Congratulations to the Hubble team for 36 amazing years! 🔭

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Bright spiral galaxy glowing with swirling arms against a star-filled cosmic background. Text reads "Spiral Galaxy: Extroverted, Organized, Has everything in their bag you could possibly need. Galaxia espiral: Extrovertido, Organizado, Su mochila tiene todo lo que puede necesitar"

Bright elliptical galaxy glowing softly with a smooth, rounded core surrounded by faint stars in deep space. Text reads: "Elliptical galaxy: An old soul, Has a vinyl collection for the sound quality, Online vintage “entrepreneur”. Galaxia elíptica: Es un alma vieja, Tiene una colección de vinilos por la calidad del sonido, “Emprendedor” vintage en línea"

Three galaxies connected by a faint bridge of stars and gas, illustrating the merging process in deep space. Text reads "Merging galaxies: Inseparable besties, “Let’s hang out!” → suddenly it’s 3am, Can be a little clingy. Galaxias en fusión: Son amigos inseparables, “¡Salgamos!” → y de repente son las 3 de la mañana, Tiende a apegarse un poco a las personas."

Dense galaxy cluster with numerous stars and galaxies glowing against a dark space background. Text reads "Galaxy cluster: Knows everyone somehow?, Wants to start a band, but can’t play an instrument, Loves hosting themed parties. Cúmulo de galaxias: Por alguna razón… conoce a todo el mundo, Quiere armar una banda, pero no sabe tocar ningún instrumento, Le encanta organizar fiestas temáticas."

Which astronomical object are you? Comment below! ⬇️ 😉

All of these objects were taken from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's view of the southern region of the Virgo Cluster, ~55 million light-years from Earth & the nearest large collection of galaxies to our own Milky Way. 🔭🧪

Annual Physics Fair | Physics & Astronomy JHU Physics Fair, happening on Saturday, April 25, 2026, will be a day of fun, interactive exhibits and activities that explore the fascinating world of physics at Bloomberg Center for Physics and Ast...

Join the Space Telescope Science Institute for hands-on science demonstrations at the annual Johns Hopkins University Physics Fair, happening on Saturday, April 25, 2026, in Baltimore. 🔭 🧪

Congratulations Tony!

The Metal-Poor Frontier: Understanding Low-Metallicity Stars and Galaxies Across Cosmic Time

⚠️ One more week remaining to register for the @stsci.edu Spring Symposium on "Understanding Low-Metallicity Stars and Galaxies Across Cosmic Time". 🔭www.stsci.edu/contents/events/stsci/20...

Tour the cosmos with the Space Telescope Science Institute! 🪐 🔭

Join our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/spacetelescopevision

Last year, astronomers clocked the longest gamma-ray burst on record, which lasted hours rather than seconds. Learn the likely cause, and catch up on all the cosmic news, with ViewSpace: https://bit.ly/40i9sDi

Photo montage of the 2026 class of the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program. Title, centered at top, reads: 2026 NHFP Fellows. At top right is a small logo with astronomical images that reads: NHFP. Three categories of fellows are listed in groups, left to right. Heading for first is: How Does the Universe Work? Einstein Fellows. Tightly cropped portraits of 10 researchers in hexagons appear below. Heading for second: How Did We Get Here? Hubble Fellows. Portraits of 8 researchers in hexagons appear below. Heading for third group: Are We Alone? Sagan Fellows. Portraits of 6 researchers appear below. At bottom left is the label: NASA Hubble Fellowship Program.

The NASA Hubble Fellowship Program named 24 postdoctoral scientists to its 2026 class. These researchers will investigate how the universe functions, seek to understand how the universe evolved, and try to answer the question: Are we alone? ➡️ https://news.stsci.edu/4t5pxc1

Side-by-side comparison of Saturn observed at different wavelengths and times show how differently it appears in infrared, on the left, versus visible light, on the right. Left image is labeled Saturn, Webb Infrared Light, November 29, 2024. Right image is labeled Saturn, Hubble Visible Light, August 22, 2024. In infrared, Saturn has horizontal bands, with bands at the north and south poles appearing darker orange and lightening to tan as they approach the equator. The north and south poles glow a greenish-grey. The rings appear in an icy neon white. White dots, representing several of Saturn’s moons, are labeled Janus, Dione, and Enceladus. In visible, Saturn’s horizontal bands appear pale yellow, with some bands towards the north and south pole having a light blue hue. The rings appear bright white, glowing slightly less than Webb’s infrared image. White dots, representing several of Saturn’s moons, are labeled Janus, Mimas, and Epimetheus.

