave Brody snapped the image and joked, “add a Rick or an Alembic, and that’s an album cover.”

Harry Bennett, our e-commerce staff writer and overall photography enthusiast snapped a stunning view of Vega shining in the constellation Lyra.

"Vega shines a beautiful white-blue with four prominent diffraction spikes, giving it an angelic presence amongst a vast star field, " said Bennett. "It is the fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest in the northern hemisphere. I took this shot using the enhanced vision mode on the Unistellar Odyssey Pro, which stacks four-second exposures continuously until you stop it."

Vega as captured by Harry Bennett. (Image credit: Harry Bennett)

"I have a soft spot for it because it is the first smart telescope I ever used and it gave me the ability to capture mind-blowing images of night sky objects even from a city center. It is fully automatic and can orient itself, find a target and start imaging all from a few presses on your smartphone. People can be swept up in smart telescopes’ ability to capture amazing detail on deep-sky objects like galaxies but forget that imaging individual stars can really make you feel magical."

Entertainment editor Ian Stokes went off campus to take a look at Amazon's office in London in disguise as a scout trooper. At least we think it's Ian?

"I channelled my inner Bothan and managed to infiltrate the Amazon office in London and while they didn’t have the droids I was looking for, they did have a bunch of Star Wars merch on display ahead of the May the Fourth festivities. They had a bunch of cool lightsabers, figurines, and helmets for staff and visitors to check out, including the snazzy scout trooper helmet that I’m sporting here.

Space.com's editor, Ian Stokes, offered without comment. (Image credit: Ian Stokes)

"Sadly I was escorted from the premises when I tried to add myself to the cast list for the new Stargate show they’re working on."

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your photography with Space.com's staff and readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The cosmos wears a galactic sombrero | Space photo of the day for April 29, 2026

chelseagohd@gmail.com (Chelsea Gohd) — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Messier 104, or the Sombrero galaxy. (Image credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURAImage Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab))

The Sombrero galaxy looks like a work of science fiction in a stunning new image showcasing its hat-shaped appearance in stunning detail.

What is it?

Messier 104, nicknamed the Sombrero galaxy, is a spiral galaxy located about 28 million light-years from Earth.

At an apparent magnitude of +8, it's too dim to see with the naked eye. However, binoculars or a small telescope will reveal its distinctive, wide, sombrero shape, making it a favorite target for skywatchers.

If you're looking for Messier 104 in the night sky, you can find it in the constellation Virgo.

This image of the far-off galaxy was captured using the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The observatory is part of the National Science Foundations' NOIRLab (formally the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the U.S. center for ground-based nighttime optical astronomy.

Why is it incredible?

It's no secret how the Sombrero galaxy got its nickname. With a very distinctive, wide and flat shape and it really does look like a cosmic sombrero.

The name itself has no scientific meaning — it's simply a reflection of a very human habit of finding familiar shapes in the unfamiliar.

The Sombrero galaxy holds nearly 2,000 globular star clusters, nearly 10 times more than the number in our own Milky Way. But in looking at this galaxy like a big, cosmic hat, it becomes somehow more relatable. Humans have been doing this with galaxies, stars, constellations, and even cloud shapes for as long as we have existed, and it brings the cosmos close.

Help scientists find spacetime warps in these Euclid Space Telescope images

Samantha Mathewson — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

A new citizen science project invites the public to scan never-before-seen images from the Euclid Space Telescope in search of galaxies bending spacetime.

Led by the European Space Agency (ESA), the initiative, called Space Warps, uses data from Euclid to crowdsource the search for rare cosmic distortions known as gravitational lenses. These occur when massive foreground objects such as galaxies or galaxy clusters warp spacetime, bending and magnifying the light from more distant background objects. As Euclid continues its survey, sending around 100 GB of data to Earth each day, citizen scientists are being asked to help identify strong gravitational lenses in the dataset, according to a statement from the space agency.

"We can't wait to see what we will find within this unprecedented dataset," Aprajita Verma, Space Warps' co-founder and project lead at the University of Oxford, UK, said in the statement. "Join us on Space Warps to take part in this exciting search!"

Gravitational lensing can produce striking visual signatures: stretched arcs of light, duplicated galaxy images or near-perfect rings known as Einstein rings. Beyond their visual appeal, these "space warps" are powerful scientific tools. By magnifying extremely distant galaxies, gravitational lenses allow astronomers to study objects that would otherwise be too faint to detect, while also offering clues about the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe.

Finding these lenses, however, is far from straightforward. Even with modern machine learning tools, the subtle distortions can be difficult to reliably identify in large imaging surveys. Citizen scientists, by contrast, are often adept at picking out unusual patterns that algorithms miss.

Through the Space Warps project, hosted on the Zooniverse platform, participants are shown real Euclid images and asked to flag potential lensing features. Roughly 300,000 AI-selected images — refined using results from the initial Euclid citizen science strong lens search — will be shown, representing the top candidates drawn from 72 million galaxies in the mission's first data release.

No scientific background is required to participate. Volunteers are guided through examples, along with an explanation of what gravitational lenses are and how to recognize them before classifying data from the mission's growing archive. Participants also get an early look at images not yet released publicly, ahead of Euclid Data Release 1.

Over 2,500 volunteers have already joined Space Warps to identify rare strong lenses. Participants are asked to place a marker on features that suggest there is gravitational lensing in an image. A marker can simply be added to an image by clicking on the lens feature — or easily deleted — and users can then move on to the next image by clicking done.

The Zooniverse platform makes it easy to comb through the images, allowing users to pan/zoom each image, or change to a flip-book view of the different colored images. The platform also has a built-in Field Guide to help distinguish real signals from imposters, as well as training images and real-time feedback to help sharpen classifications.

The scale of the task reflects Euclid's ambition. Since its launch in 2023, the mission has begun mapping the large-scale structure of the universe in unprecedented detail, capturing vast numbers of galaxies across a wide swath of the sky. Its high-resolution, wide-field imaging makes it especially well suited for spotting strong gravitational lenses, which are rare but scientifically valuable.

Researchers estimate that citizen scientists could help identify more than 10,000 new lens candidates over the course of the project — a major expansion of the current catalog. Those discoveries would help improve measurements of how matter, both visible and invisible, is distributed across cosmic scales.

The effort builds on earlier successes in citizen science, where volunteers working through the Zooniverse have already contributed to the discovery of hundreds of gravitational lens candidates. In fact, in March 2025, 500 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses were found nestled in just the first 0.04% of Euclid data, most of them previously unknown. Those classifications not only add to scientific databases but also help refine the artificial intelligence systems increasingly used to process astronomical data, according to the statement.

As Euclid continues to survey the cosmos, Space Warps highlights a growing reality in modern astronomy: the biggest datasets in history are increasingly being explored not just by scientists and supercomputers, but by anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to help uncover the universe's hidden distortions.

Registration on the Zooniverse platform is required to participate in the research and save possible classifications for further investigation. By exploring and interacting with Euclid images, volunteers have a unique chance to contribute directly to discoveries that could reshape our understanding of the universe.

Backyard snapshot delivers stunning galaxy image | Space photo of the day for April 27, 2026

chelseagohd@gmail.com (Chelsea Gohd) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0000

This image of the Small Magellanic Cloud was captured with a camera and a wide-aperture telephoto lens from a mountain in Chile. (Image credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Horálek (Institute of Physics in Opava))

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) looks spectacular in a new snapshot. But something about it might really surprise you.

It looks like this detailed image of a far-off galaxy was captured an advanced space telescope, or a huge ground-based scope. However, it was actually snapped with a camera sporting a telephoto lens from right here on Earth.

What is it?

The SMC is a dwarf galaxy that holds hundreds of millions of stars. The galaxy is near our very own Milky Way; in fact, it's one of our closest neighbors. Still, it is nearly 200,000 light-years away.

Despite that distance, the SMC can be seen with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere.

This unique visibility may have played a role in this spectacular image, which was captured by Petr Horálek, a NOIRLab Audiovisual Ambassador, using a camera and a wide-aperture telephoto lens on the mountain Cerro Pachón in Chile. This image capture took four hours under the dark skies above the mountain.

Why is it incredible?

In looking at this photo, you might assume it was captured by a space telescope like Hubble. It's a detailed and striking view of this far-off galaxy.

But Horálek captured this image with just a camera and telephoto lens. NOIRLab's ambassador program is a joint venture with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and ambassadors share science with the public and their local communities.

This image is beautiful, but it also represents an exciting achievement in astrophotography.

'Dark subhaloes' may explain why galaxies seem to form pre-determined shapes

Paul Sutter — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Our universe is full of mysteries, but few are as perplexing as the dark, tiny galaxies that hover around larger ones like the Milky Way.

Small, dim, and almost invisible, dwarf spheroidal galaxies are packed to the brim with something we can't see: dark matter. They're like cosmic icebergs, with most of their mass hidden from plain sight, making them some of the most exotic objects in the universe.

But these deceptively simple structures hide a deep secret. For years, astronomers have scratched their heads over a thorny problem, often called the "cusp-core problem." Our best theories for dark matter, based on the cold dark matter model, predict that the density of this invisible stuff should get incredibly steep, forming a "cusp" at the very center of these galaxies. Like a mountain peak, sharp and pointy, where dark matter congregates.

Yet, when we peer at the actual movements of stars inside many of these dwarf galaxies, what we often see is something flatter, more like a gentle hill – a "core." It’s a bit like finding a perfectly smooth, inviting plateau where you expected a jagged, impassable summit. This persistent mismatch has fueled a serious debate, leaving us wondering if our understanding of dark matter, or perhaps galaxy formation itself, is fundamentally off.

This mystery has challenged the standard picture of how galaxies form and evolve. But astronomers are clever, and they keep digging. Consider this: these galaxies aren't just born with their final shape, but instead evolve into it, following a cosmic blueprint. This is the idea at the heart of new research from Jorge Peñarrubia and Ethan O. Nadler, affiliated with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh and the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. They propose that dwarf spheroidal galaxies are always moving toward a specific, stable configuration, a cosmic resting place they call a "dynamical attractor." It's like every tiny galaxy has a pre-determined final form, and no matter its starting conditions, it's destined to build itself into that design.

How does a galaxy find its way to this precise blueprint? It's not a gentle drift toward equilibrium. Stars inside these dwarf galaxies get a constant, chaotic cosmic kick in the pants. They don't just orbit smoothly around the galaxy's center, like planets around a star. Instead, they’re constantly jostled by what Peñarrubia and Nadler describe as "stochastic force fluctuations." Think of it like a pinball machine. The stars are the pinballs, and instead of perfectly smooth walls, they're continually bumping into invisible, unpredictable bumpers, always gaining a little bit of energy.

What are these invisible bumpers? They are "dark subhaloes" — clumps of dark matter embedded within the galaxy's larger, smoother dark matter halo. Yes, even within the mysterious dark matter, there are smaller, lumpier bits. Causing trouble. These dark subhaloes exert unpredictable gravitational forces, giving energy to the stars and pushing their orbits outward. The stars gain energy, their orbits expand, and the entire stellar system starts to puff up and spread out. This process, in which stellar orbits expand and gain energy, is a kind of internal "heating" for the galaxy, driving its evolution. This internal heating is a powerful force, but it’s not the only game in town.

