Space

With giant storms, powerful winds, aurorae, and extreme temperature and pressure conditions, Jupiter has a lot going on. Now, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the planet. Webb’s Jupiter observations will give scientists even more clues to Jupiter’s inner life.

In this wide-field view, Webb sees Jupiter with its faint rings, which are a million times fainter than the planet, and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea. The fuzzy spots in the lower background are likely galaxies “photobombing” this Jovian view.

This is a composite image from Webb’s NIRCam instrument (two filters) and was acquired on 27 July 2022.

CREDIT NASA, ESA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/08/Jupiter_showcases_aurorae_hazes_NIRCam_widefield_view

This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. Flying over Mercury's north pole gave the spacecraft's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters.

M-CAM 1 took this long-exposure photograph of Mercury's north pole at 07:07 CET, when the spacecraft was about 787 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet's night side at 06:59 CET.

In this view, Mercury’s terminator, the boundary between day and night, divides the planet in two. Along the terminator, just to the left of the solar array, the sunlit rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer can be seen, including some of their central peaks.

Because Mercury’s spin axis is almost exactly perpendicular to the planet's movement around the Sun, the rims of these craters cast permanent shadows on their floors. This makes these unlit craters some of the coldest places in the Solar System, despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun!

Excitingly, there is already evidence that these dark craters contain frozen water. Whether there is really water on Mercury is one of the key mysteries that BepiColombo will investigate once it's in orbit around the planet.

The left of the image shows the vast volcanic plains known as Borealis Planitia. These are Mercury’s largest expanse of ‘smooth plains' and were formed by the widespread eruption of runny lava 3.7 billion years ago.

This lava flooded existing craters, as is clearly visible in the lower left Henri and Lismer craters. The ‘wrinkles’ seen in the centre-left were formed over billions of years following the solidification of the lava, probably in response to global contraction as Mercury’s interior cooled down.

The volume of lava making up Borealis Planitia is similar in scale to mass extinction-level volcanic events recorded in Earth’s history, notably the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago.

The foreground of the image shows BepiColombo's solar array (centre right), and a part of the Mercury Transfer Module (lower left).

[Technical details: This image of Mercury's surface was taken by M-CAM 1 on board the Mercury Transfer Module (part of the BepiColombo spacecraft), using an integration time of 40 milliseconds. Taken from around 787 km, the surface resolution in this photograph is around 730 m/pixel.]

[Image description: Planet Mercury in the background with its grey, cratered, pockmarked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.]

CREDIT ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Search?SearchText=mercury&result_type=images

A little less than four years from now, a killer asteroid will narrowly fly past planet Earth. This will be a celestial event visible around the world—for a few weeks, Apophis will shine among the brightest objects in the night sky.

The near miss by the large Apophis asteroid in April 2029 offers NASA a golden—and exceedingly rare—opportunity to observe such an object like this up close. Critically, the interaction between Apophis and Earth's gravitational pull will offer scientists an unprecedented chance to study the interior of an asteroid.

This is fascinating for planetary science, but it also has serious implications for planetary defense. In the future, were such an asteroid on course to strike Earth, an effective plan to deflect it would depend on knowing what the interior looks like.

"This is a remarkable opportunity," said Bobby Braun, who leads space exploration for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an interview. "From a probability standpoint, there’s not going to be another chance to study a killer asteroid like this for thousands of years. Sooner or later, we’re going to need this knowledge."

A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.

"As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn't tell the whole story. And what astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots," says Yusra AlSayyad, a Princeton University researcher who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

"The sky and the world aren't static," she points out. "There's asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding."

And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, conceived nearly 30 years ago, is designed to capture all of it.

This dramatic view of the crescents of Neptune and Triton was acquired by Voyager 2 approximately 3 days, 6 and one-half hours after its closest approach to Neptune north is to the right.

Taken: August 23, 1999

Producer: JPL

https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/amf-pia02215/

A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.

"As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn't tell the whole story. And what astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots," says Yusra AlSayyad, a Princeton University researcher who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

"The sky and the world aren't static," she points out. "There's asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding."

Voyager 1 image of Saturn and its ring taken Nov. 16, 1980 four days after closest approach to Saturn, from a distance of 5,300, 000 km (3,300,000 miles). This viewing geometry, which shows Saturn as a crescent, is never achieved from Earth. The Saturnian rings, like the cloud tops of Saturn itself, are visible because they reflect sunlight. The translucent nature of the rings is apparent where Saturn can be seen through parts of the rings. Other parts of the rings are so dense with orbiting ice particles that almost no sunlight shines through them and a shadow is cast onto the yellowish cloud tops of Saturn, which in turn, casts a shadow across the rings at right. The black strip within the rings is the Cassini Division, which contains much less orbiting ring material than elsewhere in the rings.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/pia00335-3/

Asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft. The image was taken by the on board DRACO imager from a distance of 570 miles (920 kilometers). This image was the last to contain a complete view of both asteroids. Didymos is roughly 2,500 feet (780 meters) in diameter; Dimorphos is about 525 feet (160 meters) in length. Ecliptic north is toward the bottom of the image. This image is shown as it appears on the DRACO detector and is mirror flipped across the x-axis from reality.

CREDIT

NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Daphnis, a small moon of Saturn, orbits within the Keeler Gap and exerts a noticeable gravitational pull on Saturn’s rings. This effect creates striking wave-like patterns along the ring edges, offering a visual glimpse into gravitational interactions in planetary systems.

