Hubble Shows Young Stars Shaping Their Surroundings in the Orion Nebula

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the nearest star-forming region to Earth, the Orion Nebula (Messier 42, M42), located some 1,500 light-years away. Young stars in Orion are shaping their environments. ESA/Hubble, NASA, and T. Megeath

Orion the Hunter, resplendent in the northern hemisphere’s night sky in winter, is more than an easily identified constellation. It’s home to the Orion Nebula, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. It’s a mere 1,500 light-years away and can be seen with the naked eye below the three stars that form Orion’s belt.

New Hubble images show how young, newly-formed stars in the Orion Nebula are altering their environments.

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The Webb Shows Us Where Cosmic Dust Comes From

Concentric rings of dust form around the pair of binary stars named Wolf-Rayet 140. The dust is formed when the stellar winds from the stars slam into each other every few years. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JPL-Caltech

Carbon-rich cosmic dust comes from different sources and spreads out into space, where it’s necessary for life and for the formation of rocky planets like ours. When astronomers aim their telescopes at objects in the sky, they often have to contend with this cosmic dust that obscures their targets and confounds their observations.

One reason the JWST was built is to see through some of this dust with its infrared vision and unlock new insights into astrophysical processes. In new work, the JWST was tasked with observing the dust itself.

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Webb Sees a Supercluster of Galaxies Coming Together

Using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers have found new galaxies in the Spiderweb protocluster. Because Webb can see infrared light very well, scientists used it to observe regions of the Spiderweb that were previously hidden to us by cosmic dust, and to find out to what degree this dust obscures them. This image shows the Spiderweb protocluster as seen by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera). Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, H. Dannerbauer

As a species, we’ve come to the awareness that we’re a minuscule part of a vast Universe defined by galaxy superclusters and the large-scale structure of the Universe. Driven by a healthy intellectual curiosity, we’re examining our surroundings and facing the question posed by Nature: how did everything get this way?

We only have incremental answers to that huge, almost infinitely-faceted question. And the incremental answers are unearthed by our better instruments, including space telescopes, which get better and more capable as time passes.

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope.

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Space Stations Get Pretty Moldy. How Can We Prevent it?

Ask any property inspector, and they’ll tell you one of the maxims of their profession – where there’s moisture, there’s mold. That relationship also holds true for the International Space Station. The interior climate on the ISS is carefully controlled, but if thrown out of whack, potentially dangerous mold could sprout overnight. A new paper by researchers at The Ohio State University explains why – and provides some insights into how we might prevent it if it does happen.

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The JWST Reveals the Nature of Dust Around an Active Galactic Nuclei

The James Webb Space Telescope captured this three colour image of the galaxy ESO 428-G14. New research shows how the dust near the galaxy's supermassive black hole is heated up. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) are located in the centers of large galaxies like ours. When they’re actively feeding, they produce more light and are called active galactic nuclei (AGN). But their details are difficult to observe clearly because large clouds of gas block our view.

The JWST was built just for circumstances like these.

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A New View of Olympus Mons

100,000 orbits requires some sort of recognition. NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this single image of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, on March 11, 2024. Besides providing an unprecedented view of the volcano, the image helps scientists study different layers of material in the atmosphere, including clouds and dust. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

After 100,000 orbits and almost 23 years on Mars, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has seen a lot. The spacecraft was sent to map ice and study its geology, but along the way, it’s captured more than 1.4 million images of the planet.

A recent image captured the Solar System’s tallest mountain and volcano, Olympus Mons.

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Astronomers Propose a 14-Meter Infrared Space Telescope

An artist's illustration of the SALTUS Observatory concept. SALTUS is a Far-IR space telescope that will open a new window into the cosmos. Image Credit: NASA

The Universe wants us to understand its origins. Every second of every day, it sends us a multitude of signals, each one a clue to a different aspect of the cosmos. But the Universe is the original Trickster, and its multitude of signals is an almost unrecognizable cacophony of light, warped, shifted, and stretched during its long journey through the expanding Universe.

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How We Get Planets from Clumping Dust

This artist’s impression shows a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, where dust grains gather together to form planetesimals—the building blocks of new planets. © ESO/L. Calçada

Our gleaming Earth, brimming with liquid water and swarming with life, began as all rocky planets do: dust. Somehow, mere dust can become a life-bearing planet given enough time and the right circumstances. But there are unanswered questions about how dust forms any rocky planet, let alone one that supports life.

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This Galaxy Hosted One of the Most Powerful Supernovae Ever Seen

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image is of the small galaxy known as UGC 5189A. This otherwise unremarkable galaxy was the site of an extraordinarly luminous supernova in 2010. ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko

In 2010, an exceptionally luminous supernova exploded in a small galaxy about 150 million light-years away called UGC 5189A. The Hubble Space Telescope has kept its eye on this galaxy because of the extraordinary supernova, which for three years released more than 2.5 billion times the energy of our Sun in visible light alone.

Though the supernova, named SN 2010jl, died down years ago, astronomers are still watching its aftermath.

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Webb and Hubble Work Together to Reveal This Spectacular Galaxy Pair — and Several Bonuses!

By combining data from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, this image of galaxy pair VV 191 includes near-infrared light from Webb, and ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Rogier Windhorst (ASU), William Keel (University of Alabama), Stuart Wyithe (University of Melbourne), JWST PEARLS Team, Alyssa Pagan (STScI).

What’s better than a pair of galaxies observed by a pair of iconic space telescopes? The answer to that, according to researchers using the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, is finding even more galaxies and other remarkable details no one expected in the duo’s observations.

“Galaxies in the foreground, background, deep background, and into the depths,” said astronomer William Keel from Galaxy Zoo, on Twitter.

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