The universe is a busy, often violent place, and dwarf spheroidal galaxies often find themselves caught in the gravitational pull of much bigger galaxies, like our own Milky Way. When a large galaxy tugs on a smaller one, it can rip away its outer layers — a process called tidal stripping. This external stripping accelerates the heating and expansion of the dwarf galaxy, nudging it toward that dynamical attractor even faster. But even dwarf galaxies that are floating alone in the cosmic void, isolated from the gravitational harassment of their larger neighbors, still evolve toward this attractor through their own internal heating. It just takes them a bit longer. For example, a dwarf galaxy in isolation might need as long as 14 billion years — essentially the age of the universe — to fully reach its stable form.

An illustration showing a halo of dark matter around a spiral galaxy (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

So, how do Peñarrubia and Nadler know this isn't just some clever mathematical conjecture? They didn't just concoct a theory out of thin air. These researchers built entire tiny universes, running elaborate "N-body experiments" — fancy computer simulations that track the motions of zillions of stellar particles and dark subhaloes over billions of years. They even placed some of their model dwarf galaxies on eccentric orbits around a simulated Milky Way, just to see how the relentless tug of tides would affect things. Their experiments showed that a dwarf spheroidal galaxy has to shed more than 99% of its initial dark matter before it starts losing a significant number of its stars, thanks to how the stars and dark matter separate over time.

And they didn't stop there. They also applied what they call the "Heating Argument" to real-world data from the dwarf galaxies orbiting our Milky Way. What they found was fascinating: these galaxies follow specific "tidal tracks" that match what you'd expect from their model. Their stellar orbits, on average, expand to a point where the speed at which the stars are jiggling around — what astronomers call the velocity dispersion — is about half the peak speed that dark matter could make them go within the halo. This holds true for different theoretical dark matter distributions, whether they’re "cuspy" like a sharp peak or "cored" like a gentle plateau. For a common stellar distribution model, the ratio could be 0.54, or for another, 0.48. It’s a remarkable consistency, suggesting a universal behavior.

This all means that the incredible diversity we see in dwarf spheroidal galaxies today — their different sizes and internal motions — isn't necessarily a snapshot of how they were born, like distinct species. Instead, it’s a dynamic story of evolution, a journey driven by both internal gravitational jostling from dark subhaloes and external tidal forces from larger neighbors. They're all marching toward a common, stable state, a kind of cosmic destiny. The structural diversity we observe is largely an evolutionary outcome, not just a random scattering of initial conditions. This reframes our understanding of their very structure and persistence.

Of course, science is never truly settled. We still have many puzzles to crack. Attempts to figure out the exact dark matter distribution inside these galaxies are notoriously tricky, partly because of what's called the "mass-anisotropy degeneracy." It’s difficult to tell if stars are moving in perfectly random directions or if there's a preferred direction, which makes calculating the dark matter's gravitational pull a real headache. Plus, we often can't tell the full 3D orientation of these dim galaxies along our line of sight, adding another layer of uncertainty to their total halo masses and density profiles. So, while we have a brilliant new framework, the precise total masses and density profiles of individual dwarf spheroidal galaxies remain elusive. This model, for instance, simplifies by not fully accounting for how dark subhaloes affect the smooth overall dark matter potential.

Still, this work gives us a powerful new lens through which to view these tiny, dark-matter-dominated worlds. It highlights how the subtle, ongoing interactions within and around a galaxy can completely reshape its destiny. The universe, it seems, has a way of guiding even its smallest inhabitants toward predictable, stable forms, offering a tantalizing glimpse into the grand, unfolding story of cosmic evolution. What other hidden attractors are out there, waiting for us to discover? We've got a lot more to learn about how these cosmic dance partners choreograph their lives, and the detective work continues, one tiny, dark galaxy at a time.

Synthetic universe allows you to 'see and hear' galaxies evolving from the dawn of time (video)

Robert Lea — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Ever dreamt of being present during the birth of the first galaxies? Perhaps being able to fast-forward through billions of years of cosmic evolution to watch those galaxies grow and shape the universe we know today? Of course, that sadly isn't possible. But thanks to a revolutionary new and unique audiovisual simulation of "virtual universes," scientists have developed the best picture of cosmic evolution to date, and you too can see and hear it!

The COLIBRE virtual universes use the standard model of cosmology to model the dynamics of cold galactic dust and gas, which form the building blocks of stars, from the first billion years after the Big Bang to the present day. With more computing power than previously available to other cosmic simulations, COLIBRE developed a synthetic universe that closely resembles observations the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been making of the early cosmos. As such, the research offers validation of the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model.

And fascinatingly, this synthetic universe is so convincing that even some astronomers are doing double-takes.

(Left) The so-called cosmic web, where the color encodes the projected density of gas and stars. (Right) Two of the many galaxies formed in the simulations seen face-on (top) and edge-on (right). (Image credit: Schaye et al. (2026))

"It is exhilarating to see 'galaxies' come out of our computer that look indistinguishable from the real thing and share many of the properties that astronomers measure in real data, such as their number, luminosities, colors and sizes," COLIBRE team member Carlos Frenk said in a statement. "I like to tease my observer colleagues by asking, 'Which galaxy catalogue do you think these images came from?' What is most remarkable is that we are able to produce this synthetic universe purely by solving the relevant equations of physics in the expanding universe."

The simulation runs on the COSMA8 supercomputer at Durham University, and has overcome a challenge that others have found insurmountable: the modeling of cold gas. But difficulty with such modeling was a problem because stars form when cold gas and dust collapse under their own gravity — to accurately simulate stars, you need to be able to accurately simulate cold gas movements. COLIBRE was also able to simulate small dust grains and their impact in helping form hydrogen molecules and blocking ultraviolet light that would prevent gas from cooling and birthing stars.

"Much of the gas inside real galaxies is cold and dusty, but most previous large simulations had to ignore this," COLIBRE leader Joop Schaye, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in the statement. "With COLIBRE, we finally bring these essential components into the picture."

Yet, as good as the synthetic universes are, there is still one cosmic puzzle the JWST has unveiled that they can't answer. Those are the so-called "little red dots" this instrument has been seeing in abundance during one period of cosmic time.

That could be because these enigmatic objects – which appear in vast numbers 600 million years after the Big Bang but disappear after the universe is around 1.5 billion years old — are heavy black hole seeds.

Though most of the simulations were completed in 2025, some are still running, and the data they have already delivered will take years to analyze.

"We're excited not just about the science, but also about creating new ways to explore it," James Trayford, of the University of Portsmouth, U.K., who led the development of COLIBRE's dust model and the sonification of its visualizations, said in the statement. "These tools could provide new insights, make our field more accessible, and help us build intuition for how galaxies grow and evolve."

The COLIBRE research was published on Monday (April 13) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

New moon of April 2026 brings incredible views of the constellation Hydra, Jupiter, Venus and more this week

Anthony Wood — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:27:48 +0000

The April new moon has arrived bringing several nights of spectacular dark skies perfect for observing the planets of the solar system, majestic constellations and the galaxies that lie beyond.

April's new moon occurs at 7:52 a.m. EDT (1152 GMT) on April 17, when the moon is positioned between the sun and Earth, rendering it lost from sight in the daytime sky, with the entirety of its near side bathed in shadow.

The moonless nights surrounding this phase are the perfect time to indulge in skywatching and night sky photography, as subtle constellations and deep sky objects often lost behind a veil of moonlight glisten in the twilight realm.

Visible planets

Look to the west shortly after sunset on April 17 to find Venus appearing as a bright evening star 15 degrees from the horizon, with the blue-white stars of the Pleiades open star cluster glowing 10 degrees above — roughly the width of your clenched fist held at arm's length.

The ice giant Uranus can be found a little under 5 degrees to the lower left of the star cluster. It'll be too dim to spot with the naked eye — without exceptionally dark skies and perfect vision — but a pair of binoculars or a small telescope will allow you to spot its disk as a tiny greenish dot, according to telescope manufacturer Celestron.

Jupiter, meanwhile, will shine high overhead, below Castor and Pollux — the brightest stars of the constellation Gemini. Turn a 6-inch telescope on Jupiter and you may notice a line of bright dots extending outward from the gas giant's colorful disk. Those are the Galilean moons Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto!

A quartet of planets lurk on the eastern horizon before dawn on April 18. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva.)

Head out an hour before sunrise on April 18 and find yourself a clear view to the eastern horizon for a chance to catch a planetary triangle rising in the glow of the coming dawn.

Mars will sit higher in the sky,with Saturn below and Mercury off to the right. Neptune will also be present to the upper right of Mercury, though the distant ice giant will be far too dim to spot with the naked eye.

Stars and constellations

The dark nights surrounding the new moon are a perfect time to explore some of the subtler constellations that glisten in the northern hemisphere sky.

First, locate the sickle-like formation of stars representing the head and chest of the great lion represented in the constellation Leo, which can be found high above the southern horizon in April with the bright star Regulus at its base.

How to find the constellation Hydra in the evening sky. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva.)

Next, look to the lower right of Regulus to find a circlet of stars representing the head of the great serpent in the constellation Hydra, along with a string of stars that wind down and to the east towards the horizon, which mark its tail. Hydra is the largest constellation in the night sky, though it's often overlooked due to its lack of bright stars.

Perched along Hydra's back are the compact constellations Corvus (the crow) and Crater (the cup). To their east is the blue-white light of Spica — the brightest star in the constellation Virgo.

How to find Markarian's Chain between Virgo, Leo and Coma Bernices. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva)

For a spot of deep sky viewing, why not head out to a dark sky location and sweep your telescope over the patch of sky where Leo, Virgo and the constellation Coma Berenices meet?

First, find Denebola, the star that marks the tail of the lion in Leo, and Vindemiatrix using a handy stargazing app. Roughly halfway between the two is Markarian's Chain — a spectacular string of galaxies whose ancient light can be spied with the aid of a modest telescope.

You could also capture spectacular images of the stars with the help of our beginner's guide to photographing the night sky. Be sure to check out our picks of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky, along with our roundups of the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography available in 2026.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your night sky photography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) along with your name, location and comments to spacephotos@space.com.

Hubble Space Telescope spots a mesmerizing spiral galaxy | Space photo of the day for April 17, 2026

chelseagohd@gmail.com (Chelsea Gohd) — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy IC 486. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. J. Koss, A. J. Barth)

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a spiral galaxy swirling through the darkness of space, emanating an otherworldly glow through its cosmic, branching arms.

What is it?

A new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 in all its glory.

This galaxy is located about 380 million light-years from Earth, just to the left of the constellation Gemini.

IC 486 is a barred spiral galaxy, which means that it is a spiral galaxy — or a galaxy with a spiraling disk with "arms" that extend from its center — with a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars. These bars are seen in about two thirds of all spiral galaxies we've observed.

Why is it incredible?

The incredible nature of this image speaks for itself. The soft, gossamer glow of the spiral galaxy seems straight out of science fiction, but it is even more amazing to know that it is a real image of a real, massive galaxy far out in the cosmos.

But beyond its beauty, this image holds a multitude of scientific wonders. Highlighted at the center of the galaxy by a bright white glow, for instance, is IC 486's active galactic nucleus (AGN), the center of the galaxy and an active supermassive black hole.

