Telescopes

Nearly a millennium ago, astronomers witnessed a brilliant new star blazing in the sky—a supernova so bright it was visible in daylight for weeks. Today, its expanding remnant, the Crab Nebula, continues to evolve 6,500 light-years away. First linked to historical records by Edwin Hubble, the nebula has since been studied in exquisite detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has now revisited this ancient explosion to trace its ongoing expansion and transformation.

Catching a comet in the process of falling apart is difficult, but a coincidence let astronomers see one in more detail than ever before using the Hubble Space Telescope – and revealed a mystery

Astronomers have uncovered surprising evidence of a thick atmosphere surrounding TOI-561 b, a scorching, fast-orbiting rocky planet once thought too extreme to hold onto any gas. Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers found the planet is far cooler than expected for a bare rock, hinting at a heat-distributing atmosphere above a churning magma ocean. This strange world—where a year lasts just over 10 hours and one side is locked in eternal daylight—may even be rich in volatile materials, behaving like a “wet lava ball.”

In an incredibly lucky cosmic accident, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a comet breaking apart in real time—something astronomers have long tried and failed to observe. The comet, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), wasn’t even the original target, but when researchers pivoted to it, they unknowingly caught it mid-disintegration into multiple pieces.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has observed a nearby spiral galaxy known as NGC 628. Results of the observational campaign, published March 10 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on the population of emerging young star clusters in this galaxy.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking

A team of astronomers were fortunate when their original comet target couldn't be observed with the Hubble. They quickly pivoted to a different target, and caught Comet K1 in the process of breaking apart. This gave them an excellent opportunity to learn more about the doomed object.

In a stroke of luck, astronomers saw the comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) break into four or five fragments in November after it passed close to the sun.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

Kepler-51d is a giant, ultra-light “super-puff” planet wrapped in an unusually thick haze that’s blocking scientists from seeing what it’s made of. Observations from JWST revealed that this haze may be one of the largest ever detected, possibly stretching as wide as Earth itself. The planet’s low density and close orbit don’t match existing models of how gas giants form or survive. Now, researchers are left with more questions than answers about how such a strange world came to be.

Astronomers have identified a strange new kind of exoplanet that challenges how scientists classify worlds beyond our Solar System. The planet, L 98-59 d, appears to contain a vast ocean of molten rock beneath its surface that traps large amounts of sulfur deep inside. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope revealed unusual sulfur-rich gases in its atmosphere and a surprisingly low density for its size.

Everything you need to know about telescope magnification and eyepieces

Europa is not supposed to look the way it does. Jupiter's icy moon is scarred by a chaotic patchwork of fractured terrain, crisscrossed ridges, and disrupted surface regions that suggest something dynamic is happening beneath its frozen shell. Scientists have long suspected that a vast liquid ocean, kept warm by the gravitational kneading of Jupiter's enormous gravity, lies hidden beneath that ice. Now, a new study using the James Webb Space Telescope is adding a crucial piece to the puzzle, and the implications reach right to the heart of astrobiology.

Astronomers combined Hubble's small-scale details of stellar death with Euclid's wide view of cosmic environments to take a closer look at the iconic Cat's Eye Nebula.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing a star suddenly burst into a blaze of light brighter than anything nearby. A flash so bright that it briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading forever.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

The comet formed in a cold and distant part of the early Milky Way up to 12 billion years ago, potentially putting it just under 2 billion years the age of the universe.

Jupiter's powerful, continuous aurorae dwarf those of Earth. Scientists know that Jupiter's Galilean moons created bright spots on Jupiter's northern aurora. The JWST observed these bright spots and generated infrared spectra of them for the first time. Those observations showed that Io's bright spot is extremely variable in both temperature and density, and researchers want to know why.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals new infrared images of the brain-shaped "Exposed Cranium" nebula, the final stages of a dying star.

Astronomers have analyzed the images collected by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to investigate a galactic open cluster known as NGC 2158. Results of the study, published Feb. 25 on the arXiv pre-print server, provide essential insights into the population of binary stars in this cluster.

Small, smart and beginner-friendly, the SeeStar S50 takes the hassle out of stargazing, delivering detailed nebula and galaxy shots at the tap of your screen.

It's hard to turn away from a picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula, even if you've seen it dozens of times. It may be the most visually compelling planetary nebula out there, with its billowing, layered shrouds and its intricate structure. NASA and the ESA have combined images of the Cat's Eye from the Euclid and Hubble space telescopes for a fresh look at a favourite and historical cosmic object.

An international team of scientists, led by a Ph.D. researcher from Northumbria University, has made further discoveries about a spectacular feature of Jupiter's northern lights, revealing a never-before-seen temperature structure and dramatic density changes within the top of the giant planet's atmosphere.

For this month's ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month, NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope is joined by ESA's Euclid to create a new view of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star: the Cat's Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. This extraordinary planetary nebula in the constellation Draco has captivated astronomers for decades with its elaborate and multilayered structure. Observations with ESA's Gaia mission place the nebula at a distance of about 4,300 light-years.

