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.

featured story

Coming in Hot – NASA’s Chandra Checks Habitability of Exoplanets

Astronomers are using NASA’s Chandra Observatory and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton X-ray data to explore whether nearby stars could host habitable exoplanets by tracking how much lethal radiation the exoplanets receive in orbit. This research will help guide observations with the next generation of telescopes searching for Earth-like planets.

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A bright, almost-round orange and yellow star is at the center of the black background of space. A light tan, circular planet is orbiting the star. The planet has a white halo around it.
The artist's illustration featured in the main part of this graphic depicts a star and its planet, WASP-18b, a giant exoplanet that orbits very close to it.
NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Featured Video

Sound of Space Data: Crab Nebula Sonification

The Crab Nebula is an expanding remnant of a star’s supernova first seen by Japanese and Chinese astronomers nearly 1,000 years ago. In this new sonification of the explosion, X-ray wavelengths and brightness in data obtained with NASA’s NuSTAR and Chandra space observatories have been turned into sound.

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Featured News

Article
4 min read

Discovery Alert: Spock’s Home Planet Goes ‘Poof’

Artist's concept shows a full disk of imagined planet Vulcan, predominantly light brown with patches of gray-green, against the black background of space.
Article
5 min read

X-ray Satellite XMM-Newton Sees ‘Space Clover’ in a New Light

An artist's concept of the binary star system HM Sge on the black background of space sprinkled with various sizes of red and white points of light. At the top of the image a blazing hot white disk surrounds a white dwarf star that is pulling a stream of material from its red giant companion, the glowing mottled ball at bottom right.
4 min read

Hubble Finds Surprises Around a Star That Erupted 40 Years Ago

Article3 weeks ago
5 min read

NASA’s Webb Reveals Long-Studied Star Is Actually Twins

Article3 weeks ago
4 min read

Travel Through Data From Space in New 3D Instagram Experiences

Article1 month ago

NGC 1546

NASA Releases Hubble Image Taken in New Pointing Mode -- this image, featuring NGC 1546, represents one of the first observations taken with the Hubble Space Telescope since transitioning to a new operating mode that uses only one gyro.

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A galaxy against a black backdrop dotted with more distant galaxies and a few foreground stars. The galaxy is slightly tilted toward us, providing a good view of dark dust lanes from slightly above. They are backlit by the galaxy’s core. This dust appears rusty-brown. The core itself glows brightly in a yellowish light as brilliant-blue regions sparkle through the dust. Several background galaxies also are visible, including an edge-on spiral just to the left of NGC 1546.

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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

Article7 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

Article2 weeks 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