James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Astronomers capture the most intricate picture of a galaxy in a thousand colors ever seen (photo, video)

By Robert Lea published 8 hours ago

"The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot. It is close enough that we can resolve its internal structure, but at the same time big enough that we can still see it as a whole system."

Says Team leader Enrico Congiu of the Universidad de Chile in a statement.

"It is close enough that we can resolve its internal structure and study its building blocks with incredible detail, but at the same time, big enough that we can still see it as a whole system."

 

Covering 65,000 light-years of the 90,000-light-year-wide galaxy, zooming in on the finer details of the Sculptor Galaxy to create this image required 100 exposures collected over 50 hours of MUSE observing time.

 

The team's research was published online today (June 18) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

 

Full Article:

https://www.space.com/astronomy/astronomers-capture-the-most-intricate-picture-of-a-galaxy-in-a-thousand-colors-ever-seen-photo-video

 

Pic Description: 

Astronomers have obtained a stunning new image of the Sculptor Galaxy, painted in thousands of colors that reveals the intricacies of galactic systems.

 

Video link:

https://videos.space.com/m/LT5bpewL/sculptor-galaxy-seen-in-thousands-of-colors-by-the-very-large-telescope?list=9wzCTV4g

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

First images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory released, giving a taste of what's to come

By Ellen Phiddian - 20h ago

 

The images are a taster of what is expected to be unveiled at 1AM AEST Tuesday morning in a live stream that will also include ultra-high definition video.

 

According to astronomers, even these first previews are unlike anything they've ever seen before.

 

Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the University of Mebourne, said she was stunned by the vast scale of each picture.

 

"There's just so much going on in each of these images...."

[ED: Some super nice pics in the article! They are too big to post here. Lol]

 

Full Article:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-06-23/first-taste-images-vera-c-rubin-observatory-released/105448868

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

...

"I just look at it and I think: what on Earth is going on there?" Dr Webster said.

"I've never seen a galaxy that looks like that before."

More images to come!

 

The official unveiling happens at 1am (AEST) this Tuesday, June 24.

If you are keen, you can watch the unveiling live on the telescope's website or rug up and go to a watch party in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth.

[ED: See end of article for links]

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

More from Vera

Within just 10 hours, the Rubin Observatory already revealed new discoveries, including 2104 asteroids. The team says that it will be able to discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, compared to 20,000 asteroids discovered annually by all other ground and space-based observatories. You can see all of the asteroids in the short video below.

 

https://m.dpreview.com/news/7841694397/rubin-observatory-shares-the-first-look-from-the-world-s-biggest-camera

 

 

[Approx 1min video showing discoveries - still below showing: 1. 2,000 new discoveries;  2. Slice of heavens explored]

 

 

Edited June 24 by ➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

A [1 min] video was also revealed, which offers a unique perspective of what LSST is capable of:

 

 

This is just the start of what we will see from LSST and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Later this year, it will kick off a decade-long survey, which the team is calling the "ultimate movie of the night sky." The Rubin Observatory will scan the sky repeatedly over the course of a decade, resulting in an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse of our Universe.

 

The survey will involve observations of about 40 billion stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. Each object will be checked hundreds of times, resulting in 60 petabytes of raw data, which the Rubin Observatory says is "more data than everything that's ever been written in any language in human history."

 

[Dustparticle]

A new planet 

https://www.space.com/astronomy/exoplanets/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-discovered-its-1st-exoplanet-and-snapped-its-picture-image3

Edited June 25 by Dustparticle

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

NASA's Webb Digs into Structural Origins of Disk Galaxies
June 26, 2025 10:00am  Release ID: 2025-121

 

Summary
Scientists “excavated” disk galaxies across cosmic time to understand their formation history.

Disk galaxies, like our own Milky Way galaxy, commonly consist of both a thick and thin disk of stars — each with different features, including stellar population and movement. Three major theoretical scenarios have been proposed to explain the formation mechanisms and timing of thick and thin disks.

A team of astronomers has recently investigated the structure of disk galaxies by sifting through multiple surveys from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This extensive sample includes over 100 edge-on disk galaxies up to roughly 11 billion years ago. The team’s analysis aligns with one of the three scenarios, suggesting that thick stellar disk formation occurs first, and thin stellar disk formation follows. When this happens in a galaxy’s formation history depends on the galaxy’s mass.