A new study suggests that "little red dots" spied by the James Webb Space Telescope could be the universe's short-lived first generation of gigantic stars, challenging an existing theory.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

The first bubble of hot gas seen around another star has been spotted around the "Moth," just 117 light-years away.

The radio telescope LOFAR, with a major contribution from Leiden Observatory, has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made. Never before have so many cosmic radio sources been captured in a single survey: 13.7 million.

Nebula PMR 1 looks uncannily similar to an electrified brain inside a semi-transparent skull

Uranus is a planet that seems to roll around on its side as it orbits the Sun. That's because it's tipped over, with an axial tilt of 97.8 degrees. That weird tilt gave the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) a chance to probe the ionosphere using the Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) instrument. An international team of astronomers used the data to map the vertical structure of that region and detect faint auroral displays.

The Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 5-inch Schmidt-Cass is now down to $479 at Amazon, making it easy to enjoy the blood moon eclipse on March 3.

A dying star has ejected its outer layer and illuminated it with its powerful radiation. The resulting nebula looks every bit like a transparent human skull. Astronomers are calling the unusual structure the Exposed Cranium Nebula.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

Chandra's X-ray Space Telescope, with some help from the Hubble, spotted a young Sun-like star about 120 light-years away with a powerful stellar wind. It's carving out its astrosphere, a bubble of relatively hot gas that's pushing into the surrounding, much cooler, interstellar medium. This is the same process our Sun went through 5 billion years ago when it created the heliosphere.

JWST observed Uranus for nearly a full rotation, charting the planet's upper atmosphere and magnetic environment for the first time.

How did the construction of the Subaru Telescope transform Japanese astronomy? A new study provides a quantitative answer by analyzing scientific publications and their citation impact during the telescope's early years. Drawing on large-scale publication data, the research shows that the Subaru Telescope generated many internationally influential results and significantly enhanced Japan's global visibility in astronomical research.

Fresh observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show how vivid auroras surge through Uranus’s tilted magnetic field

Search through space telescope’s archival images reveals unusually dim galaxy

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

A stunning new Hubble image reveals the most detailed look yet at the Egg Nebula, the youngest and closest pre-planetary nebula to Earth.

Drawing together leading experts from across the field, an international collaboration of cosmologists has created a unified approach for measuring the value of the Hubble constant. Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the milestone could bring us a step closer to understanding why the universe appears to be expanding faster than our standard cosmological model predicts.

For the first time, scientists have mapped Uranus’s upper atmosphere in three dimensions, tracking temperatures and charged particles up to 5,000 kilometers above the clouds. Webb’s sharp vision revealed glowing auroral bands and unexpected dark regions shaped by the planet’s wildly tilted magnetic field.

Astronomers have uncovered one of the most mysterious galaxies ever found — a dim, ghostly object called CDG-2 that is almost entirely made of dark matter. Located 300 million light-years away in the Perseus galaxy cluster, it was discovered in an unusual way: not by its stars, but by four tightly packed globular clusters acting like cosmic breadcrumbs.

A Simon Fraser University cosmologist believes his team’s new research may bring them a step closer to cracking one of science’s biggest questions – the Hubble tension.

Astronomers have found a candidate Jellyfish Galaxy only about 5 billion years after the Big Bang. This is earlier than expected, since the ram pressure stripping responsible for it wasn't thought to be possible so early in the Universe's history. The galaxy could explain the puzzling "Red Nugget" galaxies, but first it has to be confirmed.

We know galaxies by their powerful illumination, generated by multitudes of stars. But some galaxies can be very dim. These are hypothesized to be dark galaxies, or dark matter galaxies. They're theoretical, and only candidates have been identified, but researchers may have confirmed the very first one.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

Author(s): William R. Coulton et al.The authors use the relativistic thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Planck to measure the average electron temperature in galaxy-cluster stacks, thus paving the way for dramatic measurement improvements in upcoming survey data. [Phys. Rev. D 113, 043520] Published Wed Feb 18, 2026

In the vast tapestry of the universe, most galaxies shine brightly across cosmic time and space. Yet a rare class of galaxies remains nearly invisible—low-surface-brightness galaxies dominated by dark matter and containing only a sparse scattering of faint stars.

Astrophysicists from the University of Waterloo have observed a new jellyfish galaxy, the most distant one of its kind ever captured. Jellyfish galaxies are named for the long, tentacle-like streams that trail behind them. They move quickly through their hot, dense galaxy cluster, and the gas within the cluster acts like a strong wind pushing the jellyfish galaxy's own gas out the back, forming trails. The technical term for this process is ram-pressure stripping. The Waterloo scientists found this galaxy in deep space data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It is at z = 1.156, meaning we're seeing it as it was 8.5 billion years ago, when the universe was much younger.

