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How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe? A team of scientists has used observations by NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt to determine the brightness of the cosmic optical background. Their result sets an upper limit to the abundance of faint, unresolved galaxies, showing that there is about twice as much optical light permeating space as can be accounted for by all known galaxies.

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In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a blank patch of the sky for 10 straight days. The resulting Deep Field image captured thousands of previously unseen, distant galaxies. The Roman Space Telescope will be able to photograph an area of sky 100 times larger than Hubble with the same exquisite sharpness. As a result, a Roman Ultra Deep Field would collect millions of galaxies, including hundreds that date back to just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

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Forming solar systems are a bit unkempt—a profusion of gas and dust, and an array of molecules orbits a star that's still gathering material. Over time, some of the dust bumps into one another, forming larger and larger particles until planets begin forming. Researchers know quite a bit about the outer regions of these planet-forming disks, but the inner areas, extending about as far as Saturn in our solar system, and the forming planets they may contain aren't yet well studied. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's specialization in mid-infrared light, specifically its collection of data known as spectra, will help researchers model what's going on at the centers of these systems with unprecedented detail.

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A giant dark storm on Neptune heading for certain doom at the equator mysteriously halted its journey and began drifting in the opposite direction. Almost simultaneously, another smaller dark spot appeared nearby, only to vanish months later. Hubble astronomers are presenting these findings today at the Fall 2020 American Geophysical Union meeting.

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Astronomers analyzing Hubble images of the double star, HD 106906, have discovered a planet in a huge 15,000-year-long orbit that sweeps it as far from its stellar duo as Planet Nine would be from our Sun. This is observational evidence that similarly far-flung worlds may exist around other stars. Researchers hypothesize that the planet wound up there in a game of planetary pinball where the gravitational pull of a passing star modified the orbit's shape.

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Great things take time. This is true when it comes to many processes in the universe. For example, it takes millions of years for stars—the building blocks of the universe—to form. Then, many stars last for billions of years before they die and begin to eject shells of gas that glow against the vastness of space—what we call nebulas. It can be exceedingly rare to capture some of these processes in real time. Lucky for us, it seems as if the Stingray nebula, Hen 3-1357, was destined to stand out from the crowd since its beginnings. It was dubbed the youngest known planetary nebula in 1998 after Hubble caught a rare peek at the central star’s final stages of life. Now, twenty years after its first snapshot, the Stingray nebula is capturing the attention of astronomers again for a very different reason. Images from 2016 show a nebula that has drastically faded over the last two decades. Additionally, shells of gas that surrounded the central star have changed, no longer as crisp as

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This Hubble image of a disk of material feeding a monster black hole in nearby galaxy IC 5063 may be casting its shadow into space. The shadow is interspersed with bright rays that extend across the galaxy. This unique effect offers insight into the structure of the disk.

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Dust may seem insignificant, but it plays a huge role in the universe, from the formation of stars and planets to facilitating the complex chemistry that becomes the stuff of life—including usT. Astronomers refer to the unexplained abundance of dust in galaxies as the “dust budget crisis.” It is a mystery that astronomers are excited to get to work solving using the specialized technology of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

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Following up on an enormous gamma ray burst detected by Swift in May, Hubble astronomers believe they've viewed the glow of a kilonova, the aftermath of a colossal explosion caused by the merger of two neutron stars that formed a magnetar. The near-infrared emission seen by Hubble was 10 times brighter than predicted.

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This is a ground-based telescopic photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The LMC is one of several select targets of a new initiative with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, called ULLYSES (UV Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards). The program is looking at over 300 stars to build an ultraviolet-light catalog for capturing the diversity of stars, from young to old, to give astronomers a much better understanding of the birth of stars and how this relates to everything from planets to the formation and evolution of galaxies.

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This new Hubble photo resembling a Halloween carved pumpkin features the early stages of a collision between two galaxies. The “pumpkin’s” glowing “eyes” are the bright, star-filled cores of each galaxy that contain supermassive black holes. An arm of newly forming stars give the imaginary gourd a wry smirk.

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In the distant reaches of the solar system lies a region called the Kuiper Belt. Beyond the orbit of Neptune, this ring of icy bodies is left over from the early days of planet formation. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will examine an assortment of these objects shortly after its launch in 2021.

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New research finds that the majority of stars in our galaxy’s central bulge formed in a single burst of star formation more than 10 billion years ago. To reach this conclusion, astronomers surveyed millions of stars across 200 square degrees of sky—an area equivalent to 1,000 full Moons. The resulting wealth of data is expected to fuel many more scientific inquiries.

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A new theoretical study examines how well NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2021, will be able to separate the light of host galaxies from the bright central quasar. The researchers find that Webb could detect host galaxies that existed just 1 billion years after the big bang.

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Hubble Space Telescope images have been assembled into a time-lapse video of an exploding star fading into oblivion inside a distant galaxy. The video compresses one-year's worth of observations into seconds. When it exploded the supernova was as bright as 5 billion Suns.