Full Article: 
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-121?utm_id

 

Pic Description: 
Present-day disk galaxies often contain a thick, star-filled outer disk and an embedded thin disk of stars. Three major theoretical scenarios have been proposed by astronomers to explain how this dual-disk structure comes to be. Using archival data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers is closer to understanding disk galaxies’ origins, and the stellar thick- and thin-disk formation process. The team carefully identified, visually verified, and analyzed a statistical sample of more than 100 edge-on disk galaxies at various periods — up to 11 billion years ago (or approximately 2.8 billion years after the big bang). The results of their analysis suggest that galaxies form a thick disk first, followed by a thin disk. The timing of this process depends on a galaxy’s mass: high-mass, single-disk galaxies transitioned to two-disk structures around 8 billion years ago, while low-mass, single-disk galaxies formed their thin disks about 4 billion years ago.

Link:

https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01JXX24CYFPGSG7YYXCTV7E7QD.png
 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

[ED: Technically not "WEBB", but pretty interesting imho.]

Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency, is revealing the first-ever views of the sun's south pole.

These never-before-seen images offer scientists a chance to better understand our star and its effects on Earth.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/science/video/solar-orbiter-first-images-sun-south-pole-digvid

 

1min 30sec Video link:

 

 

 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Hello, neighbor!

See the Andromeda galaxy like never before in stunning new image from NASA's Chandra telescope. By Robert Lea 2 days ago

[Nice 3 min 26 sec video]

 

 

Created as a tribute to dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin, the image was created with the aid of a vast array of telescopes.

 

The galaxy next door to the Milky Way, Andromeda, has never looked as stunning as it does in a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope.

 

The image of the galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), was created with assistance from a range of other space telescopes and ground-based instruments...

 

As the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, at just around 2.5 million light-years away, Andromeda has been vital in allowing astronomers to study aspects of galaxies that aren't accessible from our own galaxy. For example, from inside the Milky Way, we can't see our galaxy's spiral arms, but we can see the spiral arms of Andromeda!

 

Full Article:

https://www.space.com/astronomy/hello-neighbor-see-the-andromeda-galaxy-like-never-before-in-stunning-new-image-from-nasas-chandra-telescope-video

 

 

 

 

Edited June 29 by ➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

 

Hubble Captures an Active Galactic Center

Jun 27, 2025

 

The light that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope collected to create this image reached the telescope after a journey of 250 million years. Its source was the spiral galaxy UGC 11397, which resides in the constellation Lyra (The Lyre). At first glance, UGC 11397 appears to be an average spiral galaxy: it sports two graceful spiral arms that are illuminated by stars and defined by dark, clumpy clouds of dust.

 

What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its center, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of our Sun grows. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show.

 

Thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397's actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust.

 

This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a donut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.

 

https://share.google/ZpUL9ggytoVwFYAbC

 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

NASA Webb 'Pierces' Bullet Cluster, Refines Its Mass

June 30, 2025 10:00am Release ID: 2025-128

 

Summary

Webb shows fainter and more distant galaxies, along with light from stars that trace dark matter in these galaxy clusters, helping researchers carefully map everything in the scene.

 

It’s rare for galaxy clusters to collide and merge at high speeds. An iconic example is the Bullet Cluster, the aftermath of two vast galaxy clusters that collided. To be able to “replay” what happened, and in which order, researchers need to first fully define all the contents in this scene.

 

Full Article:

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-128

 

Pic Description: 

This is the central region of the Bullet Cluster, which is made up of two massive galaxy clusters. The vast number of galaxies and foreground stars in the image were captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light. Glowing, hot X-rays captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory appear in pink. The blue represents the dark matter, which was precisely mapped by researchers with Webb’s detailed imaging. Normally, gas, dust, stars, and dark matter are combined into galaxies, even when they are gravitationally bound within larger groups known as galaxy clusters. The Bullet Cluster is unusual in that the intracluster gas and dark matter are separated, offering further evidence in support of dark matter.

[ED There's also a video comparing Webb to Hubble view in the main article.]