Scientists use rare 'Einstein Cross' to learn about young galaxy with surprisingly old stars

Robert Lea — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have discovered a rare "Einstein Cross" gravitational lens, revealing a young galaxy with shockingly mature stars.

The galaxy in question is J1453g, an elliptical galaxy that is the first gravitational lens at a large cosmic distance for which astronomers have been able to precisely "weigh." J1453g lenses the light from a more distant quasar, a region of space dominated by a ravenously feeding supermassive black hole, magnifying it and causing it to appear multiple times in the same image in the shape of a cross.

The galaxy is seen as it was around 8 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 6 billion years old. However, though it is a "primordial galaxy" in its early stages of development, J1453g is surprisingly similar to the Milky Way, our "mature" home galaxy. What this shows us is that the growth and evolution of galaxies could be much more complex than previously theorized.

"The discovery of this exceptional object has allowed us to accurately study the nature of the stars at the center of an elliptical galaxy in a remote era of the universe, when the galaxy was still young," team leader Quirino D'Amato, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), said in a statement. "The fact that their composition is very similar to what we see today in the Milky Way, in a completely different environment and era, is surprising.

"This tells us that we are still far from fully understanding the processes of galaxy formation and evolution, and represents an important point for the development of future models."

What is gravitational lensing?

This research wouldn't have been possible with a quirk of the cosmos first posited by Albert Einstein in his 1915 magnum opus theory of gravity, general relativity.

General relativity suggests objects with mass give rise to a curvature in the very fabric of space and time, united as a four-dimensional entity called "spacetime." The bigger the mass of an object, the greater the curvature it generates, and we experience these warps in spacetime as gravity. Thus, the greater mass an object has, the greater its gravitational influence.

And when light passes through warps in spacetime, something fascinating happens. The usually straight path of light gets curved along the warp, with the degree of curvature dictated by how close to the object of mass the light passes.

That means when an object of great mass comes between Earth and a more distant object, light from that background object can arrive at our telescopes at different times. These intervening bodies can cause background objects to be magnified, or "gravitationally lensed." Indeed, this phenomenon is used to great effect by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to see ancient and distant galaxies.

Every so often, the difference in arrival time can cause a background object to appear multiple times in the same image, too. These multiple manifestations of the same background body can take circular arrangements, or Einstein Rings, and can also appear as rarer Einstein Crosses.

An "Einstein cross" with the strange elliptical galaxy J1453g at its heart (Image credit: Quirino D'Amato.)

In the case of this Einstein Cross, the gravitational lens is the galaxy J1453g in near-perfect alignment with Earth and a distant quasar, the active region at the heart of the galaxy, which is powered by a feeding supermassive black hole.

Gravitational lensing isn't just useful for seeing objects ordinarily way beyond our view; the lensing effect can tell scientists a great deal about the body doing the lensing as well. In this case, the team was able to use the cross-shaped manifestations of this quasar to determine the mass distribution of the stars J1453g to an unprecedented level of precision. That revealed something that defies what current models suggest.

Scientists usually expect the central bulges of elliptical galaxies to form rapidly and thus be dominated by low-mass stars. However, it appears that J1453g has a configuration like that of the Milky Way, which is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning some elliptical galaxies may form more slowly with higher mass stars at their hearts. Another possibility is that J1453g was transformed in its early history by a violent incident, such as a collision and merger with another galaxy.

As such, the team's results not only represent one of the most robust measurements of star birth in the adolescence of the universe, but also represent a new window on the formation and evolution of massive cosmic structures. Indeed, the research suggests a more dynamic and complex history for galaxies than was previously thought possible.

The team's research was published on Thursday (April 2) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This star-forming galaxy is blowing out powerful winds topping 2 million mph

Robert Lea — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0000

NASA's X-ray spacecraft XRISM, which stands for X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, has clocked how fast winds are ripping from a distant galaxy bursting with star formation.

It would appear these winds travel at an incredible 2 million miles per hour (3.21 million kilometers per hour).

The superheated gas from this galaxy, Messier 82 (M82), flows from a region of intense stellar activity at the galaxy's heart. M82 is located around 12 million light-years away from us in the northern constellation Ursa Major and classified as a "starburst galaxy" because it is forming stars 10 times as rapidly as the Milky Way does.

"The classic model of starburst galaxies like M82 suggests that shock waves from star formation and supernovas near the center heat gas, kick-starting a powerful wind," team member Erin Boettcher, of the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "Prior to XRISM, though, we didn't have the ability to measure the velocities needed to test that hypothesis. Now we see the gas moving even faster than some models predict, more than enough to drive the wind all the way to the edge of the galaxy."

Boettcher measured the speed of these galactic winds using the XRISM (pronounced "crism") spacecraft's Resolve instrument.

Cigar galaxy has smoking hot winds

Also known as the Cigar Galaxy, M82 is known for its cool winds composed of vast amounts of gas and dust that stretch out for around 40,000 light-years. These winds have been observed with a wealth of space telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Chandra and Spitzer.

The aim of this team's investigation was to connect these massive outflows of matter with stellar activity in M82. This includes discovering the effect of high-speed particles called cosmic rays on the winds of the galaxy. This is important because researchers suggest the same phenomenon that blows these winds also launches cosmic rays and believe they may be the main source of pressure pushing the outflows.

XRISM measured the 2-million-mph speed of these winds by observing X-ray radiation being emitted by superheated iron at the heart of M82. This also revealed a temperature of 45 million degrees Fahrenheit (25 million degrees Celsius) at M82's galactic center, with this heat generating pressure that pushes the winds outward, from high pressure to low pressure, just like the movement of winds through Earth's atmosphere.

A full version of the image of M82 captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; X-ray: NASA/CXC/JHU/D.Strickland; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA/The Hubble Heritage Team; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of AZ/C. Engelbracht; XRISM Collaboration et al. 2026)

These winds aren't just extraordinary for their speeds and initial temperatures, but also for the amount of material they shunt. The team found the center of M82 expels the equivalent of seven suns each year. That poses something of a puzzle for astronomers.

"If the wind blows steadily at the speed we've measured, then we think it can power the larger, cooler wind by driving out four solar masses of gas a year. But XRISM tells us much more gas is moving outward," XRISM Member Edmund Hodges-Kluck said in the statement. "Where do the three extra solar masses go? Do they escape out of the galaxy as hot gas some other way? We don't know."

XRISM will continue to observe M82, potentially helping scientists solve this puzzle while simultaneously building better models of starburst galaxies.

"Some of our early models of starburst galaxies were developed in the 1980s, and we're finally able to test them in ways that weren’t possible before XRISM," team member Skylar Grayson of Arizona State University, said in the statement. "It provides opportunities to figure out why the model might not be capturing everything that’s going on in the real universe."

The team's findings were published on Wednesday (March 25) in the journal Nature.

Record-breaking 'space laser' erupts from merging galaxies 8 billion light-years away

Robert Lea — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have spotted the most distant and brightest "space laser," or megamaser, ever seen, and it's blasting out from a collision between galaxies that occurred when the universe was just half its current age.

This galaxy system, designated HATLAS J142935.3–002836, is emanating light that needed to travel for about 8 billion years before it reached the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The laser is specifically a hydroxyl megamaser, meaning it is similar to a laser but is seen in microwave or radio wave radiation rather than in visible light. The prefix "hydroxyl" refers to the fact that this space laser was created when hydroxyl molecules, each composed of one oxygen and one hydrogen atom, smashed into one another within the gas-dense, colliding galaxies.

Even with its impressive brightness, HATLAS J142935.3–002836 wouldn't have been visible if it weren't for the influence of gravity on the fabric of space, aka the concept of gravitational lensing. This phenomenon was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his magnum opus theory of how gravity works, general relativity, back in 1915, and is still a key tool for astronomers exploring the universe.

Gravitational lensing describes what happens when light from a distant source, our megamaser in this case, passes by warps in spacetime caused by an object of great mass, like a cluster of galaxies. The closer that light passes to the warping object, or gravitational lens, the more strongly its otherwise straight path gets curved. As a result, light from the same object can arrive at our telescopes at different times, and this magnifies the background object.

"We discovered a very distant hydroxyl megamaser using the MeerKAT radio telescope. The signal comes from a galaxy at high redshift and is strongly magnified by gravitational lensing," discovery team leader Thato Manamela of the University of Pretoria told Space.com. "This magnification makes the emission easier to detect and allows us to study a system that would otherwise be too faint to observe."

Manamela added that megamasers are rare based on studies conducted in the near universe, usually found in bright infrared galaxies that contain huge amounts of gas and dust. These environments are often the result of two or more galaxies colliding and merging to birth a new "daughter" galaxy. Mergers like this trigger bouts of intense star formation, as well as creating the physical conditions that allow the hydroxyl molecules to amplify radio emission.

"This megamaser is unusual because it is located at a very large distance. That means we are observing it from a much earlier time in the universe," Manamela continued. "The signal is also gravitationally lensed, which boosts the brightness and provides a natural magnifying effect. This combination makes it one of the most distant and powerful hydroxyl megamasers known."

The fact that a megamaser is erupting from this galaxy collision indicates the presence of dense molecular gas and intense activity.

"By studying the emission lines, we can learn about the gas kinematics, the physical conditions in the galaxy, and the processes driving star formation," Manamela said. "Megamasers can also act as indicators of dual active galactic nuclei or pairs of supermassive black holes, systems that are expected to produce gravitational waves."

"This will help us understand how common megamasers were in the early universe and how they relate to galaxy evolution and star formation," Manamela concluded.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters and is available as a preprint on the paper repository server arXiv.

Astrophotographer captures spectacular photo of Antennae Galaxies dueling in deep space

Anthony Wood — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:00:00 +0000

The Antennae Galaxies pictured merging in the constellation Corvus. (Image credit: Greg Meyer)

Astrophotographer Greg Meyer took aim at the constellation Corvus to capture a majestic view of the Antennae Galaxies, whose once spiral forms have been rendered chaotic as they merge into a single elliptical monster of a galaxy.

The deep space image captures a fleeting moment in a titanic struggle that has lasted hundreds of millions of years, as the gravitational influence of the galaxies NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 pulls at one another to create chaos on a truly cosmic scale.

"I have a Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 [telescope] with a focal length of 840mm, which is a little short for most galaxies, this being galaxy season now," Meyer told Space.com in an email. "So whenever I see a picture of a galaxy, I see if it is within reach for me by checking Astrobin for photos taken with the same scope. And since this is such a cool image of 2 galaxies, with an amazing backstory, I had to go for it."

Meyer's shot reveals the orange-yellow cores of the dueling galaxies glowing in a maelstrom of interstellar dust, gas and stars, from which a pair of sweeping "tidal tails" made from elongated spiral arms reach out for light-years on either side. The sweeping structures bear a striking resemblance to the sensory organs sported by members of the insect world, which eventually granted them the nickname of the Antennae Galaxies.

ZWO ASI533MC Pro

(Image credit: Amazon)

The cosmic tug of war has triggered an outburst of star formation, which has led to the creation of "super star clusters" in the vast antenna-like arms, according to NASA. 90% of these goliath clusters are likely to disperse as the galaxies merge and settle, while others will persevere as globular clusters.

