Welcome to the Universe

Discover the universe: Learn about the history of the cosmos, what it's made of, and so much more.

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Exoplanets

Worlds beyond our solar system.

Stars

Giant balls of hot gas that burn for millions to billions of years. 

Black Holes

Concentrations of matter with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Galaxies

Collections of stars, planets, and vast clouds of gas and dust bound together by gravity.

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How NASA’s Roman Mission Will Hunt for Primordial Black Holes

Astronomers have discovered black holes ranging from a few times the Sun’s mass to tens of billions. Now a group of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find a class of “featherweight” black holes that has so far eluded detection.

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An artist rendition of primordial black holes, this depicts a black background with many small black holes in an orange-red color.
This artist’s concept takes a fanciful approach to imagining small primordial black holes. In reality, such tiny black holes would have a difficult time forming the accretion disks that make them visible here.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Featured Video

NASA Simulation’s Plunge Into a Black Hole: Explained

This new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — enters the event horizon, sealing its fate.

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Featured News

Article
3 min read

NASA, JAXA XRISM Spots Iron Fingerprints in Nearby Active Galaxy

Article
2 min read

Hubble Views the Dawn of a Sun-like Star 

Three bright stars with diffraction spikes shine near the center-right of the image, illuminating nearby clouds that glow in pale blue. The clouds darken at the edges of the image, and are dotted with smaller stars, some also with diffraction spikes.
Illustration of an exoplanet with a hazy blue atmosphere and loose bands of clouds on the black background of space. The right three-quarters of the planet is lit by a star not shown in the illustration. The left quarter is in shadow. The terminator, the boundary between the day and night sides is gradual, not sharp. The planet is light blue with loose bands of white clouds. The limb of the planet (the edge) has a subtle blue glow.
7 min read

Webb Cracks Case of Inflated Exoplanet

Article1 month ago
Space scene of a thin atmosphere version of Gliese 12 b
5 min read

NASA’s TESS Finds Intriguing World Sized Between Earth, Venus

Article1 month ago
4 min read

NASA Images Help Explain Eating Habits of Massive Black Hole

Article2 months ago

Messier 78

Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust located 1,300 light-years away from Earth. Using its infrared camera, ESA's Euclid exposed hidden regions of star formation for the first time and mapped complex filaments of gas and dust in unprecedented detail.

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A vibrant cosmic scene showing the star-forming region Messier 78, also known as M78. The image features a stunning mix of colors, with glowing purples, oranges, and pinks among a backdrop of countless stars. Nebulous clouds of gas and dust create intricate and wispy structures, with areas of bright illumination indicating the presence of young, hot stars. The overall effect is a mesmerizing and dynamic view of space, showcasing the beauty and complexity of stellar nurseries.

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Article
2 min read

Hubble Examines an Active Galaxy Near the Lion’s Heart

The bright-white, diffuse glow of an elliptical galaxy sits at image center. The galaxy's core appears as an intense-white circle that gets more diffuse as you move outward from the core. A rusty-red, diffuse cloud is visible to the upper-left of the galaxy. It extends to the upper-left corner of the image, where it is very faint. Black background dotted with foreground stars and distant galaxies.
Article
6 min read

Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualization from NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes

Mosaic of the Pillars of Creation visualization model, composed of 4 rectangular strips oriented 45 degrees clockwise from vertical. Strips alternate between Hubble and Webb views of the visualization model, with each strip labeled: “Hubble” at lower right corners of first and third strips; “Webb” at upper left corners of the second and fourth strips. Webb strips have drop shadows that make it look like they are overlaid on top of larger Hubble image. Mosaic shows 3 vertical structures (pillars) of thick smoke-like material. Pillar edges are glowing, with thin wisps of material moving away into space. In Hubble strips, pillars are dark brown and opaque, on greenish blue background. In Webb strips, pillars are bright orange to brown with a distinct area of bright red at the top of middle pillar. A red star appears at the tip of a peak in the left pillar and the background is deep blue.
3 min read

NASA Webb, Hubble Scientist Marcia Rieke Awarded Gruber Cosmology Prize

Article4 days ago
Clouds of gas and dust with many stars. The clouds form a flat, blue background toward the bottom, and become thicker and smokier toward the top. Stars on one side light the nebula. A thick arc of gas and dust reaches around from the bottom-right corner of the image toward the top-left corner. It begins as a dark and obscuring cloud at bottom right and gradually becomes brightly lit by many stars at the upper left. Other large, foreground stars lie between the nebula and the viewer.
2 min read

Hubble Captures Infant Stars Transforming a Nebula

Article1 week ago
A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.
6 min read

First of Its Kind Detection Made in Striking New Webb Image

Article1 week ago
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Galaxies

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Black Holes

Stars

Exoplanets