 

Edited June 30 by ➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes Reveal Two Faces of a Star Cluster Duo

NASA Mission Team July 07, 2025

 

Open clusters NGC 460 and NGC 456 reside in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Open clusters consist of anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand young stars loosely bound together by gravity. These particular clusters are part of an extensive complex of star clusters and nebulae that are likely linked to one another. As clouds of gas collapse, stars are born. These young, hot stars expel intense stellar winds that shape the nebulae around them, carving out the clouds and triggering other collapses, which in turn give rise to more stars.

 

In these images, Hubble’s view captures the glowing, ionized gas as stellar radiation blows “bubbles” in the clouds of gas and dust (blue), while Webb’s infrared vision highlights the clumps and delicate filamentary structures of dust (red). In Hubble images, dust is often seen silhouetted against and blocking light, but in Webb’s view, the dust – warmed by starlight – shines with its own infrared glow. This mixture of gas and dust between the universe’s stars is known as the interstellar medium.

 

Read more:

https://share.google/WxWiuPfN26Q6k1pW9

 

Pic Descriptions:

Hubble’s view captures visible light and some infrared wavelengths, while Webb’s view is exclusively infrared. The nebulae’s glowing gas, ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, is distinct in Hubble’s view. Dusty areas that appear dark in the Hubble image are visible as bright structures in the Webb image, and more background galaxies are visible since infrared light from fainter and farther galaxies can pass through the obscuring clouds of gas and dust.

 

Clouds of ionized gas dominate open cluster NGC 460 in the Hubble image (left), while tendrils of dust are on display in the Webb image (right). Together, the two images provide a more comprehensive look at the region.

 

On the left is a Hubble image of NGC 460, a round, bubble-shaped bluish cloud of gas and dust. On the right is a Webb telescope image of NGC 460, showing a cavern-like outline of red filaments of dust. Both are studded with stars.

 

The Hubble image of NGC 456 (left) shows a puffy, bluish cloud of ionized gas, while the Webb image (right) displays the same cluster’s cavern-like outline of dust.

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Nearly 10 million alerts a night —

Rubin Observatory rewrites cosmic surveillance
by Beatriz T. July 7, 2025

It’s known as the largest digital camera in the world, with 3.2 gigapixels. Just to give you an idea, each image is so detailed that it would require 400 TV screens to display in real size.

And the best part of all this is that when we compare recent images with a “background model” built in the first months of operation, the system identifies everything that changes, that is, the emergence of supernovae, the movement of asteroids, and variations in the brightness of stars are detected. The result? A daily tsunami of data, with around 10,000 changes detected per image, totaling up to 10 million alerts per night...

Okay, so how do you handle all this data? Let’s face it, all this power would be useless without easy access to the data. That’s why Rubin was designed from the beginning to run in the cloud. How so? Well, the Rubin Science Platform allows any scientist to access, query, and analyze data directly over the web. The best part is that the heavy processing is done on the servers, and the user can interact with the data without needing a supercomputer.

And the positive points go beyond that: the alert system is completely public and in real-time. The expectation is that the data will also feed open platforms such as Zooniverse, as well as educational materials for use in schools. The goal here is to truly democratize astronomy. It is no wonder that we are already looking forward to his discovery of planet nine.

Read more:
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/10-million-alerts-rubin-observatory/17371/#google_vignette

 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

NASA's Webb Scratches Beyond Surface of Cat's Paw for 3rd Anniversary
July 10, 2025 10:00am Release ID: 2025-129

Summary
What lies within a toe bean? According to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, mini toe beans composed of gas, dust, and stars.

Since the start of its science operations in July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has amazed scientists and the public alike with its ability to peer farther into the cosmos than ever before. With each infrared-light observation, the telescope continues to reveal aspects of the universe previously unknown to us.

To mark its third year of highly productive science, astronomers used Webb to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region. This near-infrared view, which shows a portion of a singular “toe bean,” reveals a subset of mini toe bean-reminiscent structures composed of gas, dust, and young stars.

Full Article: 

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-129

Pic Description: 
With its near-infrared capabilities and sharp resolution, the telescope “clawed” back a portion of a singular “toe bean,” revealing a subset of mini toe bean-reminiscent structures composed of gas, dust, and young stars.

