One of the justifications for building the Hubble Space Telescope was to finally get a detailed enough view  of the fuzzy blobs we call planetary nebulae that we could finally understand what is going on. Turns out, for some of the nebulae, we actually needed something even better than HST - and that “better than” is the JWST.  First catalogued in 1790 by William Herschel, NGC 1514 is a binary star system surrounded by a glowy blob of stuff. One of the stars is actually a stellar remnant - a hot white dwarf that has shed its atmosphere and stopped undergoing nuclear reactions in...

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia) Our Solar System lives in a nice suburb of the Milky Way. Sitting about 25,000 light years from the galactic center, we’re in a good place to view what’s happening in the core district, but far...

Credit: X-ray: NASA/SAO/GSFC/M. Corcoran et al.; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, N. Wolk (SAO/CXC) Astronomers kind of live to see weird weird objects. While likely always visible to humans, this southern hemisphere star transformed from kind of meh to the...

 Credit: Science Communication Lab for DESY Ultimately, our universe is far more diverse in its reality than humans tend to be in our theorizing. Over and over, we have found remarkable things just by turning a new instrument skyward. From the discovery of cold...

Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick/M. Zamani To me it feels like our biggest unknowns are often part of the high-energy universe - those processes and objects rise to the highest temperatures and give off the bluest of light.  As an example, back in 2018, researchers...

Credit: Dana Berry, SWIFT/NASA The most important factor about our Universe that we should be able to measure is its expansion rate. In 1929, Edwin Hubble provided the first observational evidence of an expanding universe when he demonstrated that galaxies that are...

credit: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al., HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the universe is an improv artist that likes to say “Yes, and”. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the effects we see are due to both a stuff we’ll collectively...

The results of science are often weirder than anything humans can imagine. As researchers, we dedicate our lives to taking data and knowing that whatever we may want to believe, we have to accept the reality of what our data shows us.  And sometimes the data is...

An artist’s impression of the ultra-long period magnetar—a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy. Credit: ICRAR. The more we look at the universe, the more we’ll be able to find rare and wonderful things. In...