The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a stellar new image of the Whirlpool Galaxy (aka M51 or NGC 5194), a grand-design spiral galaxy about 27 million light-years away from Earth. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), grand-design ...

Even the most advanced ground-based telescopes struggle with nearsighted vision issues. Often this isn’t through any fault of their own, but a dilemma of having to see through the Earth’s constantly varying atmospheric interferences. As undesirable as that is to ...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just headed into its second year in service, and recently recorded new images of the Ring Nebula named Messier 57. This nebula is about 2,600 light-years away from Earth, located in the Lyra ...

The early universe was a stressful place for galaxies. Globs of tens to hundreds of neighboring galaxies, called galaxy clusters, would share a communal pool of hot gas—but not without drama. There was always another wayward galaxy crashing into the cluster, ...

In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that ...

The three-decade old Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a swarm of space boulders around the asteroid Dimorphos. If that name sounds familiar, it is the same asteroid that NASA deliberately slammed the 1,200 pound DART spacecraft into in September 2022. ...

Our asteroid belt is home to more than a million space rocks, varying in size from a dwarf planet to dust particles, which float between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have just discovered another such belt—but this one circles a different ...

The universe is a dusty place. Cosmic particles can range from the size of a single large molecule up to a bit larger than a grain of terrestrial sand, and these can accumulate in billowing clouds light-years wide. The general ...

In milliseconds, Google can serve up a fact that long eluded many of humanity’s deepest thinkers: The universe is nearly 14 billion years old. And many cosmologists continue to grow more confident in that number. In December of 2020, a ...

Few scientific tools get introduced in a press conference by the commander-in-chief. But NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is no ordinary instrument. President Biden unveiled the first image from JWST in July 2022, revealing the sharpest, deepest infrared view of ...