Webb’s view reveals a chaotic scene still in development: Massive young stars are carving away at nearby gas and dust, while their bright starlight is producing a bright nebulous glow represented in blue. This is only a chapter in the region’s larger story. The disruptive young stars, with their relatively short lifespans and luminosity, will eventually quench the local star formation process.

The Cat’s Paw Nebula is located approximately 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

1min 40s Video link:

 

 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Hubble Snaps Galaxy Cluster’s Portrait

NASA Hubble Mission Team - July 11, 2025

 

A massive, spacetime-warping cluster of galaxies is the setting of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy cluster in question is Abell 209, located 2.8 billion light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Whale).

 

This Hubble image of Abell 209 shows more than a hundred galaxies, but there’s more to this cluster than even Hubble’s discerning eye can see. Abell 209’s galaxies are separated by millions of light-years, and the seemingly empty space between the galaxies is filled with hot, diffuse gas that is visible only at X-ray wavelengths. An even more elusive occupant of this galaxy cluster is dark matter: a form of matter that does not interact with light. Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, effectively making it invisible to us. Astronomers detect dark matter by its gravitational influence on normal matter. Astronomers surmise that the universe is comprised of 5% normal matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy...

 

Full Article: 

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-snaps-galaxy-clusters-portrait/

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Whooo's there? 

James Webb telescope spots 'Cosmic Owl,' 

A super-rare structure formed from colliding ring galaxies

By Abha Jain published July 9, 2025

Located billions of light-years away, the "Cosmic Owl" is a pair of colliding ring galaxies spotted by the JWST. It's also an "exceptional natural laboratory" for studying how galaxies evolve.

 

Whoooooo's there? Just a "Cosmic Owl," the latest strange discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

 

A new study using JWST data has helped scientists spot an owl-faced object peering out at us from billions of light-years away. Formed through the extremely unusual collision of two rare ring galaxies, the structure also serves as a natural laboratory where researchers can study many of the processes accompanying the evolution of galaxies...

 

Ring galaxies are pretty rare, accounting for just 0.01% of all galaxies discovered so far. Even rarer, though, is a pair of ring galaxies detected when colliding — exactly what the "Cosmic Owl" is, as described June 11 in a preprint posted to arXiv. The paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but the object has already been confirmed by another team that independently detected the same collision — which they dubbed the "Infinity galaxy" in a paper posted to arXiv June 19.

 

Full Article: 

https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/whooos-there-james-webb-telescope-spots-cosmic-owl-super-rare-structure-formed-from-colliding-ring-galaxies

 

Pic Description:

The "Cosmic Owl," as photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Each "eye" is an active galactic nucleus, and the "beak" is a nursery of stars. (Image credit: Li et al.)

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Feast your eyes on the shortlisted pics for the 2025 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards (photos)

By Anthony Wood published 22 hours ago

The winners will be announced during a ceremony in September. 

 

Behold! The 2025 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards shortlist has been released, showcasing a spectacular array of astrophotography images ranging from solar prominences and auroras to distant galaxies and beguiling nebulas...

 

For the past 17 years, the Royal Observatory Greenwich — supported by astronomy camera maker ZWO — has called on the global photography community to compete in an open competition celebrating the majesty and variety of our night sky.

 

The 2025 competition saw photographers from 69 countries submit over 5,500 entries to compete in a plethora of diverse categories to gain recognition and, naturally, prize money. The overall winner of the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the year will bag a £10,000 (about $13,560 U.S.) grand prize, while the photographers who come out on top in each individual category receive £1,500 (about $2,030 U.S.) for their valiant efforts.

 

[ED: Over 10 categories with scores of entries. It's a feast for the eyes.]

See photo submissions and full article here:

https://www.space.com/stargazing/feast-your-eyes-on-the-shortlisted-pics-for-the-2025-zwo-astronomy-photographer-of-the-year-awards-photos#viafoura-comments

 

Pic Description: 

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) can be seen shining with the light of countless stars and nebulas in this image taken from the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, China in late 2024. It took around 216 hours to capture the ancient light used in the creation of the image, which shows the bright central bulge and spiral arms of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor in phenomenal detail.