Meyer dedicated just under 21 hours of observation time collecting light from the distant galaxies using a series of astronomy filters as they glowed in the skies over the Starfront Observatory in Rockwood, Texas. The light data was then compiled and edited using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom in concert with the astrophotography software PixInsight.

Want to capture gorgeous images of the night sky for yourself? Then take a look at our roundup of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, along with our beginner's guide to imaging the post sunset sky.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Triangulum Galaxy dazzles in psychedelic color | Space photo of the day for March 23, 2026

brett.tingley@futurenet.com (Brett Tingley) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:00:00 +0000

A closeup of the nearby Triangulum galaxy, also known as Messier 33. (Image credit: ESO/A. Feltre, F. Belfiore, G. Cresci et al.)

The aptly named Very Large Telescope captured a colorful new portrait of the Triangulum Galaxy, revealing complex clouds of gas in between the galaxy's 40 billion stars.

What is it?

This image was captured by the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile's Atacama Desert and depicts clouds of gas in the Triangulum Galaxy, found some 3 million light-years away from Earth.

Astronomers used the VLT's Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument to separate light from the Triangulum Galaxy (also known as Messier 33, or M33) into its constituent wavelengths, revealing the presence of different elements in clouds of gas between the galaxy's young stars.

In the image, blue represents oxygen, green represents hydrogen, and red denotes the presence of sulfur.

Why is it amazing?

According to Anna Feltre, a postdoctoral researcher at the INAF-Astrophysical Observatory and author of a new study about the Triangulum Galaxy, this new image is a reminder that the space between stars is far from empty.

"This cosmic interplay produces a spectacular and dynamic landscape, revealing that the birthplaces of stars are far more beautiful and complex than we ever imagined," Feltre said in an ESO statement accompanying the new image.

Stars — particularly young, still-forming ones like those found in the central region of the Triangulum Galaxy — shape their surrounding environments with radiation, ionizing clouds of gas and causing those clouds to glow. This process is what's seen in the highlighted VLT image.

Are mysterious 'Little Red Dots' discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope actually baby galaxies under construction?

Paul Sutter — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The cosmos is full of surprises, and the James Webb Space Telescope seems to be a cosmic gift that keeps on giving, serving up puzzles faster than we can solve them.

One of the most intriguing, and dare I say, enigmatic populations to pop up in the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) groundbreaking observations are the Little Red Dots (LRDs). These aren't just any old cosmic curiosities; they're very distant objects in the universe whose light has been stretched to longer, redder wavelengths due to the universe's expansion, meaning we're seeing them as they appeared in the early universe.

These particular LRDs are characterized by a distinct V-shaped spectrum, showing off a blue ultraviolet continuum and red optical light. Mysterious, right? But what if the initial hunch about these fiery pinpricks was … a little off?

For a while, the cosmic rumor mill had a consensus: these Little Red Dots were likely powered by giant, hungry black holes, relentlessly gobbling up surrounding matter. It's a popular culprit in the universe's whodunits.

But the more astronomers looked, the more these LRDs seemed to have remarkably distinct properties compared to other known black hole populations, throwing a bit of a wrench into that tidy explanation. So, a team of cosmic detectives cooked up a rather audacious idea, which they report in a new study published on arXiv: What if these LRDs aren't baby black holes at all, but rather globular clusters in their messy, glorious formation?

Imagine, if you will, not a ravenous black hole, but a bustling cosmic construction site. In this new hypothesis, LRDs are indeed globular clusters in the making, and their glow comes from a very young stellar population, while their peculiar V-shaped spectrum is explained by something even wilder: a hypothetical, extremely massive star, significantly larger than typical stars, believed to be short-lived and highly luminous — a Supermassive Star, or SMS for short. Think of it as a cosmic beacon, a temporary but incredibly bright powerhouse, guiding the formation of the entire cluster.

This elegant explanation for their peculiar glow, however, isn't without its own set of fascinating challenges. The beauty of this new scenario lies in how neatly it ties up loose ends. For starters, the number of LRDs we see at specific redshifts, that cosmic distance-equals-time marker, naturally evolves into what we expect for present-day globular cluster populations. It's like finding a blueprint that matches the finished building. Researchers even estimate the total number density of these LRDs formed across all redshifts to be around 0.3 per cubic megaparsec, a number remarkably similar to local globular clusters.

And here's another kicker: the observed redshift range for LRDs perfectly lines up with the age distribution of metal-poor globular clusters, which we already know are often associated with the very earliest stages of structure formation in the universe.

Talk about a compelling match.

Mysterious objects or "little red dots" seen in the early universe by the JWST. (Image credit: JWST/NIRSpec.)

Of course, a good cosmic mystery always has a few red herrings, or at least, some tricky details. This forming globular cluster model doesn't quite nail every single observation, especially when it comes to that transition zone in the V-shaped spectrum. And while the spectral profiles broadly fit, the observed temperatures and sheer brightness of LRDs hint at powerful winds that our current models for Supermassive Stars just don't fully capture yet. It's a bit like having a puzzle piece that almost fits, but needs a little sanding around the edges. Indeed, the LRDs are cooler and more luminous than our current SMS models predict.

Plus, our SMS atmosphere models still need to include things like molecular opacities and models for stars cooler than 7,000 Kelvin, which could clear up some of these discrepancies. These wrinkles aren't dealbreakers, but rather invitations for astronomers to refine their cosmic blueprints.

So, what's next in this galactic detective story? To truly confirm that these Little Red Dots are indeed globular clusters in their infancy, future observations will need to sniff out specific chemical abundance patterns. We're talking about signatures like enhanced helium and nitrogen, or tell-tale anti-correlations between sodium and oxygen, or even aluminum and magnesium. If we find those, it would be a smoking gun, connecting LRDs directly to the multiple stellar generations we suspect exist within mature globular clusters.

If this hypothesis holds, LRDs won't just be pretty lights; they'll offer us a direct window into how globular clusters formed, and even open up a new realm of extreme stellar astrophysics with incredibly intense radiation fields. What's more, their incredible brightness hints that we might be able to spot similar systems even further back in time, giving us a peek at the very first generations of stars.

If confirmed, these Little Red Dots will be cosmic time capsules, revealing secrets of the universe's fiery youth.

Galaxy season: Spring brings deep space wonder to the northern hemisphere night sky

Anthony Wood — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Spring is almost here, which means it's galaxy season for amateur astronomers! Grab your telescope and join us as we highlight some of the most beautiful galactic targets visible in the spring night sky over the coming months.

Why is spring a good time to see galaxies?

Our view of the night sky is constantly changing as Earth makes its yearly journey around the sun. In spring, the northern hemisphere points away from the dusty plane of the Milky Way, revealing constellations teeming with majestic galaxies.

"Constellations like Leo and Virgo are where our nearest galaxy clusters lie and in springtime, these constellations are best visible at midnight, the darkest point of the day," Finn Burridge, Science Communicator at Royal Observatory Greenwich told Space.com in an email.

"Galaxies are hard to spot," Burridge continued. "They are very faint and distant and need perfectly dark conditions to see them best, so avoid a full or large Moon. You'll also need a telescope or large binoculars to spot them. However, they are incredibly rewarding to see and image."

Many of the galaxies visible in spring lie in the direction of the Virgo Cluster and Coma Cluster, enormous collections of galaxies that together host thousands of members that rival our own Milky Way in scale and grandeur.

The vast majority of these galaxies are too dim to spot with the naked eye, though a telescope with an aperture of at least 6 inches can reveal some of their ancient light, especially when viewed from a dark-sky location. Be sure to check out our picks of the best astronomy smartphone apps to help you find your way around the night sky.

Many modern-day amateur telescopes come equipped with GoTo mounts, which automatically aim the optics at thousands of observable targets that are easily selected from pre-programmed astronomy catalogues. We've also finder charts for each target(s) along with tips on how to find them in the night sky.

Each target is also accompanied by a beautiful image captured by talented astrophotographers who spent hours collecting and processing their ancient light to reveal spectacular detail in their sweeping spiral arms and active nuclei. What you will see through the eyepiece of your telescope will be radically different, but still undeniably incredible.

Galaxies are, by their very nature, challenging targets to observe. Their light has traveled for far longer than there have been humans on Earth and as a result they are very faint. Oftentimes, they are best viewed using the averted-eye method, wherein you place the galaxy on the periphery of your vision, where rod cells, which excel in low-light conditions, are gathered. Sadly, these cells are unable to detect color, so galaxies often appear as a nebulous halo of light surrounding a bright central core, occasionally featuring hints of dark, dusty lanes.

The Leo Triplet (M65, M66, NGC 3628)

The Leo Triplet shines 30 million light-years from Earth. (Image credit: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM. Acknowledgement: OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute)

Co-ordinates:

Right ascension: 11h 18m 56s

Declination: +13° 05' 32”

"One of my personal favourites to view in spring is called the Leo Triplet, shared Burridge. "Three galaxies, currently interacting with each other, appear very close together just under the constellation of Leo and they look quite nice through a telescope, and even nicer to image."

The Leo Triplet is made up of the spiral galaxies Messier 65 (M65), M66 and NGC 3628, all of which sit within 1 degree of each other in the night sky — roughly the width of your outstretched little finger — close enough to fit in the field of view of a backyard telescope.

How to find the Leo Triplet in the spring sky. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva)

To find the Leo Triplet, first locate the constellation Leo, the lion, which shines in the southeastern sky in the hours after sunset in early spring. Next, isolate the stars Chertan and Iota Leonis A, which together make up one of the hind legs of the celestial lion. The Leo Triplet can be found in the patch of sky directly between these two stars.

M66's bright core should prove relatively easy to spot through a 6-inch telescope under moderately dark skies, as will the dimmer nucleus of M65. The more extreme edge-on profile of NGC 3628 — often referred to as the "Hamburger Galaxy" thanks to its distinctive dust lane — will pose the greatest challenge, requiring larger apertures and the darkest skies to truly appreciate.

Bode's Galaxy (M81) and Cigar Galaxy (M82)

Bode's Galaxy captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

Co-ordinates:

Right ascension: 9h 55m 33s

Declination: +68° 56' 24”

Our next target is Bode's Galaxy — a vast spiral monster that glows in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear), some 11.6 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy shines with an apparent magnitude of 6.9, making it one of the brightest galaxies in the northern hemisphere sky.

Astronomers use magnitude to measure the brightness of objects in the night sky. The lower the number, the brighter the object! Under very dark skies, the human eye can detect objects with a magnitude as low as +6.5, while binoculars and telescopes can be used to see much fainter objects such as galaxies and nebulas.

Bode's majestic spiral is accompanied by the smaller "Cigar Galaxy" Messier 82, which gained its nickname thanks to its distinctive elongated shape. It is currently undergoing an outburst of star formation thanks to the gravitational influence of its galactic neighbor.

Here's how to find Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy in the night sky. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva)

To find Bode's Galaxy, you first need to locate the famous Big Dipper asterism in Ursa Major, glowing in the northeastern sky in the hours following sunset in spring. Next, locate the bright stars Phecda, forming part of the base of the "bowl" of the dipper, and Dubhe, which forms its pouring tip. Draw an imaginary line between the two and follow it out into space for roughly the same distance again.

