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Exoplanets

Worlds beyond our solar system.

Stars

Giant balls of hot gas that burn for millions to billions of years.

Black Holes

Concentrations of matter with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Galaxies

Collections of stars, planets, and vast clouds of gas and dust bound together by gravity.

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NASA’s IXPE Helps Researchers Determine Shape of Black Hole Corona

Scientists have long speculated about the geometry of a black hole’s corona, a region created by strong magnetic fields threading through the accretion disk. Now observations from IXPE help shed light on these obscure environments.

An illustration of a black hole with a dark circle surrounded by light discs.

This illustration of material swirling around a black hole highlights a particular feature, called the “corona,” that shines brightly in X-ray light. In this depiction, the corona can be seen as a purple haze floating above the underlying accretion disk, and extending slightly inside of its inner edge.

NASA/Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt

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Snippet of Euclid Mission’s Cosmic Atlas Released by ESA

ESA (the European Space Agency) has released a new, 208-gigapixel mosaic of images taken by Euclid, a mission with NASA contributions that launched in 2023 to study why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

Featured News

NASA Reveals Prototype Telescope for Gravitational Wave Observatory

A technician inspects a prototype LISA telescope.

NASA’s TESS Spots Record-Breaking Stellar Triplets

NASA Successfully Integrates Coronagraph for Roman Space Telescope

Article2 weeks ago

Planets Beware: NASA Unburies Danger Zones of Star Cluster

NASA Establishes New Class of Astrophysics Missions, Selects Studies

NASA's Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano

Located 700 light-years away, a binary star system called R Aquarii redistributes products of nuclear energy in violent eruptions of glowing gas.

A bright binary star surrounded by a colorful loops of nebula on the black background of space. One loop is vertical the other is horizontal across the center of the image.

Universe News

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Hubble Captures a Galaxy with Many Lights

A spiral galaxy with an oval-shaped disk. Two large arms curve out away from the ends of the disk. Bright pink patches and dark reddish threads of dust fill the arms. The bright pink patches indicate where stars are forming. The core is very bright and filled with stars. Some large stars appear in front of the galaxy. Directly under the point where the right arm joins the disk, a fading supernova is visible as a green dot.

NASA’s NEOWISE Spacecraft Re-Enters Atmosphere, But More Discoveries Await!

A collage of space-themed citizen science project logos, including 'Milky Way Project,' 'Exoplanet Explorers,' 'Cool Neighbors,' 'Disk Detective,' and 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.

A young woman with curly blonde hair wearing a cozy sweater smiles at the camera, standing in a modern hallway with plants in the background.

Sadie Coffin Named Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences/NASA Citizen Science Leaders Series Fellow

Article7 days ago

The top-left half of the image is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around the summer star Vega. The disk is represented in blue. The color trails to white as we get closer to the center of the disk. The black spot at the center blocks out the bright glow of the hot young star. The disk is perfectly circular because we are looking down on top of it. The lower-right half of the image is a view from the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals the glow of warm dust in the disk's halo that is colored orange. The disk is brighter toward the center. There is a notable dip in surface brightness between the inner and outer disk.

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

Article1 week ago

Why NASA’s SPHEREx Mission Will Make ‘Most Colorful’ Cosmic Map Ever

Article2 weeks ago

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Galaxies

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Black Holes

Stars

Exoplanets