Edited July 14 by ➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

NASA's Hubble, Chandra Spot Rare Type of Black Hole Eating a Star

July 24, 2025 10:00am Release ID: 2025-016

 

Summary

Hubble Looks at an Intermediate Black Hole Roaming Inside a Galaxy

 

Black holes, trap doors in space, come in a vast range of sizes. Some are a few times the mass of our Sun. The largest are billions of times the mass of our Sun. There is a curious gap in the range of black hole sizes. A rare class called “intermediate mass” black holes (IMBHs) weigh between a few hundred to a few 100,000 times the mass of our Sun. Unlike their much bigger cousins, monster black holes in the core of galaxies, they’re harder to find. They have to be caught in the act of foraging. When they occasionally devour a hapless bypassing star — in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event — they pour out a gusher of radiation. This has been captured both by the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes. A recent black hole fishing expedition found an IMBH nestled on the outskirts of a huge elliptical galaxy, NGC 6099, located 450 million light-years away. IMBHs represent a crucial missing link in black hole evolution between stellar mass and supermassive black holes.

 

Link to news release:

https://www.stsci.edu/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-016.html?utm_source=hubble&utm_campaign=inbox_astronomy&utm_id=2025-016

 

Full Article:

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-chandra-spot-rare-type-of-black-hole-eating-a-star/

 

Pic Description: 

A Hubble Space Telescope image of a pair of galaxies: NGC 6099 (lower left) and NGC 6098 (upper right). The purple blob depicts X-ray emission from a compact star cluster. The X-rays are produced by an intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart a star.

Science: NASA, ESA, CXC, Yi-Chi Chang (National Tsing Hua University); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

 

Video link [2:32]:

 

 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Swirling nebula of two dying stars revealed in spectacular detail in new Webb telescope image

24 Jul 2025 10:51 am AEST 
Benjamin Pope
Associate Professor, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Macquarie University

 

The day before my thesis examination, my friend and radio astronomer Joe Callingham showed me an image we’d been awaiting for five long years – an infrared photo of two dying stars we’d requested from the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

I gasped – the stars were wreathed in a huge spiral of dust, like a snake eating its own tail.

We named it Apep , for the Egyptian serpent god of destruction. Now, our team has finally been lucky to use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look at Apep.

If anything could top the first shock of seeing its beautiful spiral nebula, it’s this breathtaking new image, with the JWST data now analysed in two papers on arXiv.

Violent star deaths
Right before they die as supernovae, the universe’s most massive stars violently shed their outer hydrogen layers, leaving their heavy cores exposed...

The dust from the Wolf-Rayet is blown out in almost a straight line, and the orbital motion of the stars wraps it into a spiral-shaped nebula , appearing exactly like water from a sprinkler when viewed from above.

We expected Apep to look like one of these elegant pinwheel nebulas, discovered by our colleague and co-author Peter Tuthill . To our surprise, it did not.

Equal rivals
It turns out Apep isn’t just one powerful star blasting a weaker companion, but two Wolf-Rayet stars. The rivals have near-equal strength winds, and the dust is spread out in a very wide cone and wrapped into a wind-sock shape.

When we originally described Apep in 2018 , we noted a third, more distant star, speculating whether it was also part of the system or a chance interloper along the line of sight.

 

The new, much more detailed data from JWST reveals three more dust shells zooming farther out, each cooler and fainter than the last and spaced perfectly evenly, against a background of swirling dust.

New data, new knowledge

The JWST data are now published and interpreted in a pair of papers, one led by Caltech astronomer Yinuo Han , and the other by Macquarie University Masters student Ryan White...

 

In White’s paper , he develops a fast computer model for the shape of the nebula, and uses this to decode the orbit of the inner stars very precisely.

He also noticed there’s a “bite” taken out out of the dust shells, exactly where the wind of the third star would be chewing into them.

 

This proves the Apep family isn’t just a pair of twins – they have a third sibling.

 

Understanding systems like Apep tells us more about star deaths and the origins of carbon dust, but these systems also have a fascinating beauty that emerges from their seemingly simple geometry.

The violence of stellar death carves puzzles that would make sense to Newton and Archimedes, and it is a scientific joy to solve them and share them.

 

Full Article:
https://theconversation.com/swirling-nebula-of-two-dying-stars-revealed-in-spectacular-detail-in-new-webb-telescope-image-258314/

 

Pic Description:
The VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured this stunning image of a newly discovered massive triple star system. Nicknamed Apep after an ancient Egyptian deity, this may be the first ever gamma-ray burst progenitor found.