Sweep your telescope over that region to find Bode's Galaxy, which will appear as a hazy oval of light with a brighter central core, with the Cigar Galaxy less than 1 degree away.

Read our starhopping guide to locating Bode's Galaxy for more.

The Sombrero Galaxy (M104)

The Sombrero Galaxy glows in the constellation Virgo. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll)

Co-ordinates:

Right ascension: 12h 41m 20s

Declination: -11° 45' 59”

Next up, we have M104, also known as the Sombrero Galaxy — a breathtaking cosmic structure that currently rests almost edge-on to the Milky Way, some 28 million light-years from Earth, looking remarkably akin to the broad-rimmed hat for which it is named!

The Sombrero Galaxy was imaged to magnificent effect by the Hubble Space Telescope — most recently to mark its 35th anniversary in space — which revealed its sweeping disk-like structure and pronounced dusty lanes shining beneath its glowing galactic core.

That bright galactic core can also be seen with the help of a 6-inch telescope shining between the constellation Virgo and the smaller constellation Corvus. If you have access to a telescope with an aperture of 8-inches or more, along with a pristinely clear night, you may also be able to detect the subtle suggestion of the dense dust lane running through the edge-on galaxy, which appears as a small oval patch of light in the eyepiece.

Follow a bridge of stars to the Sombrero Galaxy. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva.)

To find it, first locate Spica, the brightest star in Virgo, which can be found ascending in the southeastern sky in the hours surrounding midnight in early Spring. Then, look for the four brightest stars of the constellation Corvus, which form a diamond pattern to the right of Virgo. The upper two stars are Gienah (right) and Algorab (left).

Grab your telescope and look out for a line of faint stars extending diagonally from Gienag above Algorab, which will lead you directly to the patch of sky containing M104! Check out our starhopping guide to finding the Sombrero Galaxy for a more detailed guide!

The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51a)

A Hubble view of the Whirlpool Galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/ESA)

Co-ordinates:

Right ascension: 13h 29m 53s

Declination: +47° 11' 42”

Our next target is the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51a), which shines face-on to Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici, some 31 million light-years from Earth. The sweeping structure of its "grand-design" spiral arms has led to it being known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, which blazes with the light of countless energetic stars.

Its rampant star formation was triggered in part by the gravitational influence exerted by the nearby galaxy NGC 5195, the glowing core of which can be seen shining at one end of the Whirlpool Galaxy's great spiral structure.

How to find the Whirlpool Galaxy using the stars of the Big Dipper. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva)

To find m51, you'll first need to locate the Big Dipper asterism in Ursa Major. Next, locate the bright blue-white star Alkaid — the outermost of the three stars that form the end of the "handle" in the stellar formation.

Imagine that the Dipper is a saucepan lying flat on a table, and sweep your telescope "downward" from Alkaid approximately 4 degrees — slightly less than the width of your three middle fingers held at arm's length — and you will find two milky patches of light representing the Whirlpool and its companion NGC 5195.

Markarian's Chain

Markarian's Chain shines in deep space. (Image credit: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Co-ordinates:

Right ascension: 12h 26m 53s

Declination: +13° 09'

Finally, we come to Markarian's Chain, a gorgeous string of galaxies whose ancient light shines out between the constellations of Leo, Virgo and Coma Berenices. The chain is named after Armenian astrophysicist Benjamin Egishevich Markarian, who found that several of these galaxies share similar motions and distances, indicating they belong to the same cluster

Among the brightest galaxies in this region are M84 and M86, each a galactic heavyweight in their own right that plays host to billions of stars. Look toward the middle of the chain to find a pair of unusual galaxies often known simply as "The Eyes", which shine some 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo and have become misshapen due to interactions with their galactic neighbors.

How to find Markarian's Chain between Virgo, Leo and Coma Bernices. (Image credit: Created by Anthony Wood in Canva)

Finding Markarian's Chain is pretty easy. All you have to do is find the magnitude 2 star Denebola, which marks the tail of the lion in Leo. Next search out the magnitude 3 star Vindemiatrix in the constellation Virgo. The chain is located in the patch of sky directly between these two stellar bodies.

Want to upgrade your skywatching gear? Then be sure to check out our picks of the best telescopes available in 2026. If you're into astrophotography you may also want to read our roundup of the best smart telescopes from a range of brands that excel at deep space astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your galactic astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Hubble and NASA space telescopes track 'game-changing' gamma-ray burst back to neutron star collision in 'forbidden' region of the universe

Robert Lea — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have tracked a powerful blast of radiation called a gamma-ray burst (GRB) back to its source, finding a collision between extreme stellar remnants called neutron stars within colliding galaxies. This could reveal more about these extraordinary collisions, thought to be the only events in the universe capable of generating heavy elements like the gold and silver we wear on our fingers and around our necks.

The GRB, designated GRB 230906A, was spotted on Sept. 23, 2023, by an array of NASA space telescopes, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope. GRB 230906A was tracked back to a neutron star merger within a tiny galaxy that is itself embedded in a river of gas 600,000 light-years long, or about six times as long as the width of our entire galaxy.

Previously, collisions between neutron stars, which are born when massive stars run out of fuel for nuclear fusion and "die" in supernova explosions, had only been observed in medium to large galaxies. Thus, these results show that these merger events between extreme dead stars can occur in more diminutive galaxies

"Finding a neutron star collision where we did is game-changing," discovery team-leader Simone Dichiara of Penn State University said in a statement. "It may be the key to unlocking not one, but two important questions in astrophysics."

The first conundrum Dichiara refers to, which could be solved by a neutron star merger in an unprecedented location, is the fact that when astronomers trace GRBs back to their points of origin, they often seem to occur away from dense galactic cores where collisions should be more common, and sometimes away from galaxies altogether.

The other puzzle relates to the fact that, though neutron star collisions are believed to generate the only environments violent and turbulent enough to forge elements heavier than iron, like gold, silver, and platinum, these elements are often detected in stars that lie far from galactic centers and which should have formed before it was possible to be enriched with such heavy elements.

'A collision within a collision'

This neutron star collision was initially detected via GRB 230906A by Fermi, with astronomers then precisely pinpointing the location where the merger occurred using Chandra, Swift, and Hubble.

"Chandra's pinpoint X-ray localization made this study possible," team member Brendan O’Connor, of Carnegie Mellon University, said. "Without it, we couldn't have tied the burst to any specific source. And once Chandra told us exactly where to look, Hubble's extraordinary sensitivity revealed the tiny, extremely faint galaxy at that position. We were only able to make this discovery after we put all the pieces together."

An illustration shows two neutron stars colliding and merging (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

The stream of gas within which the team discovered the home galaxy of this merger is thought to have been created when a group of galaxies collided hundreds of millions of years ago. This event stripped gas and dust from these galaxies, forming a gas stream and leaving to drift in intergalactic space.

"We found a collision within a collision," team member Eleonora Troja of the University of Rome in Italy said. "The galaxy collision triggered a wave of star formation that, over hundreds of millions of years, led to the birth and eventual collision of these neutron stars."

The discovery hints that some GRBs appear to originate from beyond the limits of galaxies because their points of origin are actually tiny galaxies that are too faint to be seen.

As for the heavy element enrichment of stars that dwell far from the galactic center, the team theorizes highly explosive neutron star mergers like the one that launched GRB 230906A could not only forge such elements but could also disperse them to the very edge of galaxies.

The team's research is set to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A mass stellar migration billions of years ago may have helped life get started on Earth

cqchoi@sciwriter.us (Charles Q. Choi) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Our sun and a host of sun-like "solar twins" may have migrated away from the core of the Milky Way galaxy together, potentially making the solar system more hospitable to life as we know it, new research finds.

Around the Milky Way are solar twins, stars that physically appear very similar to the sun. By analyzing solar twins, astronomers hope they can learn more about the history of the sun.

In two new studies, researchers examined data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, which captured data about two billion stars to create the most precise 3D map of the Milky Way ever made. They focused on 6,594 solar twins within about 1,000 light-years of Earth. This collection of solar twins is about 30 times larger than previous surveys of these stars.

"We found many more solar twins with ages similar to the sun than I had expected," researcher Daisuke Taniguchi, an astronomer at Tokyo Metropolitan University, told Space.com.

By analyzing the sizes, temperatures and compositions of these nearby solar twins, Taniguchi, Takuji Tsujimoto at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and their colleagues were able to estimate the stars' ages. Looking at the range of ages, they noticed a broad peak for 1,551 stars about four billion to six billion years old. (This population includes our sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old.)

The discovery that the sun and many of these solar twins are of similar ages and located about the same distance from the center of the galaxy suggests that the sun is not at its current position by accident. Previous research suggested that, based on the sun's "metallicity" — its levels of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium — it was born more than 10,000 light-years closer to the galaxy's inner regions, which are higher in metals than the part of the galaxy in which the sun now resides.

The new results suggest the sun may be a part of a larger population of stars that migrated outward from the galactic core at about the same time — four billion to six billion years ago.

"We are learning about the sun's past trajectory indirectly by studying other, similar stars," Taniguchi said.

This discovery sheds light not only on the nature of our solar system, but the evolution of the galaxy itself. At the center of the Milky Way is a giant rotating bar-like structure that would now make it difficult for such a mass migration of stars to occur. However, these new findings reveal details about when this "co-rotation bar" formed. Indeed, the birth of this enormous sweeping bar may have initially concentrated gas to help trigger star formation and then propel stars outward, the researchers suggested.

These new findings might also shed light on what conditions may have helped life on Earth to evolve, the researchers said.

"The inner regions of the Milky Way are thought to be more hostile environments for life, with energetic events such as supernova explosions occurring more frequently," Taniguchi said. If the sun migrated outward relatively soon after its birth, "the solar system may have spent most of its history in the quieter outer disk. In other words, the sun may not have arrived in a life-friendly environment purely by chance, but rather as a consequence of the formation of the galactic bar."

The scientists aim to expand their work to cover a larger release of data from Gaia planned for December. They also plan to look more closely at the compositions of these solar twins, which "may help identify stars that were born in the same place and at the same time as the sun — that is, true twins," Taniguchi said.

The scientists detailed their findings March 12 in two studies in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A star dies in the Cat's Eye | Space photo of the day for March 10, 2026

brett.tingley@futurenet.com (Brett Tingley) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:21:20 +0000

A new image of the Cat's Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543, produced by the Hubble and Euclid space telescopes. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESA Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA/Q1-2025, J.-C. Cuillandre & E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay), Z. Tsvetanov)

Two powerful space telescopes turned their gaze onto the Cat's Eye Nebula, a planetary nebula 4,400 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Draco. The new images reveal stunning details about what happens as a star approaches the end of its evolutionary life cycle.

What is it?

The Cat's Eye Nebula is known as a planetary nebula, but that name is somewhat misleading, as these clouds of ionized gas don't have anything to do with planets. These nebulas appeared spherical through early telescopes, prompting astronomers to believe they might be similar to the gas giants in our solar system.

Today, we know these colorful objects are massive shells of gas emitted by stars in their final stages. When stars begin to run out of hydrogen, the fuel needed for nuclear fusion, the outward pressure of fusion decreases, causing the stars' gaseous outer layers to contract. Upon contracting, the atoms in these gases begin to collide and release energy, causing them to expand outward in the colorful nebulas we see in the case of the Cat's Eye Nebula.

