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.

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New Year, New Era: Very Cold Detectors Reveal the Very Hot Universe of X-Ray Astronomy

NASA's XRISM mission is transforming X-ray astronomy with advanced detectors operating at near absolute zero. These innovations are providing new insights into the hottest and most energetic regions of the universe, from the remnants of exploding stars to the forces shaping galaxies.

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Person in white clean-room coverall, blue gloves, and face mask seated at a workbench using tweezers to place an electrical component into a gold and black assembly.
Resolve detector scientist Caroline Kilbourne installs the flight Resolve quantum-calorimeter array into the assembly that provides its electrical, thermal, and mechanical interfaces.
NASA Goddard

Sparkling Spray of Stars

Shining through the darkness like sparks left behind by a firework, this glittering group of stars is NGC 2660 in the constellation Vela.

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Bright blue-white stars fill the scene, but are concentrated on the right side of the image. a bright reddish-orange star sits in the upper left quadrant of the image near image center.

New(s) Beginnings

More NASA News
Article
10 min read

Beginnings: Life on Our World and Others

An illustration in a style similar to a National Parks poster shows a rocky shoreline in the foreground, an expanse of water lapping against it and, on the horizon, the cone of a volcano releasing a white cloud of gas against a sky with dusky light.
Image Article
4 min read

NASA Missions Spot Cosmic ‘Wreath’ Displaying Stellar Circle of Life

five images showing the sequence of a supernova
5 min read

Collapsing Star Gives Birth to a Black Hole

Article8 years ago
A growing protostar embedded within a molecular cloud. The center of the image shows a bright, red region, where the growing protostar resides, with a thin, gray lane of matter cutting through it horizontally, which is the protostar’s accretion disk. Above and below this region are blue triangular-shaped molecular clouds, which give the overall object an hourglass shape. The areas in the molecular clouds closest to the protostar have more pronounced plumes of blue gas. There are red, yellow, orange, blue, and green stars and galaxies scattered across the background.
4 min read

NASA’s Webb Captures Celestial Fireworks Around Forming Star

Article6 months ago
This image shows an exploding star. Two prominent lobes of white material expand outward from the center, surrounded by blue, pink, and red gas and dust against black space.
6 min read

Hubble Captures the Galaxy’s Biggest Ongoing Stellar Fireworks Show

Article6 years ago
Featured Video

Cosmic Births:
Hubble's Window into Protoplanetary Disks

In this video, Dr. Padi Boyd explains how Hubble's observations unravel the mysteries of planet formation and provide a glimpse into the birthplaces of new solar systems.

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Universe News

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Article
3 min read

Astronomy Activation Ambassadors: A New Era

Article
2 min read

Hubble Spies a Cosmic Eye

An oval-shaped spiral galaxy. Its core is a compact, glowing blue spot. A bright bar of light, lined with dark reddish dust, extends horizontally to the edge of the disk. A spiral arm emerges from each end of the bar and follows the edge of the disk, lined with blue and red glowing patches of stars, to the opposite end and a little off the galaxy. A scattering of blue stars are between us and the galaxy.
4 min read

NASA Finds ‘Sideways’ Black Hole Using Legacy Data, New Techniques

Article3 weeks ago
4 min read

NASA Missions Spot Cosmic ‘Wreath’ Displaying Stellar Circle of Life

Image Article
24 min read

The Mind-Bending Math Inside Black Holes

A Celestial Fireworks Display

Delicate sheets and intricate filaments form in the debris from the cataclysmic death of a massive star that once lived in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

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Keep Exploring

Discover More Topics From NASA

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