The groundbreaking Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii has revealed features of the Sun's surface as small as 30 kilometres across for the first time.
The highest-ever resolution images of the Sun's surface have been released, captured by the groundbreaking new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope located at 789nm on Maui, Hawaii.
In this picture, features as small as 30km across can be seen for the first time ever. This image covers an area of 38,300 x 38,300km - almost the same as the circumference of planet Earth.
The first light image from the Inouye Solar Telescope shows a bubbly, popcorn-like texture zoomed in really close. The area of the image is exploded off of a larger picture of the whole sun.
The images show a pattern of turbulent, "boiling" gas that covers the entire sun. The golden cell-like structures - each about the size of New South Wales - are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface.
The images show the Sun's surface at five times the resolution captured by the telescope's predecessor, the NSF's Dunn Solar Telescope.
The images show hot plasma rising in the bright centres of "cells", cooling off and then sinking below the surface into the dark lanes in a process known as convection.
In these dark lanes, we can also see the tiny, bright markers of magnetic fields. Never before seen to this clarity, these bright specks are thought to channel energy up into the outer layers of the solar atmosphere called the corona.
Water has been found inside a comet by NASA astronomers, who used the James Webb Telescope to observe the space rock.
Water was detected inside a comet on the main asteroid belt that orbits between Mars and Jupiter.
The discovery came after 15 years of attempts by astronomers using different observation methods.
The space observatory detected water vapour around Comet Read.
This suggests that ice can be preserved in a warmer part of the solar system, scientists say.
"In the past, we've seen objects in the main belt with all the characteristics of comets, but only with this precise spectral data from Webb can we say yes, it's definitely water ice that is creating that effect," astronomer and principal research scientist at the University of Maryland, Michael Kelley said.
"With Webb's observations of Comet Read, we can now demonstrate that water ice from the early solar system can be preserved in the asteroid belt."
The James Webb Space Telescope has observed the first asteroid belt seen outside of our solar system, unveiling cosmic surprises along the way.
The space observatory focused on the warm dust that encircles Fomalhaut, a young, bright star located 25 light-years from Earth in the Piscis Austrinus constellation.
It was initially discovered in 1983, but researchers weren't expecting to see three nested rings of dust extending out 23 billion kilometeres from the star — or 150 times the distance of Earth from the sun.
Webb's new view revealed Fomalhaut's two inner belts for the first time, which didn't appear in previous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or other observatories.
The detailed image of the dust belts, captured in infrared light that is invisible to the human eye, showed that the structures are more complex than the main asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt in our solar system.
The main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, is where leftovers from the formation of our solar system orbit the sun. More icy leftovers can be found in the Kuiper Belt on the edge of our solar system, a doughnut-shaped ring of small celestial bodies and dust beyond Neptune.
The revelation of the Fomalhaut's two inner rings has suggested that planets hidden deeper within the star system may be affecting the dust belt's shape. Fomalhaut's outer belt alone is about twice the scale of the Kuiper Belt.
The new image and a study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet — not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.
Astronomers reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet.
It's a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets.
"If it's any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years," said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
This galactic feast happened between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the Aquila constellation when the star was around 10 billion years old. As the planet went down the stellar hatch, there was a swift hot outburst of light, followed by a long-lasting stream of dust shining brightly in cold infrared energy, the researchers said.
While there had been previous signs of other stars nibbling at planets and their digestive aftermath, this was the first time the swallow itself was observed, according to the study appearing in the journal Nature.
Astronomers have captured for the first time the shadow of a black hole and the powerful jet of material emerging from it in a newly released image.
The supermassive black hole is at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87. The observations were initially made in 2018 by combining the capabilities of multiple telescopes.
The groundbreaking image can help astronomers gain more insight into how black holes behave and what enables them to launch energetic jets of material across the universe.
The black hole at M87's galactic center is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun.
A large galaxy usually contains a supermassive black hole at its center, where the celestial object gobbles up gas, dust and stars that pass too closely.
But a black hole can also send powerful jets of material blasting across space and beyond its home galaxy.
NASA astrophysicists have looked back to 650 million years after the Big Bang to photograph the furthest galaxies ever observed.
The cluster of seven galaxies is located 30 billion light years away and was first observed by the Hubble telescope.
However, Hubble did not possess the technology to identify how far away the galaxies were.
Light from distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach Earth, meaning scientists have photographed the galaxies how they would have looked over 650 million years ago.
The James Webb telescope used a property called redshift to measure how far away a galaxy is from earth.
"It came as a surprise when we first saw the spectra from JWST—all seven galaxies were aligned at the exact same redshift," staff scientist at Caltech's IPAC astronomy centre, Takahiro Morishita says.
If galaxies share the same redshift, it means they were created at the same time.
Scientists say the sheer magnitude of the galaxy cluster could mean they were one of the first to ever develop in the universe.
An outer-space discovery has left scientists stumped, as it defies everything astronomers know about physics in outer space.
Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are objects in space that exude 10 million times more energy than the sun - which breaks a physical law - referred to as the Eddington Limit.
When an object breaks the Eddington Limit it should - according to the law - implode on itself as the object becomes too powerful or heavy to be sustained.
But most ULXs exceed the limit by 500 times while still sustaining themselves.
One ULX in particular, called M82 X-2 and illustrated here, is pushing physics even further, by breaking the Eddington Limit laws - by a lot.
The ULX is somehow sustaining itself.
Despite breaking every law of physics, it exists.
It's been identified as a Neutron star - which is made up of the leftover, dead cores of stars like our sun.
A neutron star is so dense that the gravity on its surface is about 100 trillion times stronger than that of Earth, according to Live Science.
At first NASA astronomers thought they were looking at a ray of light smudging their deep space satellite photograph.
But what they were really looking at was something far more vast and far more intense.
The streak was actually the trail of destruction and creation wrought by a black hole hurtling through the universe at immense speed – so fast it could travel from Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes.
The black hole sucks up gas from the space around it, and flings it behind it.
"Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole," Yale University's Pieter van Dokkum said.
As the gas cools, stars are formed, lighting up the trail, which is 200,000 light-years long.
NASA described the black hole as an "invisible monster on the loose".
The supermassive black hole weighs as much as 20 million of the Sun.
This artist's impression shows how the black hole creates new star formations behind it.
This detailed photo of the sun isn't what it seems.
It's actually 90,000 individual photos stitched together as one, to make an accurate depiction of the star at the centre of our solar system.
Astrophotographers Andrew McCarthy and Jason Guenzel used NASA data and satellite images to create this image, which they named "Fusion of Helios."
In this up close image, 'whispy' orange strands of plasma can be seen jumping off the sun's surface.
"We're using multiple layers of the sun's atmosphere that normally can't be photographed at the same time," McCarthy said.
"We wanted to create a full mosaic of the sun."
The plasma layer of the sun, called the chromosphere, is only visible under certain conditions.
Scientists have discovered something new on the surface of Venus: evidence that - more than 30 years ago - a volcano was active over the course of eight months.
The NASA Magellan spacecraft captured the images in the early 1990s as it circled our closest planetary neighbour, which is similar in size and composition to Earth.
A new analysis of the orbiter's perspective of a region near the Venusian equator reveals a volcanic vent that changed shape and increased greatly in size over the span of eight months.
Here a computer-generated 3D image of Maat Mons depicts how the volcano and lava flows extend for hundreds of kilometres across the fractured plains.
The images of the vent represent the first direct geological evidence of recent volcanic activity on the surface of Venus, according to the researchers.
This rendering provides a 3D perspective of Venus' Maat Mons volcano.