A new image of the Cat's Eye Nebula captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Tsvetanov)

Why is it amazing?

The combined observations of the Euclid and Hubble space telescopes help "reveal the remarkable complexity of stellar death in this object," NASA wrote in a statement accompanying the image. While Hubble was able to zoom in for a close-up of the central shell of the nebula, Euclid captured a wider view that reveals a larger halo of gases expanding outward into space. This halo was blasted out away from the star at a much earlier stage, before the main nebula formed.

Euclid's wide view also reveals thousands of distant galaxies in the background behind the nebula, offering a glimpse at the true vastness of space that space telescopes like Euclid and Hubble are revealing to astronomers.

Cosmic Hawk spreads its wings| Space photo of the day for March 6, 2026

Robert Lea — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:47:52 +0000

An image of RCW 36 in which the Milky Way nebula appears like a vast cosmic bird of prey (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured a stunning image of a glowing nebula in the Milky Way that resembles a vast cosmic hawk swooping down on its prey.

What is it?

The nebula in question is RCW 36, located around 2,300 light-years away from Earth in the Vela constellation.

The head and body of this hawk are composed of dark clouds and filaments of gas and dust. Below the hawk-outline is a blue stellar nursery packed with newborn massive blue stars.

Why is it special?

You may find it surprising to learn that it isn't the newborn stars in RCW 36 that scientists are really fascinated by.

Astronomers believe that this nebula is filled with dim stellar bodies called brown dwarfs.

These objects have been labelled with the unfortunate nickname "failed stars." This is because, despite forming like stars from collapsing patches of overdense and cool gas, brown dwarfs fail to gather the mass needed to generate the temperatures and pressures in their cores needed to fuse hydrogen to helium. That's the process that defines what a main-sequence star is.

This image of RCW 36 was ironically and coincidentally captured by the VLT instrument HAWK-I.

Spiral galaxy is a stunning cosmic wheel in head-turning image | Space photo of the day for March 3, 2026

Robert Lea — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:23:16 +0000

The spiral galaxy NGC 941 looks like a spinning cosmic wheel in new image from the Subaru Telescope (Image credit: NAOJ)

Using the Subaru Telescope located at the summit of the extinct volcano Maunkea in Hawai'i, astronomers have captured a stunning image of a spiral galaxy that resembles a spinning cosmic wheel.

What is it?

The galaxy in question is NGC 941, located around 55 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cetus.

NGC 941 is considered an "intermediate spiral galaxy," which means that, in terms of morphology, it is somewhere between a barred spiral galaxy and an unbarred spiral galaxy.

The "bars" in these classifications refer to a dense churning central structure of stars. Intermediate galaxies have some signs of such a structure, rather than having them well-formed or altogether absent.

Why is it special?

The Subaru Telescope image shows NGC 941 as a bright blue spiral. Within the galactic structure are prominent central dark lanes of cosmic dust. These are signs of ongoing star formation.

Appearing with the spiral are orange blobs that aren't part of NGC 941 at all. These are much more distant background galaxies that appear through NGC 941 because of how faint this intermediate galaxy is.

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS shines in new image | Space photo of the day for March 2, 2026

daisy.dobrijevic@space.com (Daisy Dobrijevic) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft got its first detailed view of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, capturing a glowing coma and sweeping tail. (Image credit: ESA/Juice/JANUS)

A spacecraft bound for Jupiter has caught a visitor from beyond our solar system.

This striking image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was imaged by the JANUS science camera aboard the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft; it reveals the object's glowing coma and sweeping tail of gas and dust.

What is it?

Comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third known interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system. Unlike most comets, which originate in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, this icy wanderer formed around another star before drifting into our cosmic neighborhood.

The bright, egg-shape glow at the center of the image is the comet's coma — a vast cloud of gas and dust released as sunlight heats the comet's icy nucleus. Stretching away from the coma is a long tail sculpted by radiation from the sun and the prevailing solar wind.

The arrows in the top left show the direction the comet is traveling (blue) and the direction of the sun (yellow).

Why is it special?

JANUS captured this view on Nov. 6, 2025, just seven days after 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to the sun. At the time, JUICE was about 41 million miles (66 million kilometers) away from the comet.

Throughout November, five of JUICE's instruments — JANUS, MAJIS, SWI, PEP and UVS — observed the cosmic wanderer, collecting images and spectrometry data to determine its composition and activity.

But because JUICE was on the opposite side of the sun from Earth during these observations, data had to be transmitted at a slower rate, delaying scientists' first glimpse of the results. The instrument teams had to wait until only last week to receive the data and are now working hard to analyze it all. They will come together in late March to discuss their findings.

World's largest radio telescope array pierces heart of our Milky Way: 'This is just the beginning'

Robert Lea — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Using the world's largest radio telescope array, The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, astronomers have dived deeper into the turbulent and complex tendrils of gas and dust at the heart of our galaxy than ever before.

The image of the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) represents the first time that the cold gas of this 650-light-year-wide region has been fully explored in great detail. This research is also noteworthy because it is the largest image The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has ever captured. It should help scientists investigate how stars live and die in the extreme environment around the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).

"It's a place of extremes, invisible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail," team member Ashley Barnes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a statement. "It is the only galactic nucleus close enough to Earth for us to study in such fine detail."

The CMZ is packed with an intricate network of dense and cold gas that flows along filaments, often collapsing into clumps of matter that are capable of forming stars. Though this process can also happen at the edge of our galaxy, the process is far more extreme in the CMZ.

The CMZ as seen in intricate detail by ALMA. (Image credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Background: ESO/D. Minniti et al.)

As part of ACES (the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey), the team was able to determine the chemical composition of this molecular gas, detecting dozens of different molecules. These ranged from complex organic molecules like methanol and ethanol to simple molecules like silicon monoxide.

"The CMZ hosts some of the most massive stars known in our galaxy, many of which live fast and die young, ending their lives in powerful supernova explosions, and even hypernovas," ACES leader and John Moores University researcher Steve Longmore explained in the statement. "By studying how stars are born in the CMZ, we can also gain a clearer picture of how galaxies grew and evolved.

"We believe the region shares many features with galaxies in the early universe, where stars were forming in chaotic, extreme environments."

The central molecular zone and its location in the Milky Way. (Image credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Stars in inset: ESO/D. Minniti et al. Milky Way: ESO/S. Guisard)

The CMZ is around the size of three full moons in the night sky, meaning even ALMA, composed of 66 radio antennas across the Atacama Desert regions of northern Chile, couldn't image it all at once. Representing the largest area that ALMA has ever observed, the resultant image was basically stitched together using smaller, individual observations.

"We anticipated a high level of detail when designing the survey, but we were genuinely surprised by the complexity and richness revealed in the final mosaic," ALMA astronomer Katharina Immer said in the statement.

The ACES research was published on Wednesday (Feb. 25) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

These 70 dusty galaxies at the edge of our universe could rewrite our understanding of the cosmos

Robert Lea — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array , astronomers have investigated 70 dusty, star-forming galaxies at the very edge of the universe. These galaxies, seen as they were less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, could change everything we know about cosmic evolution.

It seems these galaxies were already rich in "metals," the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, despite existing before current models predict the current generation of stars could have forged and distributed those heavy elements.

"Dusty galaxies are massive galaxies with large amounts of metals and cosmic dust," team leader Jorge Zavala of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said in a statement. "And these galaxies are very old, which means stars were being formed in the early universe, earlier than our current models predict."

The research into these galaxies began when Zavala and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), an array of 66 radio antennas located in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, to identify a population of 400 bright and dusty galaxies.

Further investigation with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) whittled these galaxies down to 70 faint dusty galaxy candidates on the very edge of the cosmos, the majority of which had never been seen before. Combining JWST and ALMA observations, the researchers then confirmed these galaxies had formed as long ago as 500 million years after the Big Bang.

That not only suggests that our story of cosmic history needs revision, but it also connects these galaxies to two other families of strange galaxies. These are extremely bright, star-birthing galaxies discovered in the early universe by the JWST and older galaxies that have "died" and are no longer forming stars.

"It's as if we now have snapshots of the lifecycle of these rare galaxies," Zavala said. "The ultrabright ones are young galaxies, the quiescent ones are in their old age, and the ones we found are young adults."

More research will be needed to link these three populations of galaxies. However, if they are connected, then it is clear that something is missing from our understanding of galactic evolution, and the development of stars must begin earlier in the cosmos than currently theorized.

The team's results were published on Tuesday (Feb. 17) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Supermassive serial killers: Astronomers discover how black holes 'kill off' neighboring galaxies

Robert Lea — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Scientists have long suspected that active supermassive black holes can kill their own host galaxies, but new research suggests these cosmic titans are more like serial killers that can extend their murderous rampage across many light-years and destroy neighboring galaxies, too.

For scientists, "death" for a galaxy means the curtailing of star formation. Supermassive black holes are known to cause this when they are actively feeding, as they heat their larder of gas and dust, provoking that matter content to emit powerful radiation. This radiation either pushes away gas, the building blocks of stars — thereby starving the galaxies and black holes themselves — or simply heats that gas and prevents it from cooling enough to collapse and birth a stellar body. Both outcomes can slow or even stop star formation.

"Traditionally, people have thought that because galaxies are so far apart, they evolve largely on their own," team leader Yongda Zhu of the University of Arizona said in a statement. "But we found that a very active, supermassive black hole in one galaxy can affect other galaxies across millions of light-years, suggesting that galaxy evolution may be more of a group effort."

Zhu and colleagues point out that this influence suggests the existence of a "galactic ecosystem" akin to the linked ecosystems of Earth in which changes in one region can deeply impact conditions in another.

"An active supermassive black hole is like a hungry predator dominating the ecosystem," he said. "Simply put, it swallows up matter and influences how stars in nearby galaxies grow."

There goes the neighborhood!

Though supermassive black holes with masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun are thought to dwell at the hearts of all large galaxies, not all of these objects are cosmic killers. For instance, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the heart of the Milky Way may once have quenched star formation in our galaxy, but today it is quiet, existing on a diet equivalent to a human eating one grain of rice every million years.

Active supermassive black holes greedily feast on matter from a surrounding swirling cloud called an accretion disk. Their immense gravity generates tidal forces in this accretion disk that cause intense friction, resulting in high temperatures that cause this region to brightly glow across the electromagnetic spectrum. This turbulent region, an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), can be seen from across the cosmos as a phenomenon known as a "quasar," often outshining the combined light of every star in its host galaxy.

Not all of the matter in an accretion disk is channeled to the black hole, however. Some matter is channeled to the poles of the supermassive black hole from where it is blasted out as parallel twin jets travelling at near light-speeds. These jets can stretch out far beyond the limits of the galaxy that hosts the active supermassive black hole.

It is little wonder, given the intense radiation of the accretion disk and the violent outflows represented by these twin jets, that active supermassive black holes have a powerful influence over the evolution of their host galaxies.

An illustration of an active supermassive black hole. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began investigating the cosmos, a curious pattern has emerged regarding quasars. The more massive and powerful these active supermassive black holes are, the less they seem to be surrounded by neighboring galaxies. That's curious because large galaxies are usually found clustered together, not in isolation.