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Merging galaxies often appear lit up like a fireworks display. The meeting of their gas flows accelerates star formation and feeds their central black holes. However, much of this activity, particularly where they are interacting, is shrouded by dust. Webb’s significantly more sensitive, sharper observations in infrared light will be able to see through the dust, leading to high-resolution data that will reveal far more about what’s happening at the cores of these galaxies.

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More massive than all the other planets combined, Jupiter truly is the king of our solar system. The swirling clouds, arranged in colorful, banded structures, change from year to year. The rich colors are produced by trace compounds in Jupiter’s predominantly hydrogen/helium atmosphere. Hurricane-force winds propel these clouds, and upwelling currents are ablaze with lightning bolts far more powerful than those seen on Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope serves as a “weather satellite” for monitoring Jupiter’s stormy weather. The iconic Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, shows that it’s shrinking a little in the Hubble images, but it still dominates the entire southern atmosphere, plowing through the clouds like a cargo ship. Hubble astronomers patiently wait to get close-up snapshots as Earth make its nearest annual approach to Jupiter – an astronomical alignment called an opposition, when Jupiter is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun.

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On Monday, Oct. 5, 2020, journalists are invited to attend a virtual workshop for science writers on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. This workshop will feature a panel of prominent scientists, including a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

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Astronomers using Hubble and the VLT have found that something may be missing from the theories of how dark matter behaves. This missing ingredient may explain why they have uncovered an unexpected discrepancy between observations of the dark matter concentrations in a sample of massive galaxy clusters and theoretical computer simulations of how dark matter should be distributed in clusters. The new findings indicate that small-scale concentrations of dark matter produce lensing effects that are 10 times stronger than expected.

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In a comprehensive study of the gaseous halo of the Andromeda galaxy, Hubble astronomers have mapped this tenuous plasma, finding that it has a layered structure, with two distinct, nested shells of gas. They also found that it extends 1.3 million light-years from Andromeda—about halfway to our Milky Way—and as far as 2 million light-years in some directions. This reservoir of gas is full of clues to Andromeda’s past and future, and may offer insight into the evolution of our own Milky Way galaxy.

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Whether it’s a surprise asteroid, colorful aurora or a heart-stopping eclipse, the landscape of the night sky is constantly changing. When a new visitor appears in view, it’s guaranteed to grab the attention of professional astronomers and casual sky gazers alike. Well, consider the Hubble Space Telescope the paparazzi of the sky, as it’s managed to snap the closest images yet of the sky’s latest visitor to make headlines, comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), after it passed by the Sun. Comet NEOWISE is considered the brightest visible from the Northern Hemisphere since 1997’s Hale-Bopp. It’s estimated to be traveling at a whopping 40 miles per second, or 144,000 miles per hour. The comet’s closest approach to the Sun took place on July 3 and it’s now heading back to the outer parts of the solar system, not to pass through again for another 7,000 years or so.

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Like a penny compared to the entire Moon, a supermassive black hole is very small in relation to its host galaxy. Still, supermassive black holes have immense influence on the galaxies they inhabit. Residing at the centers of virtually all galaxies, they are extraordinarily dense, compact regions of space from which nothing — not even light — can escape. As a supermassive black hole devours material, it becomes surrounded by a swirling disk of gas. When this gas falls toward the black hole, it releases an enormous amount of energy, creating a brilliant and powerful galactic core called a quasar. The energy from quasars is widely thought to be responsible for limiting the growth of massive galaxies. Shortly after the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists plan to study the effect of three carefully selected quasars on their host galaxies in a program called Q3D.

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Hubble Space Telescope observations show that the unexpected dimming of supergiant star Betelgeuse was probably caused by an immense amount of hot plasma ejected into space. The plasma cooled, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight coming from Betelgeuse's surface.

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Upgrades in the new edition of WebbVR—the virtual reality program that is based on the scientific capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—include interactive exoplanet detection, additional detail in the solar system experience, and Spanish translations. WebbVR works on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and is available for free download on Steam and Viveport.

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Astronomers used Hubble during a total lunar eclipse to detect ozone in our planet’s atmosphere by looking at Earthlight reflected off the Moon in ultraviolet wavelengths. This method serves as a proxy for how astronomers will observe Earth-like exoplanets in search of life.

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NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has just successfully completed a preliminary design review of the mission’s ground systems, including the Science Operations Center that will be hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. This means the plan for science operations has met all of the design, schedule, and budget requirements. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data.

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will have a challenging early assignment in the solar system: observe the largest, fastest-rotating planet—Jupiter—as well as its faint rings and two of the four Galilean satellites: icy Ganymede and fiery Io. In addition to laying groundwork for the rest of Webb’s mission, the ambitious program should yield new scientific insights, not only into the Jovian system, but also the geological history of Earth and exoplanet science.

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Hubble photographed Saturn and its rings on July 4, during summer in Saturn's northern hemisphere. This image is taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project. OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system's gas giant planets.

