View a gallery of neutron stars and related phenomena captured by Chandra

View the Crab Nebula in different wavelengths of light to identify the structures surrounding the neutron star—a stellar remnant composed of tightly-packed neutrons.

View a gallery of stunning images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope

While the James Webb telescope collects an astounding amount of scientific data, a major part of its allure is its ability to return stunning, high-resolution images. These images include nearby stars, distant galaxies, and some of the oldest structures in the universe.

View galleries of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

With more than 1.7 million observations made since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of space missions, planets, stellar nurseries, interstellar comets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. This search tool allows users to sort and filter across these celestial objects to explore over 35 years of Hubble's astrophotography.

NASA captures image of ghostly cosmic hand

NASA's X-ray space telescopes, Chandra and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, have joined forces to study a hand-shaped structure in space, revealing the magnetic field "bones" of a pulsar wind nebula. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields, creating extreme physics conditions. The combined data from these telescopes provide insight into how pulsars inject particles into space and shape their environment, with the magnetic field playing a crucial role.

View galleries of images taken by the Voyager spacecraft, including close-ups of Uranus, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, Saturn's ring system, and Neptune's Great Dark Spot.

Neutron stars, the remains of some massive stars after they explode in a supernova, are the densest directly observable objects in the universe.

View a gallery of photographs of Neptune taken during NASA missions.

Explore a gallery of astronomical images curated by the European Space Agency, which includes illustrations and images of aurorae, planets, stars, galaxies, stellar nurseries, exoplanets, and black holes.

View a colorful gallery of solar features, including coronal loops and filamentary prominences, curated by the National Solar Observatory.

Watch an artist's impression of two neutron stars merging in a kilonova explosion

Such an event produces enough light to briefly outshine an entire galaxy and to produce characteristic gravitational wave and gamma-ray signals. On August 17, 2017, these signals were captured by the LIGO–Virgo and Fermi/INTEGRAL observatories, respectively, from a kilonova about 130 million light-years away.

View a gallery of photographs of Uranus taken during NASA missions.

The first image of a black hole was created from an international telescope network

The Event Horizon Telescope united radio observatories worldwide to image the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*. The team couldn’t transmit their massive dataset online, so they physically flew hundreds of terabytes of data to MIT aboard airplanes.

A composite of telescope images of the sun, which each reveal unique solar features

While traditional cameras can reveal sunspots—cooler regions on the sun's surface—in visible light, x-ray detectors can highlight explosions of high-energy plasma and magnetic fields known as coronal mass ejections. Hydrogen-alpha filters can reveal clouds and filaments of material suspended in magnetic fields above the sun's surface.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is a NASA spacecraft with telescopes designed to study gamma ray bursts—the most powerful explosions in the universe, which result from supernova explosions during the formation of neutron stars and black holes.

In 1974, a pair of neutron stars provided the first evidence of gravitational waves

Observations of a pulsar—a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits light—revealed it to be part of a system of two stars that orbited one another in a shrinking orbit, indicating gradual energy loss. Calculations showed that the changing orbit was consistent with gravitational waves predicted to carry energy away from such a system.

Research suggests that the small red dots in images of deep space captured by the James Webb Space Telescope since 2022 are black hole stars—black holes surrounded by enormous clouds of gas.

View a gallery of notable comets

The collection features 1973's Kohoutek, which had been dubbed the "comet of the century," 1965's Ikeya-Seki—one of the brightest comets of the millennium—and 2002's NEAT, a comet that survived a coronal mass ejection as it passed near the sun.

The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who was not awarded the corresponding Nobel Prize

During her doctoral program in radio astronomy at Cambridge University, Bell Burnell's first two observations of a neutron star were initially dismissed as interference by Antony Hewish, her advisor. He and Martin Ryle, head of the research group, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, the first awarded for astronomical research.

Throughout its 10-year mission to create a time-lapse of the universe, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate 500 petabytes of data by taking an ultrawide, ultra-high definition image every 34 seconds.

View a media gallery from the assembly of Voyager 1 and 2

This archive includes the many steps it took to put together each Voyager probe. Photos focus on individual parts, like the 8-track tape deck, the large dish-shaped antenna, and its long arm magnetometer boom.

How neutron stars serve as laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of gravity

Data from a 16-year study of an orbiting pair of spinning neutron stars showed that measurements of gravitational wave energy and the bending of light around the system were consistent with predictions made by general relativity to an accuracy of at least 99.99% across seven tests. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

How neutron stars resemble Earth, including harboring an atmosphere and 'mountains'

These stars maintain an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, and carbon at approximately 2,000,000 degrees Celsius (3,600,000 degrees Fahrenheit), only a few thousandths of a millimeter thick, which envelops "mountains" about a millimeter high. Its interior consists of an inner and an outer crust surrounding inner and outer cores, all held together by enormous gravitational forces despite spinning multiple times a second.

During Nancy Roman's tenure as the agency's chief of astronomy, NASA launched Stargazer—the first successful space telescope—as part of the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory program.

Explaining pulsars, the cosmic clocks and lighthouses of the universe

As of 2023, over 3,000 of these rapidly rotating neutron stars have been discovered, which contain magnetic fields along which energized particles accelerate and emit light, including X-rays, gamma rays, visible light, and, most commonly, radio waves. The fastest of these, PSR J1748–2446ad, rotates 716 times per second, meaning its surface equator moves at about 24% the speed of light.

The next generation of space-based observatories

How exactly does a space telescope come to be funded by NASA? NASA's most famous telescopes, like Hubble and James Webb, were once featured in the decadal survey–a once per decade survey run by the National Academy of Science that recommends which projects to support. This article and podcast covers which telescope designs are in contention to be part of NASA's next generation of space-based observatories.

