Webb's infrared camera pierced the dust of Messier 82 and resolved 16.5 million stars, a fraction of the galaxy's true population, in a starburst astronomers think a galaxy merger set off and that cannot keep burning for long.
GJ 251 c is a nearby candidate super-Earth in a red dwarf's habitable zone, making it an unusually promising future direct-imaging target.
The old classroom version of galaxy formation had an appealing order to it. First came the galaxy: gas cooled, stars formed, structure assembled.
Cassini's 2008 plume crossing at Enceladus is still yielding chemistry, with fresh ice-grain data revealing additional organics linked to the moon's hidden ocean.
JWST observations reveal the Big Wheel as a giant rotating disk galaxy two billion years after the Big Bang, unusually massive and large for its epoch.
Roman uses a Hubble-size mirror, but its Wide Field Instrument captures far more sky per exposure, allowing surveys up to 1,000 times faster.
Venus and Earth make a useful pair because the comparison begins so neatly and then breaks almost completely.
Webb's NIRCam detected S/2025 U1 in February 2025, a roughly 10-kilometre inner moon of Uranus too faint for Voyager 2 or Hubble.
For much of the year, vast stretches of the Canadian Arctic sit under cloud or in polar darkness, invisible to ordinary cameras in orbit.
For most of the past sixty years, the search for life beyond Earth has been a search for places like Earth.
The Moon has a far side, not a permanently dark side: synchronous rotation keeps one hemisphere facing Earth while sunlight still moves across the whole lunar surface.
The Hubble Deep Field began as a ten-day stare into an apparently empty patch of sky near the Big Dipper and became one of astronomy's defining images.
A Webb-confirmed galaxy at redshift 14.44 adds to the evidence that bright, chemically active galaxies were present earlier and more often than many pre-Webb models predicted.
A careful look back at the 27 December 2004 giant flare from SGR 1806-20, what instruments recorded, and why the energy estimate depends on distance.
The popular picture of mining in space is precious metal: an asteroid packed with platinum, worth some unfathomable sum, towed home to make someone rich.
Jupiter-mass, squeezed into a lemon by the dead star it hugs, and wrapped in an atmosphere of almost pure carbon unlike any planet ever measured. The team that found it says it appears to break every known way of building a planet.
