Telescopes and observatories
It's crazy to think that the JWST has already been working for three years. It's repeatedly impressed us not only with its powerful science observations, but also with stunning images that capture our interest even if we didn't know what we were seeing. Now, the telescope is celebrating its third anniversary with a glorious image of the Cat's Paw Nebula.
A team of researchers has cracked the code for building space telescopes with mirrors the size of a soccer field, not from perfectly figured glass, but from liquid floating in zero gravity! The new research reveals how a 50-metre liquid mirror telescope could maintain its optical quality for decades despite the constant slewing motions needed to observe different stars, with deformations taking years to propagate from the edges toward the centre. The idea could enable the next generation of space telescopes capable of directly imaging Earth-like planets around other stars, potentially answering the ultimate question: are we alone in the universe?
The long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory has delivered some preliminary observations of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae field. 47 Tuc is the Milky Way's second-brightest globular cluster, second to Omega Centauri. The Rubin Observatory's data demonstrates the telescope's promising scientific potential.
What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.
I can recall the excitement of waiting for the first CCD Image I had taken to download, THAT was exciting. I was using a Starlight Express MX716 for those who can remember. This however is far more exciting. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially come online and now we're looking at its first pictures. The telescope has completed ten hours of test observations, viewing millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars. It found thousands of new asteroids in just a few hours of observations, and took incredible pictures of the Triffid and Lagoon Nebulae. Over the course of its 10-year primary mission, it'll capture 800 images of every spot in the southern sky.
The Vera C. Rubin is a game changing observatory that we've been keeping our eyes on. When it goes online, it'll begin a 10 year survey of the southern sky, capturing the entire sky every few nights, eventually building up a history of 800 images of each spot. It'll generate 20 terabytes of data every day, collecting 60 petabytes of raw image data. And it's almost ready to begin operations. On June 23 at 15:00 UTC, operators are going to release the first images from the telescope live to the internet, and you'll be able to watch.
We don't know what dark matter is, but that doesn't stop astronomers from using it to their advantage. Dark matter is part of what makes gravitational lensing so effective. Astronomers expect the Roman Space Telescope to find 160,000 gravitational lenses, and dark matter makes a crucial contribution to these lenses.
Ultraviolet astronomical observations have always been hindered by one simple fact - the Earth's atmosphere blocks most UV photons, especially in the UV-C and UV-B range of 100-315nm wavelengths. So, astronomers must have a collector above the atmosphere if they want to know what is happening in those wavelengths. A consortium from Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) hopes to provide additional insight into that realm with their PhotSat mission, a CubeSat that will observe the whole sky in UV and visible light once every few days.
The JWST has done it again. The powerful space telescope has already revealed the presence of bright galaxies only several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Now, it's sensed light from a galaxy only 280 million years after the Big Bang, the most distant galaxy ever detected.
When the JWST came to life and began observations, one of its first jobs was to gaze back in time at the early Universe. The Assembly of Galaxies is one of the space telescope's four main science themes, and when it observed the Universe's first galaxies, it uncovered a mystery. According to our understanding of how galaxies evolve, some were far more massive than they should be.
James Webb Space Telescope zoomed in on Jupiter's turbulent north pole in 2023 on the lookout for aurora. The results were amazing. Scientists have finally crunched through the data, revealing how the aurora rapidly change, fizzing and popping with light over the course of a few minutes. The team didn't stop there, training Hubble's ultraviolet eye on the same light show, they've created the most comprehensive view of Jupiter's auroral displays ever captured.
Over the past decade or so, astronomers have speculated about the characteristics of rogue planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. These "free-floating" worlds don't orbit stars, but instead roam the spaceways. They're hard to spot with current technology, but the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will be a perfect instrument to find them and give insights into the history and features they may have in common with Solar System worlds.
When astronomers want to understand brown dwarfs, they often turn to WISE 1049AB. It's a benchmark brown dwarf in astronomy, and the closest and brightest brown dwarf we know of. The binary pair, which is also known as Luhman 16, is about 6.5 light-years away. Brown dwarfs are a crucial bridge between planets and stars, and understanding them helps astronomers understand the dynamics of both exoplanets and stars.
The James Webb Space Telescope has a number of science goals. One of them is to help understand the evolution of galaxies and their formation within the first billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers have completed an initial Webb telescope survey that discovered 1,700 galaxy groups. Many of these groups date back to when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old. The survey spans 12 billion years of cosmic history, from these ancient formations to the present day.
I do love the names of the European Southern Observatory installations. You are familiar I'm sure with the Very Large Telescope but have you heard of the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope? It was intended to house a 100m mirror but never got commissioned due to its complexity. There is however, an Extremely Large Telescope with a 39 metre mirror and its due to be completed in a couple of years. This image was taken on 12 April 2025 by photographer Eduardo Garcés showing its progress.
This week brings the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th birthday — but instead of getting presents, the Hubble team is giving out presents in the form of four views of the cosmos, ranging from a glimpse of Mars to a glittering picture of a far-out galaxy.
Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is coming in hot and heavy at this point, with various data streams from multiple instruments being reported in various papers. One exciting one will be released shortly in the Astrophysical Journal from researchers at the University of Kansas (KU), where researchers collected mid-infrared images of a part of the sky that holds galaxies from the time of the "cosmic noon" about 10 billion years ago. Their paper describes this survey and invites citizen scientists to help catalogue and classify some of their findings.
Sometimes an old telescope can still impress. That is certainly the case for Hubble, which is rapidly approaching the 35th anniversary of its launch. To celebrate, the telescope's operators are collaborating with ESA to release a series of stunning new photographs of some of the most iconic astronomical objects the telescope has observed. As of the time of writing, the latest one to be released is a spectacular new image of a favorite of millions of amateur astronomers - the Sombrero Galaxy.
NGC 1514 is a planetary nebula about 1500 light years away. William Herschel discovered it in 1790, and its discovery made him rethink the nature of nebulae. It's been imaged many times by modern telescopes, and each time a more capable one revisits it, astronomers learn more about it. The JWST is the latest to observe the curious nebula, and its observations help explain the unusual object.
Random flashes of radiation in the sky are not all that unusual. A few years ago, once such flash was detected coming from a star that at the time, was believed to be from a star consuming a planet! The exact mechanism was unsure though for example; was it the star bloating up as a red giant and engulfing the planet or did the planet spiral in toward the star? The answer was until now, a little elusive. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed the environment around the star didn't match a red giant so it must have been the planet crashing into the star!
Universe Today