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    Webb and Hubble share the most comprehensive view of Saturn to date

    March 26, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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.
    Complementary views of Saturn from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope show a dynamic planet with atmospheric features, orbiting moons, and bright rings.
    Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Observing in complementary wavelengths of light, the two space observatories provide scientists with a richer, more layered understanding of the gas giant’s atmosphere.

    Both sense sunlight reflected from Saturn’s banded clouds and hazes, but where Hubble reveals subtle color variations across the planet, Webb’s infrared view se...

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    Hubble Captures a Tarantula

    August 12, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A colorful nebula. The image’s top-left is filled with layers of fluffy pink and greenish clouds. Long strands of green clouds stretch out from here; a faint layer of translucent blue dust combines with them to create a three-dimensional scene. A sparse network of dark dust clouds in the foreground adds reddish-black patches atop the nebula. Blue-white and orange stars, from our galaxy and beyond, are spread throughout the clouds.
    This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a portion of the Tarantula Nebula.
    ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray

    This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures incredible details in the dusty clouds of a star-forming factory called the Tarantula Nebula. Most of the nebulae Hubble images are in our galaxy, but this nebula is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

    The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region, not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.

    The Tarantula Nebula is home to the mos...

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    The Westerlund 1 star cluster: Hubble unveils detailed structure

    February 12, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Study unveils detailed structure of Westerlund 1 star cluster
    A Hubble Space Telescope WFC3-IR image of Westerlund 1 in false color. Credit: Wei et al., 2025

    Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have observed a supermassive galactic open cluster designated Westerlund 1. Results of the study, published Jan. 28 on the pre-print server arXiv, yield essential details regarding the structure of this cluster.

    Open clusters (OCs), formed from the same giant molecular cloud, are groups of stars loosely gravitationally bound to each other. It is assumed that most star formation takes place in massive clusters of stars, known as superstar clusters (SSCs). They are very massive young OCs usually containing a very large number of young, massive stars. The total mass of a typical SSC exceeds 10,000 solar masses.

    Westerlund 1 is a supermas...

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    Hubble Sees Aftermath of Galaxy’s Scrape with Milky Way

    November 15, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A whitish, whirlpool-like galaxy at middle of top edge, and a tadpole-shaped structure sweeps from left to right across lower half. A label pointing to outer, left of galaxy reads “Earth.” Faint, purple haze labeled “Milky Way Halo” surrounds galaxy and stretches to graphic’s edges. The tadpole-shaped object is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, with its own halo and streaming tail. Semi-circular, progressively darker layers of purple labeled “LMC Halo” surround the LMC, which appears roughly circular, with a central, light-yellow bar. Cloud-like features sprinkled with white specks surround this bar. Trailing the LMC is a large, tail-like feature labeled “Stream.” At the bottom left corner of graphic are several small, bright points of light labeled “Quasars.” Three light blue lines point from the label “Earth” through the LMC’s halo, and to three corresponding quasars. At the bottom, right corner is the label “Artist’s Concept.”
    This artist’s concept shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much more massive Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has blown away most of the spherical halo of gas that surrounds the LMC, as illustrated by the trailing gas stream reminiscent of a comet’s tail. Still, a compact halo remains, and scientists do not expect this residual halo to be lost. The team surveyed the halo by using the background light of 28 quasars, an exceptionally bright type of active galactic nucleus that shines across the universe like a lighthouse beacon. Their light allows scientists to “see” the intervening halo gas indirectly through the absorption of the background light...
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