Behold a stellar nursery, where starlight scatters through interstellar dust — and sometimes can’t pierce the space soot.

This gorgeous Hubble image is a celebration of the telescope’s 33rd space birthday.

The Ultra Deep Field revisited.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was first imaged in the early 2000s. Now, JWST set its sights back on the target to find new hints of galactic evolution.

A new catalog allows astronomers to trace the evolution of a star’s death.

The image and the data behind it may help astronomers solve a dusty dilemma.

To say that the formation of the earliest galaxies a few hundred million years after the Big Bang was a momentous occasion is an understatement. Since astronomers first proposed they were their own “island universes” a century ago, the line of galaxies we have been able to detect has been pushed further and further away and further and further back into the history of the universe—all the way back to the first era of the emergence of galaxies.

This week, a new candidate for the earliest galaxy — and the earliest to be confirmed spectroscopically — has been identified, dubbed JADES-GS-Z13-0. It formed just 320 million years after the Big Bang, when the intergalactic medium was still made up of murky, neutral hydrogen. A pair of studies published this week in Nature give a peek at not just the most distant galaxy yet discovered, but the processes that have shaped matter in the Universe ever since.

The four distant galaxies were discovered as part of a collaboration between two teams using two different instruments on JWST. Beginning in the early 2000s, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Surveyor (GOODS) used the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes along with the Chandra and Newton X-ray Observatories and various ground-based telescopes to image two sections of the sky as deeply as possible.

Witness the reinvention of the humble EVA suit.

The humble EVA suit needed to fit the mission profiles — and the regular launches of the Space Shuttle meant it had to fit all stripe of folks.

We may owe a debt of gratitude to the primordial asteroids that visited Earth billions of years ago.

Hayabusa2 ferried pristine asteroid samples to Earth in 2020. A new study reveals they contain uracil, a key life building block.

TEMPO will study pollutants like asthma-inducing nitrogen dioxide and cancer-causing formaldehyde.

A new space instrument called TEMPO will target North America’s air pollution problem, and highlights one of its big challenges.

The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution instrument, or TEMPO, will gather pollution data across North America. On Tuesday, representatives from NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts) spoke about the soon-to-launch project, in an event held at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Atmospheric physicists and NASA officials on Tuesday called this a major step forward in pollution monitoring. TEMPO will let scientists see emissions as they occur throughout the day, hour by hour, instead of a single sampling. The project involves members from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

A newly discovered asteroid called 2023 DW has generated quite a buzz over the past week due to an estimated 1-in-670 chance of impact on Valentine’s Day 2046. But despite a NASA advisory and the resulting scary headlines, there’s no need to put an asteroid doomsday on your day planner for that date.

The risk assessment doesn’t have as much to do with the probabilistic roll of the cosmic dice as it does with the uncertainty that’s associated with a limited set of astronomical observations. If the case of 2023 DW plays out the way all previous asteroid scares have gone over the course of nearly 20 years, and further observations will reduce the risk to zero.

Nevertheless, the hubbub over a space rock that could be as wide as 165 feet (50 meters) highlights a couple of trends to watch for: We’re likely to get more of these asteroid alerts in the years to come, and NASA is likely to devote more attention to heading off potentially dangerous near-Earth objects, or NEOs.

If you want to know which objects brought water to a once-dry planet, think small.