Astronomy

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light.  

Image: An artist’s impression shows what a binary system might look like if we were observing it up close. A team of international experts  have found a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that neighbors the Milky Way. The team includes Kareem El-Badry of the Center for …

NASA released the first science-quality image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on Monday (July 11) during an event at the White House hosted by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The image, dubbed Webb’s First Deep Field, is the deepest infrared view of the universe to …

Astronomers think they may have found the most powerful pulsar to date in a distant galaxy. The fast-spinning neutron star — the dense remains of a once massive star — is just beginning to emerge from the supernova remnant that birthed it. The object, called VT 1137-0337, was first seen …

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. At the heart of the system lies a small and cool M-dwarf star, …

Swirling disks of gas and dust, the stuff that could one day form planets, surround young stars. Through NASA’s Disk Detective program, citizen scientists – volunteers from the public – collaborate with professional scientists to help search for dusty disks around nearby stars, revealing clues to the early lives of …

A star’s death throes have so violently disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind, called a white dwarf, is siphoning off debris from both the system’s inner and outer reaches. This is the first time astronomers have observed a white dwarf star that is consuming both rocky-metallic …