Photo credit: Sophie Adenot
French astronaut Sophie Adenot has shared images and video from one of the strongest aurora displays she has seen during her time aboard the International Space Station. The capture dates to day 127 of her εpsilon mission, logged as orbit 1968, and she called it the most spectacular one yet.
Right before crowds across the country prepare to mark the Fourth of July with displays of light and sound, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope offered a view from far beyond Earth that carries a similar sense of energy and new activity. Two protostars in the FS Tau system sit near the center of the frame. Both remain young enough that they still draw in gas and dust while pushing excess material outward through strong flows.
Space missions have long been constrained by the amount of propellant rockets can haul off the launch pad. NASA sees a path around that limit through refueling stops once a craft reaches orbit. Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama recently put a new connector through its first serious checks. The device, called a cryocoupler, would let two spacecraft link up so one can pass super-cold liquid fuel to the other while both float in space.
Astronomers just received the largest and sharpest visible-light portrait ever assembled of the Milky Way’s central bulge. The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope produced this six-gigapixel mosaic during a single day of observations in March 2025, packing more than sixty million stars into one frame along with dark dust clouds and pockets where new stars are forming.
Hubble has delivered a crisp new view of NGC 6723, a globular cluster tucked in the constellation Sagittarius. The image shows a tight swarm of stars that fills the frame with countless points of light, each one a distinct sun shining across 27,000 light-years of space. Blue stars crowd the center while warmer orange stars appear more often near the edges, and many of the brighter ones carry the sharp, cross-shaped spikes created by the telescope’s optics.
Photo credit: NASA / Daniel Rutter
Astronomers poring over years of data from NASA’s planet-hunting satellite have confirmed a pair of worlds that rank among the largest and least dense ever detected. A sun-like star called TOI-791 hosts them both, sitting roughly 1,113 light years away in the southern constellation Volans.
Light from a galaxy that lived just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang traveled more than 12 billion years to reach us. Astronomers examining long Hubble exposures of a deep sky field spotted something they had not expected to see at such an early time. The galaxy, cataloged MXDFz4.4, sent out ultraviolet radiation strong enough to change the gas in its immediate surroundings from opaque to clear.
Astronomers have released a striking new image of the Cigar Galaxy (M82) taken with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Data for the portrait came from a dedicated 65-hour survey using the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera. This extended observation time let Webb cut through dense dust clouds that normally hide the galaxy’s stellar population from view. Roughly 16.5 million individual stars now stand out clearly across the galactic disk in the resulting composite view. These stars show up as luminous blue-white specks scattered throughout the structure.
A short exchange on X pulled antimatter propulsion back into view. Elon Musk posted that in the future a trillion times a trillion dollars will go toward making antimatter so people can travel to other star systems. He added that later civilizations may measure wealth in mass and energy rather than currency. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman replied that he supports antimatter propulsion.
Tucked behind the familiar glow of the Orion Nebula sits a stretch of space where new stars are taking shape right now on an impressive scale. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a northern section of the Orion Molecular Cloud 2, known as OMC-2, which forms part of the larger Orion A complex roughly 1280 light years from Earth.