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A disk around a young star is casting a huge shadow resembling a pair of wings on a distant cloud. In 2018, Hubble astronomers nicknamed the phenomenon the Bat Shadow. Now, they see those “wings” flapping!

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The most distant galaxies astronomers have observed are seen as they were about 500 million years after the big bang, but galaxies are thought to have formed even earlier. Since light from these earliest galaxies has traveled through the expanding universe for so long, their light has shifted so far into the infrared that they can't currently be seen by existing observatories. Researchers will employ NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to target these extremely distant galaxies by using its infrared instruments to obtain both imagery and colorful spectra, which provide loads of information about the targets and help researchers build highly detailed data sets about the objects that existed in the early universe.

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New images from the Hubble Space Telescope have helped researchers identify rapid changes in material blasting off stars at the centers of two planetary nebulas NGC 6302 and NGC 7027— causing them to reconsider what is happening at their cores.

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Not long ago, the center of our galaxy exploded. Our primitive ancestors, already afoot in Africa, probably saw the resulting flare. Now Hubble detects that flash's signature in a huge tail of gas orbiting the galaxy some 200,000 light-years away.

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When it comes to the best region to form planets, it's all about location. Planets in the nearby star cluster Westerlund 2 may have a rough time forming in the crowded core. Astronomers using Hubble find that energy from hefty stars is blowing away planet-forming dust clouds from smaller stars.

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Asteroids, many of which are locked in orbits between Mars and Jupiter, are the rocky leftovers of planet formation. The outer planets continually stirred them up, preventing them from combining to form larger bodies. But where did they originally form? And what clues might they offer about the history of planetary migration in the early solar system? In one observation program, NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will probe five bodies, three in the main asteroid belt and two Trojan asteroids, to shed new light on the drama that occurred billions of years ago.

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Today, NASA announced that it is naming its next-generation space telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief Astronomer, who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe. The newly named Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (or Roman Space Telescope, for short), is set to launch in the mid-2020s.

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Thanks to the teamwork of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gemini Observatory, and the Juno spacecraft, scientists are able to probe deep into Jupiter's storm systems and investigate sources of lightning outbursts, map cyclonic vortices, and unravel the nature of enigmatic features within the Great Red Spot.

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A team of astronomers has discovered that the closest known brown dwarf, Luhman 16A, shows signs of cloud bands similar to those seen on Jupiter and Saturn. This is the first time scientists have used the technique of polarimetry to determine the properties of atmospheric clouds outside of the solar system, or exoclouds.

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Combined observations of WASP-79b from Hubble and other telescopes reveal a weird super-hot planet where the sky is yellow instead of blue due to lack of an atmospheric effect called Rayleigh scattering, which makes Earth’s sky blue.

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The nearby Orion Nebula is home to a bustling stellar nursery called the Trapezium Cluster, where approximately a thousand very young stars are crammed into a space only 4 light-years across. These stars are around a million years old, which at first glance doesn’t seem very young. However, if our solar system were a middle-aged person, the stars in the Trapezium would be just three- or four-day-old babies. Astronomers using the Webb telescope will study this cluster to understand stars and their planetary systems in the very earliest stages.

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This pair of Hubble photos of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20 and 23, 2020, provide the sharpest views yet of the breakup of the solid nucleus of the comet. Hubble distinguishes as many as 30 pieces that are roughly the size of a house.

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A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 30 years of viewing the wonders of space.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have come to the jaw-dropping conclusion that a planet orbiting another star has seemingly disappeared after appearing in several years’ worth of Hubble images. A team of astronomers from the University of Arizona believe this is forensic evidence of a titanic collision between two asteroid-sized bodies orbiting a nearby star, Fomalhaut.

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Zooming through space, the first bonafide interstellar comet discovered passing through our solar system is yielding chemical clues to its origin. An abundance of carbon monoxide contained in comet Borisov suggests it was born around a cool red dwarf star.

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Scientists will use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope study three mysterious, cold, dense clouds where high-mass stars form.

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A team of astronomers have found the best evidence yet that the culprit in a stellar homicide is a mid-sized black hole, the long-sought "missing link" in the black hole family. Multiple lines of evidence pointed to the elusive type of black hole, including investigations using Hubble and Chandra.

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NASA has selected 24 new Fellows for its prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP). The program enables outstanding postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research in any area of NASA Astrophysics, using theory, observation, experimentation, or instrument development. Each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support at a university or research center of their choosing in the United States.

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A team of astronomers using Hubble have found the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe. These outflows emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space like tsunamis, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.

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A team of researchers designed a computer algorithm based on slime mold behavior to generate a filamentary map of the universe, which they then confirmed with archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Shortly after its lauch in 2021, a team of scientists will train NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on the upper atmospheres of our solar system's mysterious ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.

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The operations people behind the Space Telescope's 30 years of breakthrough science are honored by the National Air and Space Museum.