Source: NASA : https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/moons/daphnis/

Observations of our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, made using ESA’s Flyeye telescope.

Andromeda appears so large in Earth’s sky that in angular size it is six times the diameter of the full Moon and it can be seen with the unaided eye in dark skies.

For a dedicated astronomical telescope such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, viewing the whole Andromeda galaxy requires stitching together hundreds of individual observations. This Hubble image of Andromeda, for example, took over 10 years and 600 snapshots to make.

Flyeye, on the other hand, is a survey telescope designed to see as much of the sky at once as possible, and to rapidly scan for new near-Earth objects. This image of Andromeda takes up just one sixteenth of the telescope’s full field of view.

The image was acquired during the telescope’s ‘first light’ campaign by combining 16 exposures, each of 30 seconds.

CREDIT

ESA

https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Week_in_images/Week_in_images_02-06_June_2025

1. Radial velocity

ESA’s Gaia data release 3 shows us the speed at which more than 30 million objects in the Milky Way (mostly stars) move towards or away from us. This is called ‘radial velocity’. We can now see how the objects move over a large portion of the Milky Way’s disc.

The rotation of the disc, projected along the line-of-sight, is visible from the alternation of bright areas (moving away from us) and dark areas (moving toward us). Several objects whose radial velocity differs from that of their close environment are visible by contrast.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) appear as bright spots in the lower right corner of the image. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is visible as a faint quasi-vertical stripe below the Galactic Centre. Several globular clusters appear as tiny dots in the image, such as 47 Tucanae, the dark dot on the immediate left of the SMC.

2. Radial velocity and proper motion

This sky map shows the velocity field of the Milky Way for ~26 million stars. The colours show the radial velocities of stars along the line-of-sight. Blue shows the parts of the sky where the average motion of stars is towards us and red shows the regions where the average motion is away from us. The lines visible in the figure trace out the motion of stars projected on the sky (proper motion). These lines show how the direction of the speed of stars varies by galactic latitude and longitude. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are not visible as only stars with well defined distances were selected to make this image.

3. Interstellar dust

Gaia not only maps the stars in our galaxy but tells us what is in between the stars. The space between stars is not empty but instead filled with dust and gas clouds, out of which stars are born.

Through the precise measurements of the stars' positions and their dispersed light, Gaia allows us to map the absorption of the starlight by the interstellar medium. Those maps provide us with essential clues to the physical mechanisms of the formation of stars, galaxies, and the history of our home galaxy.

This map shows the interstellar dust that fills the Milky Way. The dark regions in the centre of the Galactic plane in black are the regions with a lot of interstellar dust fading to the yellow as the amount of dust decreases.The dark blue regions above and below the Galactic plane are regions where there is little dust.

4. Chemical map

What stars are made of can tell us about their birthplace and their journey afterwards, and therefore about the history of the Milky Way. With today’s data release, Gaia is bringing us a chemical map of the galaxy.

With Gaia, we see that some stars in our galaxy are made of primordial material, while others like our Sun are made of matter enriched by previous generations of stars. Stars that are closer to the centre and plane of our galaxy are richer in metals than stars at larger distances.

This all-sky view shows a sample of the Milky Way stars in Gaia’s data release 3. The colour indicates the stellar metallicity. Redder stars are richer in metals.

CREDIT

ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images

The eye is first drawn, in this new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month, to the central mega-monster that is galaxy cluster Abell S1063. This behemoth collection of galaxies, lying 4.5 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Grus (the Crane), dominates the scene. Looking more closely, this dense collection of heavy galaxies is surrounded by glowing streaks of light, and these warped arcs are the true object of scientists’ interest: faint galaxies from the Universe’s distant past.

Abell S1063 was previously observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Frontier Fields programme. It features a strong gravitational lens: the galaxy cluster is so massive that the light of distant galaxies aligned behind it is bent around it, creating the warped arcs that we see here. Like a glass lens, it focuses the light from these faraway galaxies. The resulting images, albeit distorted, are both bright and magnified – enough to be observed and studied. This was the aim of Hubble’s observations, using the galaxy cluster as a magnifying glass to investigate the early Universe.

The new imagery from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) takes this quest even further back in time. This image showcases an incredible forest of lensing arcs around Abell S1063, which reveal distorted background galaxies at a range of cosmic distances, along with a multitude of faint galaxies and previously unseen features.

This image is what’s known as a deep field – a long exposure of a single area of the sky, collecting as much light as possible to draw out the most faint and distant galaxies that don’t appear in ordinary images. With 9 separate snapshots of different near-infrared wavelengths of light, totalling around 120 hours of observing time and aided by the magnifying effect of gravitational lensing, this is Webb’s deepest gaze on a single target to date. Focusing such observing power on a massive gravitational lens, like Abell S1063, therefore has the potential to reveal some of the very first galaxies formed in the early Universe.

The observing programme that produced this data, GLIMPSE (#3293, PIs: H. Atek & J. Chisholm), aims to probe the period known as Cosmic Dawn, when the Universe was only a few million years old.

[Image Description: A field of galaxies in space, dominated by an enormous, bright-white elliptical galaxy that is the core of a massive galaxy cluster. Many other elliptical galaxies can be seen around it. Also around it are short, curved, glowing red lines, which are images of distant background galaxies magnified and warped by gravitational lensing. A couple of foreground stars appear large and bright with long spikes around them.]

CREDIT

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, H. Atek, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

R. Endsley

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/05/Webb_glimpses_the_distant_past