Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has released one of its largest public views yet, a near-infrared mosaic of IC 348, a star-forming region 1,000 light-years away in Perseus. Cold molecular hydrogen in that cloud is still collapsing into new stars, and Webb’s NIRCam turned the scene into a wide, crowded field of young suns, leftover dust, and objects so small they sit uncomfortably close to the planet side of the ledger.

Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI cameras filled a 2.5-by-1.8-arcminute frame with the inner parsec of the Milky Way, a packed star field 26,000 light-years away in Sagittarius. IRS 3 sits in that crowd, a cool, luminous asymptotic giant branch star only 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the galaxy. NASA posted the composite on September 10, 2026, from data taken August 11. Mid-infrared light from the same field had already given astronomers something they had never measured cleanly for this object: oxygen-rich silicate dust and water molecules in the star’s own envelope.

Mustafa Muhibullah did not set out to name a new class of object. He was a University of Alabama graduate student working through public Chandra X-ray Observatory files that other groups had already used. In the softest sliver of those files, sources lit up and then disappeared as soon as the energy cut moved a little higher. Artifacts were the first suspicion. Stacked exposures and careful cleaning left something real.

Hubble’s latest monthly image, posted by ESA and NASA last week, frames N44, also listed as LHA 120-N44, a nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Sitting 160,000 light-years away in Dorado, this companion galaxy to the Milky Way gives researchers a nearby laboratory for busy star birth, close enough that dust and distance do not hide the action the way they often do inside our own spiral.

Photo credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
High school students on Hawaiʻi Island gave NGC 7253 a name that already feels heavier than its catalog number. Nā ʻUhane Māhoe Huki Pū i ke Ola translates to “The Twin Spirits Pulling Together Creating Life,” and Gemini North on Maunakea recorded the pair with enough reach that pink knots of newborn stars sit in plain view. More than 200 million light-years out, in the stretch of Pegasus known in Hawaiian as Ka Lupe o Kawelo, two spiral galaxies tug at one another across about four million light-years of open space.

Astronomers released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever assembled this week. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys catalog spans roughly three-quarters of the sky and holds nearly four billion stars, galaxies, black holes, asteroids and other objects captured across visible and near-infrared light. Its total resolution reaches 5.6 trillion pixels.

Astronomers have long known NGC 2392 by several names, yet the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope make the Lion Nebula nickname feel newly earned. Released today, the views combine near-infrared light from NIRCam and mid-infrared light from MIRI to show a planetary nebula roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. What appears is a glowing, roughly circular structure about 2.6 light-years across, its center dominated by a bright point that looks for all the world like a button nose.

Dense clouds of gas and dust gather into the clear outline of an open chest at the center of this new James Webb Space Telescope view. Light shines from inside the structure while long pillars of thick material trail from its base. Dark orange globules and pale hazes fill the background, and a few bright stars sit in the foreground, one of the largest positioned right in front of the chest’s lid.

Soft X-rays from a galaxy about 500 million light-years away triggered an urgent worldwide search in March 2026. The Einstein Probe satellite, built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the European Space Agency, recorded a brief pulse of these X-rays and labeled the event EP260321a. Ground telescopes responded within an hour and quickly found a supernova growing brighter by the minute. Researchers later named the explosion SN 2026gzf.

Rubin Observatory just released its first major science image from the LSST Camera, and the frame is dense with distant light. Astronomers stacked hundreds of separate exposures of the COSMOS field and ended up with more than half a million galaxies plus more than 50,000 stars in a single deep view.