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.