The James Webb Space Telescope has detected an ancient galaxy that goes "beyond what is possible", researchers say.
Research published in the journal Nature, led by Swinburne University of Technology's Distinguished Professor Karl Glazebrook, found that the galaxy includes more stars than the Milky Way, and formed about 13 billion years ago.
The researchers said this could up-end the scientific understanding of how galaxies form, as there is not thought to be sufficient dark matter to have supported the formation.
Dr Themiya Nanayakkara, who led the spectral analysis of the telescope data, said, "we are now going beyond what was possible to confirm the oldest massive quiescent monsters that exist deep in the universe."
Japan's space agency has confirmed its "moon sniper" robotic explorer landed on its nose after making a historic touchdown on the lunar surface.
The agency called the landing a "significant achievement" despite problems during the landing that put the mission in jeopardy on January 19.
During its descent, the spacecraft experienced "some kind of anomaly" at a distance of about 50 metres above the surface, JAXA officials said in a news conference.
The thrust from one of the main engines was lost as a result, forcing the spacecraft to land on its nose with its "main engine facing upward and in an almost vertical position."
Shown here is the first picture sent back by the Moon Sniper after it landed on the lunar surface.
The spacecraft's panels were left facing west rather than upward as intended, forcing it to operate on limited battery power.
The lander's battery has since been turned off to maintain spacecraft functionality, JAXA officials said.
If the Moon Sniper can survive the frigid temperatures of lunar night, the space agency hopes light might reach the solar cells as the sun's angle on the moon changes, potentially restoring power generation and allowing operations to resume.
Here's a lunar surface scan mosaic image captured by the SLIM-mounted, enlarged view.
Despite the challenges, the agency hailed the moment as "a significant achievement for future lunar and planetary exploration."
The SLIM explorer used new precision technology to demonstrate a "pinpoint" landing and successfully reached its goals of landing within 100 meters of its target.
The touchdown made Japan the third country this century, and the fifth ever to land on the moon.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has picked up a "galactic neighbourhood" featuring a spiral of galaxies.
Although they look close together, they are separated by almost a whopping 300 million lightyears.
"This image is a really interesting example of how challenging it can be to tell whether two galaxies are actually close together, or just seem to be from our perspective here on Earth," said the NASA Hubble mission team.
New images captured by two of NASA's space telescopes showcase how the light from young stars can deck the cosmos with holiday cheer.
A new composite image showcases the "Christmas Tree Cluster" of young stars located about 2500 light-years away from Earth.
Thousands of years ago, a star in our galaxy violently exploded and created a glowing supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A that has intrigued scientists for decades.
A new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the closest and most detailed look inside the exploded star.
Swirls of gas and dust are all that remain of the star that went supernova 10,000 years ago. Cassiopeia A is located 11,000 light-years away in the Cassiopeia constellation. A light-year, equivalent to 9.46 trillion kilometers, is how far a beam of light travels in one year.
The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy, is spinning rapidly and altering space-time around it, a new study has found.
A team of physicists observed the black hole, which is 26,000 light years from Earth, with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope designed to detect the X-ray emissions from hot regions of the universe.
The researchers confirmed the black hole was spinning, which causes what is known as the Lense-Thirring effect.
Also known as frame dragging, the Lense-Thirring effect was what happened when a black hole dragged space-time along with its spin, said lead study author Ruth Daly, a physics professor at Penn State University who designed the outflow method more than a decade ago.
NASA's James Webb telescope has captured a portion of the Milkey Way in "unprecedented" detail, NASA has confirmed.
The image shows Sagittarius C, a star-forming region about 300 lightyears away from the black hold in the centre of our galaxy.
The high-definition photo showcases more than 500,000 stars, including a cluster of stars that are still forming, called protostars.
Click to the next slide for a detailed breakdown of the image.
The stars inside the orange circle are the protostars, which are still gaining mass and forming.
Protostars produce an outflow of infra-red, which surrounds the cluster as a cloud, visible inside the green dotted lines.
"The cloud the protostars are emerging from is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach Webb, making it appear less crowded when in fact it is one of the most densely packed areas of the image," NASA explains in a statement.
The photo also shows ionized hydrogen in the Milky way, surrounded by a yellow dotted line.
Astrologists plan to study the needle-like structures inside the hydrogen.
"The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better," Principle Investigator of the University of Virginia's galactic observation team and student Samuel Crowe said.
"Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe."
A panorama of colliding galaxy clusters glimmers in a new image, captured by the combined forces of the two most powerful space observatories ever created.
The cosmic phenomenon, called MACS0416, is 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. Eventually, the merging pair of giant clusters will combine to form an even more massive collection of glittering galaxies.
New details of the celestial feature have emerged in the colorful image, which unites the observational powers of Hubble Space Telescope in visible light and the James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.
The colors in the new image, released today, are used to indicate distance. Blue-hued galaxies are the closest, bursting with star formation and easily seen in visible light by Hubble. The red galaxies are more distant, best detected by Webb in infrared light.
One transient in particular captured the attention of astronomers, a star system they have nicknamed "Mothra" (inset), the titular giant monster of a 1961 Japanese film. The stellar system, magnified by a factor of 4000 due to gravitational lensing, was traced to a galaxy that existed three billion years after the big bang created the universe.
"We're calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it's so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere," said Haojing Yan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Missouri. Yan is lead author of one study describing the findings that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Dinkinesh, a small asteroid that NASA's Lucy mission visited last week, continues to surprise.
Lucy swung by the space rock, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, on November 1 as part of a test of the spacecraft's equipment before tackling the mission's primary goal: surveying the swarms of Trojan asteroids around Jupiter. The flyby of Dinkinesh, which means "marvelous" in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, wasn't even added to Lucy's itinerary until January.
But the first views captured by Lucy's instruments showed there was more to the shadowy asteroid than expected. At first, images suggested that the space rock was part of a binary pair, with a smaller asteroid orbiting Dinkinesh.
However, additional images taken by the spacecraft just after the flyby's closest approach have now revealed that the smaller asteroid is actually a contact binary — two smaller space rocks that touch each other.
Lucy came within 425km of the asteroid's surface during its closest approach, which is when the first images were taken. The second batch of images revealing the contact binary, shared by NASA, were taken six minutes later from about 1630km away.
"Contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system," said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, in a statement.
"We haven't seen many up-close, and we've never seen one orbiting another asteroid. We'd been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh's brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!"