The orbit of an exoplanet around a star in a binary star system has been portrayed in three dimensions for the first time. The planet orbits its star at a different angle to the plane of the orbit of the two stars, and the misalignment could offer clues as to how planets form in binary systems.

The equation named after him helps organize our thoughts on extraterrestrial life. On Friday, the family of astronomer Frank Drake announced that he passed away peacefully at 92 in his California home, near the site of his final academic position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Drake made a number of contributions to radio astronomy, including serving as director of the Arecibo radio telescope facility.

A distant galaxy stopped birthing stars when a merger with another galaxy ripped out its star-forming gas and stars, a violent process that left it with a massive 'tail' of star-stuff. SDSS J1448+1010 was formed when the universe was roughly half its current age of 13.8 billion years old from the collision of two progenitor galaxies. This resulted in a cosmic tug of war arising from each galaxy's gravitational influence.

Last year, NASA announced that it had discovered 14 of the coldest stars it had ever recorded. The so-called “brown dwarfs” were, at that time, listed among the coldest known stars in our universe.

Stunning images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show Jupiter in new glory. Fifth in line from the sun, Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system — more than twice as big as all the others combined. If Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be the size of a basketball, NASA says.

The adolescent phase of the universe was much more complex than imagined, detailed snapshots of the early cosmos from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal. "There are many more galaxies with obvious disks, bulges, spiral arms … appearing earlier in cosmic time than we thought," Karl Glazebrook says.

The red supergiant Betelgeuse, a colossal star in the Orion constellation, experienced a massive stellar eruption - the likes of which have never been seen before, according to astronomers. Betelgeuse first drew attention in late 2019 when the star, which glitters like a red gem in the upper-right shoulder of Orion, experienced an unexpected darkening. The supergiant continued to grow dim in 2020.

Somewhere in the depths of our universe, a stellar ballet is underway. Against the dark curtain of space, three enormous, glittering stars are locked in a dance by their own gravitational forces and aglow in their shared luminescence. Two blazing balls of gas are tightly pirouetting around each other, completing their mutual orbit to the rhythm of an Earth day. Simultaneously, a third star steadily encircles the pair, casting a spotlight on the performance.

One of the most beautiful and spectacular regions of the night sky can be found in the constellation of Orion.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has caught two galaxies colliding. In the midst of this cosmic clash, researchers have found something unexpected – there doesn’t seem to be an active supermassive black hole in either galaxy. The pair of galaxies, called IC 1623 or VV 114, is about 275 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Cetus. Lee Armus at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues observed them with JWST as part of a campaign to spot four relatively nearby, bright galaxy mergers and figure out how they work.

Astronomers have witnessed a rare and important life event in the evolution of binary star couplings for the first time. The team discovered a tight binary star surrounded by an expanding shell of material. This shell is matter is leftover from a stage in the stars' evolution called the common envelope phase.

Zeta Ophiuchi has had an interesting life. It began as a typical large star about twenty times more massive than the Sun. It spent its days happily orbiting a large companion star until its companion exploded as a supernova about a million years ago. The explosion ejected Zeta Ophiuchi, so now it is speeding away through interstellar space. Of course, the supernova also expelled the outer layers of the companion star, so rather than empty space...

Astronomers are now discovering record-breaking distant galaxies by the dozen while sifting through the treasure trove of data now being collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb). Among them are several galaxies dating back to just over 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Even NASA's next-generation space observatory can't manage to see supermassive black holes directly, but that doesn't mean astronomers can't use its data to better understand the mysterious behemoths.

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, have developed a methodology that will allow them to observe and study the first stars through the clouds of hydrogen that filled the Universe about 378,000 years after the Big Bang.

A fresh image based on brand-new deep-space data appears to show a wormhole spinning before our very eyes. The appropriately named "Phantom Galaxy" glows eerily in a new image by Judy Schmidt based on James Webb Space Telescope data collected nearly a million miles away from our planet using the observatory's mid-infrared instrument (MIRI).

Scientists have developed a new telescope to detect the collisions of dead suns known as neutron stars. The process is thought to create the heavy metals in the Universe including gold and platinum. The stars are made from a substance that is so heavy that a small teaspoon weighs four billion tonnes.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals its first images on 12 July, they will be the by-product of carefully crafted mirrors and scientific instruments. But all of its data-collecting prowess would be moot without the spacecraft’s communications subsystem. The Webb’s comms aren’t flashy. Rather, the data and communication systems are designed to be incredibly, unquestionably dependable and reliable.

The first stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope were revealed this week, but its journey of cosmic discovery has only just begun. Here is a look at two early projects that will take advantage of the orbiting observatory's powerful instruments.

On top of the first high-resolution science images that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team has just released, there was also a picture of Jupiter hidden in a document about telescope testing