"We were puzzled," Zhu explained. "Was the expensive JWST broken?" he added with a laugh. "Then we realized the galaxies might actually be there, but difficult to detect because their very recent star formation was suppressed."

Zhu and colleagues began to suspect that bright quasars may not just be dampening star formation in their own galactic backyards; they may be disturbing the neighbors, too.

To investigate the possibility of active supermassive black holes killing star formation in neighboring galaxies, the team set about studying one of the brightest quasars ever seen, J0100+2802. This quasar existed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, and its central engine is a supermassive black hole with around 12 billion times the mass of the sun.

Using the JWST, the scientists hunted for traces of ionized oxygen in the galaxies around J0100+2802, which is a sign of recent star formation. They found this tracer of star birth was much scarcer in galaxies within a million light-years of the powerful quasar than in galaxies outside that radius. That hints at squashed star formation in these proximate galaxies.

"Black holes are known to 'eat' a lot of stuff, but during the active eating process and in their luminous quasar form, they also emit very strong radiation. The intense heat and radiation split the molecular hydrogen that makes up vast, interstellar gas clouds, quenching its potential to accumulate and turn into new stars," Zhu said. "For the first time, we have evidence that this radiation impacts the universe on an intergalactic scale.

"Quasars don't just suppress stars in their host galaxies, but also in nearby galaxies within a radius of at least a million light-years."

The team now intends to look for this effect in other so-called quasar fields to develop a clearer picture of how supermassive black holes influence their cosmic neighborhoods.

"Understanding how galaxies influenced one another in the early universe helps us better understand how our own galaxy came to be," Zhu said. "Now we realize that supermassive black holes may have played a much larger role in galaxy evolution than we once thought — acting as cosmic predators, influencing the growth of stars in nearby galaxies during the early universe."

The team's results were published on Dec. 3, 2025 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

James Webb Space Telescope's view of 800,000 galaxies paints a detailed picture of dark matter

Robert Lea — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have built a detailed map of dark matter, showing the density of this mysterious stuff across a field of view that encompasses around 800,000 galaxies.

Dark matter is so puzzling to scientists because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, or simply light,, and is thus effectively invisible to us. This tells researchers that dark matter isn't just difficult-to-see ordinary matter made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are particles that do interact with light. Hence, the search for particles that could comprise dark matter has been a complicated one. To make matters even more complex, these particles appear to outweigh particles that comprise ordinary matter in the cosmos by a ratio of five to one.

Fortunately, dark matter does interact with gravity, therefore influencing the very fabric of space and time. And the curvature of space caused by large concentrations of dark matter — like dark matter haloes that envelope galaxies and galactic clusters — can influence the passage of light in a process called gravitational lensing first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915. It is through its gravitational influence that astronomers were able to use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to build this new map of dark matter.

The area of the sky analyzed with this investigation is around 2.5 times the size of the full moon (as seen from our vantage point on Earth) and located in the constellation of Sextans. The JWST studied this region for around 255 hours with its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument as part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS).

COSMOS is conducted by around 15 different telescopes, including the JWST's trusty sibling the Hubble Space Telescope. These eyes on the universe all repeatedly study a larger section of the sky equivalent to around 10 full moons. This repetition with instruments that see the cosmos in different ways allows scientists to investigate how galaxies grow, with Hubble and JWST data helping to unravel the role dark matter plays in things like galactic evolution.Additionally, Hubble observed the same region involved in the new study back in 2007, and the section has since been investigated by many other ground-based telescopes independently. But the immense sensitivity of the JWST has helped scientists produce a map with around 10 times more galaxies than those produced by ground telescopes and twice as many as seen in the Hubble map.

The JWST's view of 800,000 galaxies with the blue indicating dark matter concentrations. The more intense the blue, the denser the dark matter (Image credit: NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale/A. Pagan)

Using these JWST observations, the team inferred the distribution of dark matter using "weak gravitational lensing" in particular, which is the subtle distortion of light from thousands of background galaxies caused as it passes warped space caused by concentrations of dark matter.

Additionally, observing the region with the JWST's other main instrument, Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), allowed the researchers to better measure the distances to the galaxies in this section of the sky.

The new dark matter map is just another example of how the JWST is revolutionizing our view of space, both near and far, while redefining our understanding of familiar bodies as well as the most mysterious aspects of the cosmos.

James Webb Space Telescope finds most distant galaxy ever detected: 'It looks nothing like what we predicted'

Sharmila Kuthunur — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant galaxy yet detected, NASA announced Wednesday (Jan. 28), allowing astronomers to peer closer than ever before to the era when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as cosmic dawn.

The galaxy, named MoM-z14, offers a rare glimpse into the universe just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has traveled for about 13.5 billion years to reach Earth, making it the farthest and one of the earliest known galaxies ever observed.

"With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting," study lead author Rohan Naidu at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said in a statement.

The discovery, based on JWST data from April 2025 and published this month in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, adds MoM-z14 to a growing list of unexpectedly luminous young galaxies that challenge existing theories about how quickly stars and galaxies formed after the universe began. According to NASA, MoM-z14 is "brighter, more compact, and more chemically enriched" than astronomers anticipated for such an early era.

Among its most surprising features are elevated levels of nitrogen, which suggest that massive stars may have formed and evolved more rapidly in the dense early universe than current models predict. The galaxy also appears to have cleared its surrounding region of primordial hydrogen gas — an unexpected finding, the researchers say, given that the early universe was filled with neutral hydrogen.

"There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward," study co-author Xuejian (Jacob) Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, said in the statement.

Before JWST's launch, theoretical models suggested that detecting bright galaxies beyond a redshift of 10, past the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope, would be extraordinarily difficult. Those models assumed early galaxies would be small, faint, and rare, leading astronomers to expect only a handful of dim sources that would require tens of hours of spectroscopic observations to confirm, the new study notes.

Instead, JWST has routinely exceeded expectations, its powerful infrared eye capturing light from tens of young galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

"While we were hoping for some very early objects, I don't think any of us expected to break the redshift record!" study co-author Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, told Space.com in May last year, when a preprint version of the paper was released.

That the telescope continues to break its own records suggests that even more record-breaking discoveries lie ahead, astronomers say.

"It's an incredibly exciting time," study co-author Yijia Li of the Pennsylvania State University said in the NASA statement, "with Webb revealing the early universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover."

1.1 million mph cosmic winds race through 'magnetic superhighway' in colliding galaxies

Robert Lea — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have mapped a vast "magnetic superhighway" powering intense star formation and violent 1.1 million miles per hour (500 kilometers per second) galactic winds inside the merging galaxy system Arp 220. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the international research team has produced the most detailed magnetic map ever made of this cosmic collision.

Arp 220, located about 250 million light-years from Earth, is an ultraluminous infrared galaxy (meaning it shines as bright as one hundred or more Milky Way galaxies) formed by the ongoing merger of two spiral galaxies. Shrouded in thick dust, it shines intensely in infrared light and serves as a nearby stand-in for the extreme, star-forming galaxies that dominated the early universe. By studying Arp 220, astronomers gain a rare window into processes that shaped massive galaxies more than 10 billion years ago.

"We used ALMA to map the orientation and strength of magnetic fields in the twin galaxies," team leader Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez of the University of South Carolina said in a statement.

The team's results have uncovered that its fast-moving molecular outflows are threaded by strong, organized magnetic structures.

"This revealed previously unseen details about Arp 220's dust-enshrouded cores and molecular outflows," said Josep Miquel Girart, the study's lead in the observational work, and a researcher at the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai.

Magnetic fields launch powerful cosmic winds

The new observations show that magnetic fields play a central role in launching and shaping the powerful winds streaming from Arp 220's twin cores. These winds, traveling at speeds 1,500 times the speed of sound here on Earth, carry gas, dust, metals, and cosmic rays far beyond the galaxy itself. Until now, the forces behind such outflows were thought to be driven mainly by intense star formation and possible black hole activity.

However, using ALMA's high-resolution polarization capabilities, the researchers traced how microscopic dust grains and carbon monoxide molecules align with magnetic fields. This allowed them to reconstruct the three-dimensional geometry of the fields within the galaxy and along its outflows.

The result is a striking image of what the scientists describe as a nearly vertical channel of magnetized gas streaming outward from one of the galaxy's nuclei, which they dubbed a "magnetic superhighway."

In the western core of Arp 220, the team observed a well-ordered magnetic structure closely aligned with the bipolar outflow. This indicates that the magnetic field is not merely going along for the ride but is actively guiding and accelerating the escaping material. Meanwhile, the eastern core revealed a spiral-shaped magnetic pattern embedded within a dense, rotating disk, suggesting that large-scale magnetic order can survive even in the turbulent environment of a galaxy merger.

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this investigation was the discovery of a highly polarized bridge of dust connecting the two galactic centers. This magnetized ridge appears to funnel material and magnetic flux between the merging nuclei, further emphasizing the role of magnetic fields in governing the flow of matter during galactic collisions.

"When Arp 220 is observed as a whole, it's one of the best places in the universe for astronomers to study how gravity, star formation, and powerful winds work together with strong magnetic fields to reshape a galaxy and seed its surroundings with magnetized gas and dust," said Lopez-Rodriguez.

Measurements indicate that the magnetic fields in these outflows are extraordinarily strong, reaching intensities hundreds to thousands of times greater than those typically found in the Milky Way. Such powerful fields can significantly influence how gas moves, cools, and eventually forms new stars, while also regulating how galaxies lose material to their surroundings.

These findings suggest that strong, organized magnetic fields may have been common in the early universe, especially in dusty starburst galaxies like Arp 220's ancient counterparts. By shaping galactic winds, magnetism could have played a major role in determining when galaxies stop forming stars and how they enrich the vast spaces between galaxies.

As astronomers extend these techniques to more distant systems, they expect to find similar magnetic highways throughout the cosmos. For now, Arp 220 stands as a vivid reminder that invisible forces can leave an enduring mark on the visible universe.

The team's research was published on Jan. 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

'Eye of God' nebula looks like a cosmic lava lamp in new James Webb Space Telescope image

Robert Lea — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have been given a new and incredibly detailed look at a very familiar astronomical object thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The new JWST image shows the Helix Nebula, the ring-like structure of which has led to the nickname the Eye of God.

The Helix Nebula is composed of stellar material shrugged off by a dying star as its outer layers were blasted away and its core collapsed to form a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf. White dwarfs are the type of stellar corpses that are left behind when stars with similar masses as the sun run out of hydrogen in their cores and can no longer generate the energy to support themselves against the inward push of their own gravity. The remains that surround them are referred to as "planetary nebulas," even though they have nothing to do with planets at all.

That means that this intricate view of the Helix Nebula, located some 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, gives scientists a hint of what is to come for our own star when it exhausts its hydrogen fuel in around 5 billion years. So, while this familiar sight for astronomers may look like a lava lamp in these images, it may actually serve as a crystal ball, foretelling doom for our solar system.

The Helix Nebula as seen by the JWST with its comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI))

The Helix Nebula, also known as NGC 7293 or Caldwell 63, was first discovered by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding prior to 1824. It is one of the closest and brightest planetary nebulas that can be seen from Earth.