New views of Saturn from #NASAWebb and Hubble reveal storms, waves, glowing rings, and subtle cloud bands, all in one of the most complete portraits yet.

Different wavelengths of light, one comprehensive story: https://news.stsci.edu/4sopfx4

A cosmic first! 🚨

Hubble has spotted a comet that slowed and reversed its spin. Outgassing jets acted like thrusters, literally pushing it into a new rotation, shown here in this science visualization: https://news.stsci.edu/4c2u6hv

Illustrated graphic with the boot-shaped Rubin Observatory atop its site on Cerro Pachón beneath a sparkling night sky and the glowing band of the Milky Way stretching from lower left to upper right. Sprinkled throughout are many "Data alert!" popups, labeled with icons that represent supernovae, asteroids, hungry black holes, and more.

A 3-by-4 grid of grayscale astronomical images zoomed in on single objects. From left to right, the columns are labeled Template, New image, and difference. From top to bottom, the rows are labeled supernova, variable star, active galactic nucleus, and solar system object.

The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨

On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍

A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔭🧪☄️

🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...

Asteroids, supernovae, and black holes...oh my! ☄️🌀

In a single image, Rubin will detect thousands of changes in the sky — from objects in our Solar System to exploding or pulsing stars and actively feeding supermassive black holes, as well as surprises we can't predict yet! 💥

🔭🧪

Space Telescope Science Institute Expanding the Frontiers of Space Astronomy. We are the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. We help humanit...

Subscribe to the Space Telescope Science Institute's YouTube channel to watch our collection of videos explaining fascinating concepts in astronomy! 📹 🔭 ⭐ #STScI #YouTube #astronomy

Discovering the Least-Massive Brown Dwarfs Known with the James Webb Space Telescope Stars exist across a wide range of masses, some more massive than the Sun and some less massive. If a star is less massive than roughly 8% of the Sun's mass, or 80 times the mass of Jupiter, its center is too cool to sustain hydrogen fusion. These stars...

Astronomers have used #NASAWebb—most powerful infrared telescope to date—to search for brown dwarfs at very low masses in a nearby nebula that contains newborn stars.

Join Dr. Kevin Luhman (Penn State) for a discussion on the surprising aspect of these new brown dwarfs TONIGHT at 7 p.m. ET. 🔭

A nebula appears like a transparent bubble with a white edge, inside which are two hemispheres of orange clouds being blown out from the center, split by a dark vertical lane, giving the overall appearance of a see-through skull with a brain inside, as seen from above. A few stars appear with eight points, and small background galaxies can be seen around and through the outer bubble.

Astronomers are losing their minds over #NASAWebb’s latest images of the very brainy-looking nebula PMR 1. Its distinctive form is the result of a dying star expelling its outer layers: https://news.stsci.edu/4tVQccE 🔭 🧪

📣Update: Observations at the Gemini Observatory during March-May 2026 may now be proposed as part of this month's Fast Turnaround (FT) Program. Deadline: 12:00 pm (NOON), Hawaiian Standard Time (HST), February 28. More info gemini.edu/observing/ph... #astronomy @aura-astronomy.bsky.social

Webb: Transforming Our Understanding of Star Formation YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute

In more than three years, #NASAWebb has “supercharged” what astronomers can learn about star formation—reshaping what we know with its sharp near- and mid-infrared observations.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI. 🔭 🧪

JWST shakes up the hunt for earliest galaxy cluster The Universe formed stars, galaxies, and even galaxy clusters extremely early on in our cosmos. This new marvel is one more JWST surprise.

