Spaaaaace... And stuff

The James Webb Space Telescope just looked into one of the nearest stellar nurseries in our galaxy and found something remarkable:

An entire timeline of star birth captured in a single image.

🌌 Some of the objects in the image aren't stars yet.

They're dense pockets of gas and dust slowly collapsing under gravity.

🌟 Others are newborn protostars, still hidden inside their dusty cocoons.

🚀 Some are blasting enormous jets of material into space.

🪐 Others already have protoplanetary disks—the raw ingredients for future solar systems.

⭐ And a few have grown into young stars that have begun clearing away the clouds around them.

All of these stages are happening at the same time inside Orion Molecular Cloud 2, about 1,280 light-years from Earth.

The wild part?

This hidden stellar nursery sits just behind the famous Orion Nebula—the same glowing object that countless people have viewed through backyard telescopes.

So the next time you look at Orion, remember:

Behind that familiar nebula, entire solar systems are being assembled right now.

We're not just looking into space.

We're watching the universe build itself.

Who’s ready to celebrate? The Hubble Space Telescope is! In honor of its 36th anniversary this week, the telescope returned a detailed closeup of the Trifid Nebula, which lies about 5,000 light-years from Earth.

The colors in Hubble’s visible light image are reminiscent of an underwater scene filled with fine-grained sediments fluttering through the ocean’s depths. Hubble’s image focuses on a “head” and undulating “body” of a rust-colored cloud of gas and dust that resembles a sea slug that appears as if it is gliding through the cosmos.

The sea slug’s left “horn” is part of Herbig-Haro 399, a jet of plasma periodically ejected over centuries by an actively forming star embedded in the head.

Several massive stars, which are outside this field of view, have shaped this region for at least 300,000 years.

Hubble has helped researchers make discoveries for decades—and supplies new data every day that will inevitably lead to more. Hubble’s varied instruments and the expansive range of light it collects—ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared—have sealed the telescope’s status as an ongoing astronomical pioneer.

2026 May 21

A Collision of Galaxy Clusters Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/C. Watson et al.; Optical: PanSTARRS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk and P. Edmonds Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

Explanation: This big beautiful spiral shines in X-ray light. It is about 20 times larger than our Galaxy. It belongs to Abell 2029, a galaxy cluster one billion light-years away. (To see only the galaxies, hover your cursor over the image, or follow this link.) Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe that are supported by gravity. Abell 2029 is formed by thousands of galaxies, surrounded by a huge cloud of hot gas and the equivalent of hundreds of trillions times the mass of the Sun in dark matter. The spiral is made of gas, mostly hydrogen and helium, heated to tens of millions of degrees. It was found in a recent study that used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to show that Abell 2029 had a collision with a smaller cluster four billion years ago. The collision affected the gravitational field and caused the intracluster gas to slosh, like wine moving in a wine glass, shaping the spiral.

TRACE and the Active Sun - May 15th, 1998.

Io in True Color

HiPOD: Translucent Ice on Dunes

Coordinating with the CaSSIS instrument on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, we acquired an image at this site for seasonal monitoring. At the time of year we took the image, the whole scene was probably covered in carbon dioxide ice. Some of this ice is translucent, so you can see the dark dunes through it.

ID: ESP_076844_2550 date: 18 December 2022 altitude: 316 km