View maps of the Milky Way across all wavelengths of light.

The first image of Sagittarius A*—the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy—was revealed in 2022, almost 50 years after its discovery.

Play an interactive game to explore and learn about Hubble images

Aboard the fictional USS Hubble, users can choose their own adventure to investigate the solar system, our galaxy, and the universe beyond. Each option directs users to a real image accompanied by relevant information and additional media elements, such as a time-lapse of the moon Phobos orbiting Mars.

View the Helix Nebula in different wavelengths of light to identify the structures surrounding the dying star, including shells of gas and dusty filaments.

See to the edge of the universe with this two-decade astronomy project

A New Mexico telescope has captured astronomical data for two decades to compile this map of the universe. Starting from earth and ending at the "edge" of the universe, it shows one slice of the cosmos: a total of 200,000 galaxies.

Nearly 50 years before the first observational evidence, a soldier fighting on the Eastern Front in World War I found a mathematical solution to Einstein's equations that suggested the existence of black holes.

Watch a simulation of a collapsing star becoming a black hole

When a massive star can no longer release enough energy through fusion in its core to fight off gravitational collapse, the dense core collapses first, producing an event horizon that traps light within it, including some light produced within the star at the time of collapse. As more material falls into the growing event horizon, the star will appear to eclipse itself from the inside.

Colorizers convert Hubble's gray scale images into color composites of different wavelengths

The near-infrared and ultraviolet light captured by the space telescope is not visible to human eyes, but observational data of these types of light can be filtered and modified into visible colors. Many detailed images of astronomical objects are the result of combining these artificially colored images into layers.

Webb Telescope zooms in on Orion Nebula and finds planet pairs

The Webb telescope has trained its infrared cameras on the nearest star-forming nebula in our universe, the Orion Nebula. Its images revealed a never-before-seen phenomenon: dozens of pairs of planet-sized objects in binary orbit, seemingly floating...

Watch a tour of a 3D visualization of the Pillars of Creation

Combining observational data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes has allowed NASA scientists to create a multiwavelength model of the star-forming region at the heart of the Eagle nebula.

What is a neutron star?

Neutron stars are born in supernova explosions. They are stars with a couple of times our sun’s mass, squeezed into a sphere the size of an earthly city.

Mapping the universe's 1.3 million quasars

Quasars form the core of active galaxies where supermassive black holes devour unimaginable amounts of matter. You can see a map of all 1.3 million of these objects with this 3D map. It was assembled with data from the Gaia spacecraft and shows how the spread of dark matter across space matches that described by the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Fly through the deepest image of space ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

Taken over 11 days between 2003 and 2004, when the space telescope was aimed at a seemingly empty patch of the sky, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field revealed about 10,000 sources of light, most of which are entire galaxies. This visualization expands the 2D image into a 3D view spanning 12 billion years.

Astrophotographer Vincent Bouchama's stellar photo archive

Astrophotographers specialize in collecting as much light from celestial objects as possible while minimizing the movement of the object they're capturing. It's a unique skillset—requiring unique tools—but the results are often universally...

Explore a guide to observing comets

Binoculars or telescopes can be used to see vivid tails, glowing comas, and brief bursts of brightness from these celestial objects. For photography, a DSLR or mirrorless camera with a wide-aperture lens, long exposure settings, and accessories such as tripods and star trackers is recommended.

The first-ever image of a black hole

The Black Hole at the center of galaxy M87 is ready for its close-up, becoming the first black hole to have its image directly captured. The Event Horizon Telescope caught the distant yet massive object—it's more than 55 million light years away—recording its gravity's effect on nearby hot gases.

See a timeline of James Webb Space Telescope discoveries

Since its launch on Christmas Day 2021, NASA's $10B James Webb Space Telescope has captivated the world with its rapid revelations of ancient galaxies, star-formation hotbeds, and more. This regularly updated timeline of Webb's discoveries keeps you up to date with the latest developments.

Explore a gallery of space-based images and animations of Earth

This collection compiles shots of well-known locations, such as US national parks, and natural features, including aurora borealis and fall foliage, to provide a high-level view of Earth's surface.

As seen in the dark region of the Horsehead Nebula, clouds of space dust can block some forms of light from reaching telescopes, impairing observations and data collection.

Explore the night's sky from anywhere

Stellarium Web is a planetarium running in your web browser. It shows a realistic star map, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. Using its interface, you can click on object's visible at your location on the Earth...

View historical records of solar observations and discoveries, from telescopes in the early 1600s revealing sunspots to NASA's Parker Solar Probe photographing the sun from within its outer corona in 2025.

Zoom into this mega-photo of the Milky Way galaxy

A telescope in Chile has captured 21,400 exposures of the central region of the Milky Way galaxy, and scientists created one composite image showcasing over 3 billion celestial objects. Zoom in here.

A real-time 3D-explorer of the solar system

NASA's Eyes on the Solar System allows you to track all kinds of objects in space in real time, from observatories like the James Webb Telescope to all manner of comets and asteroids. Zoom in and out, read up on space missions, and see the solar system from a totally new angle with this incredible interactive site. Jump in here.

The aesthetics of the James Webb images

The highly popular images produced by the James Webb Space Telescope are an artful collaboration between data science and visual designers. The raw data reflects real physical aspects of space, but it arrives without visual representation. Visual experts assign colors to specific wavelengths, crop and orient images in an accessible way, and consider the emotional impact of images as they incorporate design principles into the final product. Learn the fascinating details here.