JWST shakes up the hunt for earliest galaxy cluster

A newly discovered galaxy protocluster by JWST doesn't break the cosmic record; it's only the 4th most distant one.

But it's the first with hot, X-ray emitting gas, and that means something.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astro #Xray

A symbiotic binary star. The structure resembles a cozy sweater with a red body, and blue wooly arms opened wide. The object is centered and take up about a third of the image horizontally. The background of space is black and dotted with distant stars and galaxies.

Appearing like a cosmic sweater, symbiotic binary star R Aquarii is seen in a combination of X-ray and visible light, including visible light from Hubble.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; ESO/VLT. 🔭

In the lower half is a narrow, horizontal cloud of gas and dust that stretches from edge to edge. It is largely pink at left and a mix of greens, oranges and reds at right. Two actively forming stars known as Herbig-Haro 797 are hidden on the right side, within the pinched waist of an orange section. A bright star with long diffraction spikes lies along the top right edge, and a few smaller stars are spread around. The background is covered in a thin blue haze.

Two stars in this #NASAWebb image are responsible for the horizontal jets. Known as Herbig-Haro 797, they are ingesting gas and dust—and periodically sending out two-sided jets. They’ll form over thousands of years.

Credit: ESA, NASA, CSA.

For those who are wondering... Who is AURA? 🔭🧪
@stsci.edu @noirlabastro.bsky.social

Google’s Former C.E.O. Wants to Build a Cosmic Search Engine

Kenneth Chang @kchang.bsky.social @ NYT reviews the new telescope 🔭 system being pursued under the patronage of the Schmidt Sciences team, with some closing thoughts by me . . . www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/s...

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Don't miss out on the most FUN swag and chocolate 😋 at #AAS247!
Visit the AURA Booth 301!

Scientists trained Hubble’s sharp vision on a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud and identified a new type of astronomical object—a failed galaxy that never produced stars. Nicknamed Cloud-9, it is considered a fossil from the early universe: https://news.stsci.edu/4bdj2Ov #AAS247

An illustration of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, its companion star, and a dense wake. The disk of a red-orange star is in the center. It is surrounded by a diffuse orange cloud representing its extended atmosphere. Below it, about one stellar diameter away, is a yellow dot representing a smaller companion star. From the companion, a dark red cloud wraps around in a counterclockwise direction. It begins very narrow and expands as it gets further from the companion, finally disappearing at the outer edge of the diffuse orange cloud around 10 o’clock. The words “artist’s concept” are at lower right.

The varying brightness of red supergiant Betelgeuse could be explained by Hubble’s latest reveal: The bright star in Orion’s shoulder has an elusive companion star orbiting it in its extended atmosphere, leaving a “wake” of dense gas: https://news.stsci.edu/4sunaQH #AAS247 🔭

AURA is a proud sponsor of #AAS247! Come visit us at booth 301 🔭

A field of galaxies on the black background of space. In the middle, stretching from left to right, is a collection of dozens of yellowish spiral and elliptical galaxies that form a foreground galaxy cluster. Among them are distorted linear features, which mostly appear to follow invisible concentric circles curving around the center.

This image of MACS 0416 from #NASAWebb and Hubble shows two galaxy clusters in the process of combining. Their mass magnifies the light from more distant background galaxies, helping astronomers identify distant supernovas and even individual stars: bit.ly/4qSNy5T 🔭

An infrared image of the planet Jupiter, showing its atmospheric heat patterns in glowing shades of orange and gold against a black background. The image highlights the planet’s distinct horizontal bands: the darker, cooler cloud decks appear as deep brown or black stripes, while the warmer, deeper layers of the atmosphere glow brightly. A prominent dark oval in the southern hemisphere represents the Great Red Spot, which appears cool in this thermal view. Smaller swirling vortices are visible across the entire surface

This week’s image is of Jupiter! Since this image comes from Gemini North NIRI, which has a field of view of 22x22”, a mosaic of multiple images was used to obtain this stunning portrait peering into Jupiter’s cloud-forming region. Check out a few paper highlights in the thread! #Astronomy