The Best Space Images of 2023
Gif: X-ray: NASA/SAO/GSFC/M. Corcoran et al.; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, N. Wolk (SAO/CXC)/Gizmodo This is a timelapse of an outburst by Eta Carinae, a star system about 7,500…
The Hubble Telescope Just Sized Up an Earth-Sized Exoplanet
The Hubble Space Telescope just ogled an exoplanet passing in front of a star in a triple system, revealing the nearby world’s mass. Webb Telescope Images the Pillars of Creation…
16 Iconic NASA Photos That Changed Everything
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured this view of Earth—appearing as a speck of light—on February 14, 1980, at a distance of roughly 3.2 billion miles (6 billion km) from the…
Webb and Hubble Telescopes Team Up to Image ‘Mothra’ and a Massive ‘Christmas Tree’ Cluster
It’s not yet December, but NASA is already in a festive mood: the Webb and Hubble space telescopes recently imaged MACS0416, a pair of colliding galaxy clusters 4.3 billion light-years…
Live Reveal: Euclid Space Telescope’s First Glimpse of the Dark Universe
The European Space Agency’s $1.4 billion Euclid space telescope is charged with revealing the dark universe—the 95% of the cosmos we don’t see. On Tuesday, the telescope’s first images will…
You’ve Never Seen Jupiter Look So Much Like Cotton Candy
You probably know Jupiter, the rotund fifth planet from the Sun, as orange and tan with a big red splotch. But the Hubble Space Telescope recently imaged the gas giant in…
Gaia Mission Discovers Half a Million New Stars and 150,000 Asteroids
The latest data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory just dropped, and it’s a massive one: the spacecraft has identified half a million stars in a nearby cluster,…
The Euclid ‘Dark Universe’ Space Telescope Is Off to a Faltering Start
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope launched from Earth on July 1 and has since been getting set up to begin its investigation of the dark universe. But the…
Webb Telescope Sees Tantalizing Molecular Signals on Possible Water World
The Webb Space Telescope recently turned its focus to a nearby exoplanet and found that it may be a Hycean world, or a world completely covered in a single global…
Cosmic Question Mark Spotted in Deep Space Suggests the Universe Is Stumped
The James Webb Space Telescope captured the eerie punctuation mark, found buried within an image of Herbig-Haro 46/47—a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars located 1,470 light years from…