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.
Curiosity has been climbing the broad valley nicknamed Valle Grande for weeks when its cameras locked onto something that stopped the science team cold. On June 11, 2026, the 4,923rd Martian day of the mission, the rover’s Mastcam stitched together eleven frames into a clean panorama of a solitary butte standing roughly 20 feet tall. Mission planners named it Miraflores. A thick layer of dark sand sits on its flat top like a natural crown, while the rock faces below show the slow work of wind and time carving away everything that once surrounded it. That erosion left the butte standing and deepened the valley the rover is now driving through.
Far out on the outskirts of a galaxy 750 million light-years away, something invisible finally gave itself away. In November 2025, a sudden brilliant flare appeared more than 30,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center, a place where almost no one expected to find a supermassive black hole.
Hubble’s latest image shows NGC 4654, which sits 72 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, inside one of the densest collections of galaxies known as the Virgo Cluster. An intermediate spiral, it carries only a weak bar near its center, placing its shape somewhere between galaxies with strong central bars and those that lack them entirely. A rounded, clearly defined edge marks one side of the disk, packed with stars and gas, while the opposite side fades into a long gaseous tail that stretches beyond the edge of the frame.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Radar signals from the joint US-India NISAR satellite have mapped a mountaintop in East Antarctica that forms a clear hummingbird shape once the data is processed into color. Scientists at the mission nicknamed the result “the hummingbird” almost as soon as the image appeared.
Sixteen million light-years away, in the constellation Canes Venatici, sits a spiral galaxy that refuses to look ordinary. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently delivered a composite view of Messier 94, also catalogued as NGC 4736, that layers high-energy X-rays over a ground-based optical photograph. The result shows a bright central region wrapped in a tight ring of intense star formation, with the whole structure set against a softer outer disk that stretches farther than early observers realized.
NASA has just released a time-lapse video of the Psyche spacecraft approaching Mars, passing within 2,864 miles of the surface, and then pulling away after using the planet’s gravity to gain speed on May 15. The sequence, built from photographs taken over a month, shows Mars as a narrow dazzling crescent that expands and recedes behind the craft. Sunlight scattering through the dusty landscape led the crescent edges to shimmer and spread wider than intended, giving spectators a unique perspective rarely seen in missions.
Astronomers released a fresh view of the southern sky this week that carries an unexpected artistic quality. Captured by the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile, the image highlights the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud and surrounding features in rich color and fine detail.
There has always been a lot of information that could be gathered from Beta Pictoris, which is the best place to learn about the formation of planets in our galaxy. It’s located just 63 light years away from us, and it was formed some 23 million years ago. There is a lot of debris material around this star, along with two heavy impacting planets.
Recent photos from NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope show magnificent crimson plasma and dazzling blue stars in all their glory. The image in question is from LH 95, a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way.