Since then, the Helix Nebula has been imaged by a vast array of telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, with the JWST joining the fray with an infrared image courtesy of its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

(Left) The Helix Nebula as seen by the Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy. (Right) The smaller field of view from the JWST’s NIRCam (right). (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI))

The image clearly traces winds of blisteringly hot gas emerging from the vicinity of the white dwarf stellar remnant at the heart of the Helix Nebula as they slam into outer shells of previously shed cold gas and dust. This demonstrates a sharp transition between the hot gas of this system and its coolest counterpart.

Not visible in the JWST image is the smoldering white dwarf in the center of the Helix Nebula, but astronomers can see the effect of the radiation it emits as it lights close surrounding gas, heating it and causing it to be ionized.

Further out from the stellar remnant are dust pockets of cold molecular hydrogen, in which conditions are just right for the formation of complex molecules. These could one day become the building blocks of new planets, and perhaps even life.Thus, perhaps this cosmic crystal ball also offers a look backwards billions of years into the past before the solar system took shape around our infant sun.

James Webb Space Telescope discovers young galaxies age rapidly: 'It's like seeing 2-year-old children act like teenagers'

Robert Lea — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Astronomers have obtained their most detailed look yet at young galaxies in the early universe using the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. The conclusion? These cosmic adolescents grew up incredibly fast.

The team behind this research observed 18 galaxies located around 12.5 billion light-years away over a range of wavelengths of light. Existing just over 1 billion years after the Big Bang, these galaxies were in the midst of rapid star formation and were therefore undergoing explosive growth.

The team's most important discovery was the fact that these galaxies seem to have matured faster than previously expected in more than one way — but most strikingly, the galaxies are richer in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, or "metals," as astronomers call them, particularly carbon and oxygen.

"With this sample, we are uniquely poised to study galaxy evolution during a key epoch in the universe that has been hard to image until now," team member Andreas Faisst of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said in a statement. "Thanks to these exceptional telescopes, we have spatially resolved these galaxies and can observe the stages of star formation as they were happening and their chemical properties when our universe was less than a billion years old."

Galaxies grow up too fast

When the first galaxies in the universe formed, the cosmos was filled with hydrogen and helium and just a smattering of heavier elements. The first stars and their home galaxies were correspondingly metal-poor. These stars forged metals during their lives and then dispersed them throughout their galactic homes in supernova explosions that marked their deaths. These heavy elements became the building blocks of the next generation of stars, which were more metal-rich than their predecessors.

However, this process of enrichment should take longer than 1 billion years, meaning the prematurely mature state of these early galaxies is curious, to say the least.

"It was a surprise to see such chemically mature galaxies," Faisst added. "It's like seeing 2-year-old children act like teenagers. How do metals form in less than 1 billion years?"

Anyone living with human teenagers will tell you they have quite the appetites, and that is also true of these premature cosmic teens. The team found that the supermassive black holes in these galaxies are rapidly feeding, or accreting, surrounding matter. That means these black holes are also growing rapidly.

In addition to their anachronistically metal-rich nature, Faisst and colleagues discovered that many of the galaxies they studied had rotating stellar disks, similar to the spiral arms of our much more mature galaxy, the Milky Way. These features had also developed much earlier than previous models had predicted.

"Now, with this new survey, we can show that some of these galaxies were both structurally and chemically evolved," Faisst said.

The early galaxies DC-873321 and DC-842313, part of a sample of 18 galaxies found to be chemically and structurally mature (Image credit: Robert Hurt (Caltech), Andreas Faisst (Caltech) and the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST Survey team)

It wasn't just the galaxies studied by these scientists that were unexpectedly metal-rich. The surrounding gas, the circumgalactic medium, was also similarly enriched.

"The galaxies show very flat gradients in their metal abundances, reaching out to more than 30,000 light-years," team member Wuji Wang of Caltech's Infrared Processing & Analysis Center said in the statement.

The team now intends to match their observations of these galaxies using simulations of galactic growth and metal enrichment.

"The combination of observations and simulations provides a powerful synergy to understand the details of star formation, and dust and metal production mechanisms," Faisst said. "The knowledge of these will ultimately help us understand the formation of the first stars and planets and how our own Milky Way came into being."

The team's research was presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix on Tuesday (Jan.6), and was published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

James Webb Space Telescope's mysterious 'little red dots' may be black holes in disguise

cqchoi@sciwriter.us (Charles Q. Choi) — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Ancient galaxies colloquially known as "little red dots" have proven a mystery ever since astronomers discovered them three years ago. Now, a new study finds the strange features of little red dots might be explained by supermassive black holes in disguise during their youth.

With the help of NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers first discovered the mysterious specks of light known as little red dots at the end of 2022. They only existed for a short time in the cosmos, first appearing in the universe less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang and almost completely disappearing after 2 billion years, explained study lead author Vadim Rusakov at the University of Manchester in England. (The universe is currently about 13.8 billion years old.)

The discovery ignited a fierce debate among scientists over the identity of the little red dots. One possible explanation for these ancient bright spots was that they were extraordinarily star-rich galaxies. Another possibility was that little red dots hosted supermassive black holes — light in the galaxies may have emerged from gas that became super-hot as it rushed toward the enormous gravitational pull of these black holes.

A key problem with these possible explanations, however, was that both proposed objects were both too massive to have formed so early in the history of the universe. In addition, supermassive black holes should emit X-rays and radio waves, and scientists have detected neither from little red dots.

In the new study, researchers investigated 12 ancient galaxies to get a better sense of the nature of little red dots. The earliest of these galaxies existed when the universe was only about 840 million years old.

Their analysis suggested that little red dots "are simply too luminous and too compact to be explained by a large number of stars," Rusakov told Space.com. "If they were purely made up of stars, they would be the densest galaxies in the universe."

Instead, the research team's model suggested the most luminous sources of light they examined were as bright as more than 250 billion suns but also less than a third of a light-year across. This is much smaller than a galaxy — the distance from our sun to its nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light-years. The compact sizes of these incredibly bright spots within little red dots suggest they must be supermassive black holes.

The spectrum of radiation emitted from the little red dots suggested that before the JWST detected these rays of light, they got scattered off electrons in dense clouds of ionized gas in the centers of the little red dots. Such cocoons would trap most of the radiation generated near black holes.

"These objects turned out to be supermassive black holes despite missing almost all typical indications of massive black holes," Rusakov said. "They have an almost perfect disguise that removes X-ray and radio emission."

By analyzing the light from the little red dots, the scientists calculated the speed of the light-emitting gas within most of the dots as being about 670,000 miles per hour (1.08 million kilometers per hour). Assuming this gas was orbiting the black holes at the centers of these little red dots, they could deduce the black holes were likely about 100,000 to 10 million times the mass of the sun. This is about 100 times less than previous estimates suggested, and is closer to what researchers would expect from young super-massive black holes early in the history of the cosmos.

"Our results imply, most importantly, that for the first time we are seeing supermassive black holes early in their lifetimes, possibly early enough to understand how they were born—either by continuously growing from smaller black holes or by starting big, as intermediate-mass black holes that formed from collapsing streams of gas," Rusakov said.

Future research may shed light on how these supermassive black holes were born. "If we are lucky, little red dots may still preserve clues from the time when they were formed — whether it’s the gas chemistry or some useful physical property of the black holes and their cocoons that can help to differentiate between different theories," Rusakov said. "This is one of the biggest remaining questions in astrophysics and it seems that we are closer than ever to being able to answer it."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Jan. 15 issue of the journal Nature.

Unusual 'ingredients' helped stars form in a galaxy near the Milky Way

Elizabeth Howell — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Some newly found stars in a small galaxy called Sextans A are forming without some of the usual "ingredients" — raising questions about how the early universe evolved.

The astronomers behind a new study of these stars likened the stars' environment to a cosmic kitchen. Usually, stars being "cooked" in these kitchens are made up of essential ingredients like silicon, carbon and iron. Sextans A, however, is missing almost all of those ingredients, creating a situation where something as essential as metaphorical sugar, or flour, is absent from the "kitchen" where the stars form, researchers stated.

"Every discovery in Sextans A reminds us that the early universe was more inventive than we imagined," lead author Martha Boyer, an associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a NASA statement. (The institute operates JWST, and coordinates its observations.)

Boyer was part of the team studying these stars, and the environment between them, with the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists published the work in two studies highlighted in a press conference this week at the American Astronomical Association's annual meeting in Phoenix. One study was published in September 2025 in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJ), while the other study is awaiting peer review after being published on preprint server arXiv in December.

The ApJ study examined the spectra, or light signatures, of half a dozen stars in Sextans A, which is near our home Milky Way galaxy. Sextans A has a very low metal content, or metallicity, compared to the sun — just 3% to 7%. That's because the galaxy is not massive enough to hold on to heavier elements, like iron and oxygen, produced by old stars and supernovas (the explosions of massive, old stars that run out of fuel to burn).

Using JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument, the scientists honed in on stars, all between one and eight times the mass of the sun, that are late in their lifetimes. These are called asymptomatic giant branch (ASB) stars at the red giant phase of existence, before they explode and collapse into white dwarfs.

Usually, ASB stars produce silicate dust in metal-rich galaxies, said Boyer, who led the ApJ study. "However, at such low metallicity [in the galaxy], we expect these stars to be nearly dust-free," she added. "Instead, Webb revealed a star forging dust grains made almost entirely of iron. This is something we've never seen in stars that are analogs of stars in the early universe."

Astronomers wouldn't expect stars missing those key 'ingredients' to be able to create much dust at all. The JWST revealed that not only are the stars producing dust, but one of them was able to do so using an entirely different chemical "recipe."

Stars in the dwarf galaxy Sextans A, a portion of which was imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope at left, came together in an environment missing essential ingredients for star formation. The entire galaxy is visible at left in a ground-based image from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. (Image credit: STScI, NASA, ESA, CSA, KPNO, NSF's NOIRLab, AURA, Elizabeth Tarantino (STScI), Phil Massey (Lowell Obs.), George Jacoby (NSF, AURA), Chris Smith (NSF, AURA); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Travis Rector (UAA), Mahdi Zamani (NSF's NOIRLab), Davide De Martin (NSF's NOIRLab))

The second study in arXiv looked at the interstellar medium (the environment between stars) in Sextans A, searching for carbon-bearing molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Models suggest that PAHs would best form in metal-rich galaxies, unlike Sextans A. Yet scientists still found "pockets" of PAHs in the dwarf galaxy.

"Webb shows that PAHs can form and survive even in the most metal-starved galaxies, but only in small, protected islands of dense gas," Arxiv study lead author Elizabeth Tarantino, a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in the same statement.

The study authors suggest the PAHs came together where the density of gas, and shielding of dust, gave just enough protection. By association, this would mean that PAHs tend to be difficult to find in metal-poor galaxies because these galaxies often lack such protection.

Astronomers plan to peer at Sextans A again with JWST to search out more PAHs, using high-resolution spectroscopy. The planned observations may give more information about the PAH clump chemistry. But in the meantime, team members stated, the two studies show potential other ways of creating dust than supernovas, and that cosmic environments with low metallicity have more dust than models predicted.