Astronomers have already discovered many stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sgr A*. Now, researchers have announced they've found a binary star system in the vicinity too. This is surprising since Sgr A* tears at nearby stars with its ferocious tidal forces, and you'd expect binary stars to be separated from one another after too many close flybys. Well, there they are, still a pair after millions of years.

Don Pettit is one of the astronauts currently on board the International Space Station. He's also a serious shutterbug and amateur astronomer. To take advantage of his current lofty perspective, he rigged up a special star tracking mount that he could use to take long-exposure astrophotos from the ISS. The homemade orbital sidereal tracker rotates at a 90-minute period to match the pitch rate of the ISS, allowing him to take 30-second exposures.

Astronomers have used JWST to weigh a galaxy in the early Universe, finding that it has roughly the same mass as the Milky Way should have had at the same time in the Universe's history. The galaxy was seen in a gravitational lens and contains a collection of star clusters, so astronomers have nicknamed it the "Firefly Sparkle Galaxy." The galaxy also contains companion dwarf galaxies, similar to the Milky Way's Magellanic Clouds, which probably merged with it.

When a massive star dies as a supernova, it can leave behind a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. The fastest pulsars can spin upwards of 700 times a second, blasting out regular pulses of energy. In a new paper, researchers propose that the fastest-spinning pulsars could contain quark matter in their cores. This would be even denser matter than neutrons and help explain how surprisingly massive neutron stars can spin so rapidly, maybe reaching 1,000 Hz.