麻豆传媒

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Despite decades of study, the process of star formation still holds many mysteries. Stars are the source of nearly all the universe鈥檚 chemical elements, including carbon and oxygen, so understanding why and how they form 鈥� or not 鈥� is a crucial initial step in understanding how the universe works and the origins of just about everything, including life on Earth. At the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is the star-forming region Sagittarius C, which despite a wealth of raw material does not make as many stars as astronomers would expect. Two new studies have used NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope to investigate star formation in this extreme environment that is relatively near the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, at 200 light-years distance.

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Halfway through its fourth decade, Hubble鈥檚 long life has proven invaluable for studying the atmosphere of the mysterious ice giant Uranus. By repeatedly training Hubble on the distant cyan planet over the course of 20 years, researchers chronicled a two-decade story of seasonal changes. These astronomers have gained new understanding of the atmospheric dynamics of Uranus, which can serve as a proxy for studying exoplanets of similar size and composition.

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The highly competitive NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) recently named 24 new fellows to its 2025 class. The NHFP fosters excellence and leadership in astrophysics by supporting exceptionally promising and innovative early-career astrophysicists. Over 650 applicants vied for the 2025 fellowships. Each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support at a U.S. institution.

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The early universe was filled with a thick fog of neutral hydrogen. Even though the first stars and galaxies emitted copious amounts of ultraviolet light, that light struggled to pierce the fog. It took hundreds of millions of years for the neutral hydrogen to become ionized, electrons stripped from protons, allowing light to travel freely through space. Astronomers are seeking to understand this unique time of transformation, known as the era of reionization. A newly discovered galaxy illuminated this era in an unexpected way. JADES-GS-z13-1, observed just 330 million years after the big bang, shows bright hydrogen emission that should have been absorbed by the cosmic fog. Theorists are struggling to explain how its light could have pierced the fog at such an early time.

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Neptune lies in the frigid, dark, vast frontier of the outer edges of our solar system about 3 billion miles away from the Sun. It鈥檚 only been visited once by a spacecraft back in 1989, and since then, observatories like NASA鈥檚 Hubble Space Telescope have tracked the planet鈥檚 changing weather. Hubble even discovered a new moon orbiting the planet in 2013. In many images, the planet appears as a blueish orb, sometimes with disappearing and reappearing dark spots. NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope has now revealed a different appearance鈥攆or the first time, a bright auroral glow from this ice giant.

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When peering out into space, we get a 2D view of a 3D universe. Sometimes, images will capture objects that appear close to each other on the sky, but are actually at wildly different distances and are unassociated with each other.

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The first planet outside our solar system was discovered in the 1990鈥檚, but it wasn鈥檛 until more than a decade later astronomers actually obtained a direct image of one. It鈥檚 extremely difficult to image an exoplanet, as stars in other planetary systems can be thousands of times brighter and bigger than their planets.

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The Flame Nebula, a star-forming region in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, has a long history of observation from telescopes such as NASA鈥檚 Hubble Space Telescope. However, the smallest stars within its dark and dusty heart have largely been hidden from view.

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High-resolution near-infrared light captured by NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope shows extraordinary new detail and structure in Lynds 483 (L483).

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The Kuiper Belt object known as 148780 Altjira, already known to be a binary system shows signs of containing a third member in new Hubble observations.

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Getting a nice, good look at a planet outside our solar system can be tricky. Some exoplanets are way too cool and dim to observe. Many are virtually invisible in the blinding glare of their host stars. Others spin so slowly it would take days to survey the entire planet. This is where a stand-in like SIMP 0136 鈥� a hot, bright, planet-sized object with a thick atmosphere, extremely fast rotation rate, and no star to spoil the view 鈥� comes in handy. Although SIMP 0136 is not technically an exoplanet because it doesn鈥檛 orbit a star, it鈥檚 close enough. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to monitor SIMP 0136 directly as different parts of the object rotate into view, researchers have been able to disentangle the brightness patterns of hundreds of colors of infrared light coming from different parts of the object鈥檚 atmosphere. The results reveal variations in cloud cover, temperature, and chemistry that provide insight into the three-dimensional complexity of gas giants within an

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Hubble is studying a swarm of 36 dwarf galaxies that orbit our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. The dwarf galaxies are evidence that Andromeda has had a more dynamic history than our Milky Way galaxy.

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Imagine solar flares, but on a mind-boggling scale. A constant scintillation that is bright enough to shine across 26,000 light-years of space. And interspersed between the flickers, brilliant flashes that spew out on a daily basis. Researchers using NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope have spotted this activity in the center of our galaxy. The source is the accretion disk around the Milky Way鈥檚 central supermassive black hole. Webb detected brightness changes over remarkably short timescales, meaning they are coming from the black hole鈥檚 inner disk, not far beyond its event horizon.

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Since its discovery in 2010, the Phoenix cluster has always been one to stand out from the bunch. 鈥↖t鈥檚 one of the most massive galaxy clusters known to astronomers, and was the first galaxy cluster to found to have a supermassive black hole that promotes, instead of hinders, a high rate of star formation.

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Bullseye! Researchers using Hubble found a massive galaxy rippling with nine star-filled rings after an "arrow," the blue dwarf galaxy to its center-left, plunged through its core 50 million years ago. A thin trail of gas still links the pair.

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This panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away, is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It took more than 10 years to collect data to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, built from more than 600 overlapping snapshots. This stunning mosaic captures the pinpoint glow of 200 million stars spread across 2.5 billion pixels.

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We are joining the Carnegie Science in celebrating the 100th anniversary of Edwin Hubble鈥檚 discovery of galaxies existing beyond our Milky Way. He found a stellar 鈥渕ilepost marker鈥� embedded in Andromeda and calculated it is outside our galaxy.

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Soon after the start of NASA鈥檚 James Webb Space Telescope鈥檚 science operations, astronomers noticed something unexpected in the data: red objects that appear small on the sky, located in the distant, young universe. Come to be known as 鈥渓ittle red dots鈥� (LRDs), this intriguing class of objects is not well understood at present, sparking new questions and prompting new theories about the processes that occurred in the early universe.

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An unusual star that spins over seven times faster than our sun has been detected by Hubble. Known as a "blue lurker," it probably got a turbo-boost from the merger of two accompanying stars that fed material onto the star, increasing its rotation speed.

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How are the elements like carbon produced and spread across space? Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified two stars responsible for generating carbon-rich dust a mere 5,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. As the massive stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing past one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce carbon-rich dust. For a few months every eight years, the stars form a new shell of dust that expands outward 鈥� and may eventually go on to become part of stars that form elsewhere in our galaxy. Webb鈥檚 mid-infrared light observations show 17 uneven shells around these stars 鈥� but many more may have dissipated and thousands more will be created. These findings offer definitive clues about carbon鈥檚 beginnings that may help the astronomy community unwind how elements go on to form new stars and planets.