Astronomers are racing to understand mysterious ancient objects that pepper James Webb Space Telescope images

Astronomers want to collect as much data as possible using as many systems as possible. Sometimes that requires coordination between instruments. The teams that run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) missions will have plenty of opportunity for that once both telescopes are online in the early 2030s. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from the Ariel-JWST Synergy Working Group details just how exactly the two systems can work together to better analyze exoplanets.

It's well established that the universe is expanding, but there's serious disagreement among scientists over how fast it's happening.

Recent observations suggest that 'runaway' black holes are tumbling through the cosmos. Building on decades of theory, the discovery adds a remarkable new chapter to the story of the universe.

A dazzling new Hubble image peels back the layers of the mysterious Egg Nebula, a rare and fleeting phase in a Sun-like star’s death just 1,000 light-years away. Hidden inside a dense cocoon of dust, the dying star blasts twin beams of light through a polar opening, carving glowing lobes and delicate ripples into the surrounding cloud. These striking, symmetrical arcs hint that unseen companion stars may be shaping the spectacle from within.

NASA's SPHEREx space telescope detected organic molecules coming off comet 3I/ATLAS as the interstellar visitor made its closest approach to Earth in December.

Astronomers want to collect as much data as possible using as many systems as possible. Sometimes that requires coordination between instruments. The teams that run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) missions will have plenty of opportunity for that once both telescopes are online in the early 2030s. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from the Ariel-JWST Synergy Working Group details just how exactly the two systems can work together to better analyze exoplanets.

The stunning image captures a star's dying moments wrapped in dust, light, and a cosmic conundrum still waiting to be solved.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

This stunning image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a dramatic interplay of light and shadow in the Egg Nebula, sculpted by freshly ejected stardust. Located approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Egg Nebula features a central star obscured by a dense cloud of dust—like a "yolk" nestled within a dark, opaque "egg white." Only Hubble's sharpness can unveil the intricate details that hint at the processes shaping this enigmatic structure.

NASA observes interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS unexpectedly flaring as it leaves the solar system, revealing water vapour and organic compounds.

A team of researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope has produced the most detailed map of dark matter to date.

Author(s): Davide Pedrotti, Luis A. Escamilla, Valerio Marra, Leandros Perivolaropoulos, and Sunny VagnozziThe authors demonstrate that, even if fiducial cosmology assumptions cause Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) measurements to bias low low-redshift acoustic angular scales, this cannot make post-recombination solutions to the Hubble tension plausible. Thus any such biases cannot be potential loopholes to this tension. [Phys. Rev. D 113, 043507] Published Fri Feb 06, 2026

A study led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA, using modeling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

A new study has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy. This provides new insights into how complex organic molecules and carbon are processed in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe.

Researchers have found what might be a little red dot transitioning into its final state, where x-rays burst through its gas cocoon. Others argue the object is nothing special

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has triggered fevered speculation after the James Webb Space Telescope detected an "out of order" burst of methane in its coma, puzzling even seasoned astronomers. While a handful of commentators flirt with alien probe theories, most scientists say the object's odd chemistry reveals an ancient, natural relic from another star system, not visiting technology.

Telescopes are getting smaller. It’s strange to think: smartscopes have been with us for over half a decade now. Since 2020, we’ve tested units from Vaonis, Unistellar and more. In a short time, these smartscopes have revolutionized amateur astronomy, putting deep-sky imaging within reach of causal users. Recently, we had a chance to put Dwarf Lab’s latest unit the Dwarf Mini through its paces.

Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.

NASA's AI analysis of Hubble data reveals 1300+ cosmic anomalies, including unclassified objects, reshaping our approach to astronomical discoveries.

The JWST found a system of at least five interacting galaxies only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery adds weight to the growing understanding that galaxies were interacting and shaping their surroundings far earlier than scientists thought. There's also evidence that the collision was redistributing heavy elements beyond the galaxies themselves.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a new dwarf galaxy, which received designation CAPERS-39810. Further investigation of CAPERS-39810 revealed that it is an extremely metal-poor galaxy. The discovery was detailed in a paper published January 24 on the arXiv pre-print server.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This “lens-shaped” galaxy sits in between more familiar spiral alaxies and elliptical galaxies in the galaxy classification scheme. The dark, dramatic dust lanes are the fingerprints of an ancient galaxy merger.

After a year of protests from astronomers, authorities have abandoned plans for a giant, light-polluting renewable-energy facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert

A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the Lupus 3 cloud in Scorpius bursting with young stars that are forming within collapsing clouds of gas and dust.

Astronomers have discovered how "forever young" stars stay blue and bright despite being almost as old as the universe.

AnomalyMatch allows astronomers to process millions of Hubble images at record speed, revealing new galaxies and gravitational lenses

The venerable Hubble observatory is going strong despite its decades in space and the advent of next-generation successors

The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed the most distant, early galaxy in the known universe. The new contender, MoM-z14, is visible just 280 million years after the Big Bang.