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...

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...

Left: Dust is shown in red, oxygen in green, and starlight (from HST) in blue. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Y. Tamura et al., NASA/ESA HST). right: ALMA shows just dust emissions, including a vertically elongated elliptical cavity- a possible super bubble. Credit:...

A planet and its Trojan orbiting a star in the PDS 70 system (annotated) Credit: ALMA A whole fair amount of astronomy consists of theorists coming up with mathematically valid ideas of what is possible and then everyone debating if the universe would actually do...