 

Zooming in video [50sec]:

 

 

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

NASA's Webb Traces Details of Complex Planetary Nebula

July 30, 2025 10:00am Release ID: 2025-124

 

Summary

More than one star contributes to the irregular shape of NGC 6072.

 

The lifecycle of stars is one of the most well-studied areas of astronomical study, but is still shrouded in mystery. Stars are essentially the cosmic engines that shape the universe. They populate the universe with elements, some key to life as we know it. Planetary nebulas are spectacular showings of a star, 1 to 8 times the mass of our Sun, as it is dying, casting off a glowing shell of gas and dust. Eventually, our own Sun will go through this phase. However, it’s astronomers’ best guess on specifically what that last hurrah will look like – not that we’ll be around to see. Studying planetary nebulas outside our solar system may provide insights into that, however, more powerful telescopes and detailed studies have shown the process isn’t as straightforward as once thought. Complicated dynamics in systems, including interacting stars, create messy scenes, as seen in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s newest look at a planetary nebula, NGC 6072.

 

Link to Full Article:

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-124

 

Pic Description:

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s view of planetary nebula NGC 6072 in the near-infrared shows a complex scene of multiple outflows expanding out at different angles from a dying star at the center of the scene.

 

There is one stretching from roughly 11 to 5 o’clock, another from 1 to 7 o’clock, and possibly a third from 12 to 6 o’clock. These outflows push gas toward the equatorial plane, forming a disk that appears to span from 9 to 3 o’clock.

 

Astronomers suspect there is at least one other star interacting with the material cast off by the central dying star, creating the abnormal appearance of this planetary nebula.

 

In this image, the red areas represent cool molecular gas, for example, molecular hydrogen.

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

Sculptor galaxy image provides brilliant details that will help astronomers study how stars form

By Adam Leroy, Rebecca McClain published 15 July 2025.

 

The Sculptor galaxy is a treasure trove of information that astronomers around the world cannot wait to pick apart.

 

If you happen to find yourself in the Southern Hemisphere with binoculars and a good view of the night sky on a dark and clear summer night, you might just be able to spot the Sculptor galaxy. And if your eyes were prisms that could separate light into the thousands of colors making it up, then congratulations: After hours of staring, you could have recreated the newest image of one of the nearest neighbors to our Milky Way galaxy.

 

This is not just another stunningly gorgeous picture of a nearby galaxy. Because it reveals the type of light coming from each location in the galaxy, this image of the Sculptor galaxy is a treasure trove of information that astronomers around the world cannot wait to pick apart...

 

Full Article:

https://theconversation.com/sculptor-galaxy-image-provides-brilliant-details-that-will-help-astronomers-study-how-stars-form-259754

 

Video link:

https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/LT5bpewL

 

Pic Description: 

This image represents one of the first times that astronomers have obtained images of thousands of star-forming regions at this impressive level of detail. A component of our team’s research uses the data from MUSE to understand how these regions are structured and how they interact with the surrounding galaxy.

 

It may look like only one picture, but this image of Sculptor is actually over 100 individual observations and 8 million individual spectra, painstakingly stitched together to reveal millions of stars all in one cohesive galaxy.

 

 

Edited August 1 by ➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

ED: Another one:  The "ELT" Extremely Large Telescope (lol)

 

Extremely Large Telescope gets a roof

By Kenna Hughes-Castleberry published 16 hours ago

The world's largest optical telescope is still under construction but is raising the roof on its progress.

The ELT is the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) $1.4 billion project to create the next-generation observatory.

In the middle of Chile's Atacama desert, there's lots of activity as construction on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is still underway, with cranes helping to move pieces in place.

Here, the world's largest optical telescope will scan the sky with a primary segmented mirror stretching 128 feet (39 meters) in diameter, roughly four times larger than any current ground-based optical telescope. The large mirror will not only allow the telescope to collect more light, but according to the ESO, the telescope will also provide images 15 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

Pic Description:

A view of the Extremely Large Telescope under construction. (Image credit: ESO/CHEPOX)

Article link:
https://share.google/ILPRGSOC1eDmASDuF