Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found strong evidence for a new exoplanet — one orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the nearest sun-like star to Earth. It’s located just four light-years away from us, in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system. Using JWST‘s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the team imaged Alpha Centauri with a coronagraphic mask to remove the glare …
Read More »CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best picture yet of a high-speed comet visiting our solar system from another star. NASA and the European Space Agency released the latest photos Thursday. Discovered last month by a telescope in Chile, the comet known as 3I-Atlas is only the third known interstellar object to pass our …
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Zoom image will be displayed The Hubble Space Telescope image of 3I/ATLAS shows diffuse emission that extends ahead of the object as it approaches the Sun. The yellow and green arrows mark, respectively, the projected negative heliocentric velocity vector and the projected anti-solar direction. (Image credit: Jewitt et al. 2025) Today, two new papers about 3I/ATLAS were posted online. The …
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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. What is it? The ELT is the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) $1.4 billion project to create the next-generation observatory. Here, the world’s largest optical telescope will scan the sky with …
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Since its launch in late 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been glimpsing some of the earliest epochs of cosmic time. Its observations have stretched cosmologists’ timelines of when galaxies may have first started to form. And now some of the telescope’s farthest observations yet have revealed sources of blue ultraviolet light from an epoch when stars shouldn’t …
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The James Webb Space Telescope has returned to the scene of one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic images, the Ultra Deep Field, to capture galaxies throughout cosmic history. This new image was taken as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), which is intent on further probing in infrared light two patches of sky that were …
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The James Webb Space Telescope recently opened a new window onto one of the universe’s more mysterious secrets. For the first time, it has imaged black holes feeding stealthily on stars from deep within dusty galaxies, where even ordinary telescopes are blocked.These results, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 1, show how JWST’s intense infrared sight enables astronomers …
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The world’s first telescope, crafted in 1608 by the Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey, led to stunning technologies that would later revolutionize our understanding of the universe. While his telescope used simple lenses to magnify objects to about three times their size, later scientists built on this concept to peer into the depths of outer space. But some telescopes are …
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A new telescope built to to track fast-moving space objects caught a comet from beyond the solar system moving across the sky — before anyone even knew it was there. The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile recently captured rare footage of the visitor known as 3I/ATLAS — only the third interstellar object discovered. What’s more impressive: The observatory …
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Beautiful light displays in the sky, such as glowing halos around the moon or bright spots beside the sun, aren’t just Earthly wonders. According to new research, similar dazzling effects might also occur on planets light-years away. In a study published on July 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Cornell University scientists propose that WASP-17b, a gas giant roughly 1,300 …
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