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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered an object they've dubbed 'Big Wheel,' a gargantuan galaxy spinning through the early universe and growing larger by the second. The Big Wheel alongside some of its neighbors. (Image credit: Weichen Wang et al. (2025), CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It's a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We've dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published March 17 in Nature Astronomy. This giant disk galaxy...

A close-up view of the center of the NGC 6505 galaxy, with the bright Einstein ring around its nucleus, captured by ESA’s Euclid space telescope. The Einstein ring is formed by gravitational lensing, with the mass of galaxy NGC 6505 bending and magnifying the light from a more distant galaxy into a ring. NGC 6505 is a well-known galaxy only around 590 million light-years from Earth, and Euclid’s discovery of a spectacular Einstein ring here was unexpected. (Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, T. Li) MUNICH — When the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope launched on July...

The distant galaxy has all the structure of a modern spiral galaxy (the object next to it is another galaxy in the foreground). Image credit: Xiao et al., arXiv 2024 (CC BY 4.0) It has been just over three years since JWST was launched into space and in that time, the telescope has dramatically expanded our understanding of the distant universe. Among the important findings is the discovery of very young galaxies that already looked like their more senior counterparts in the local universe, and a recent study has shown a spiral galaxy that already had everything modern ones do...

It was barely a century ago that we thought the Milky Way encompassed the entirety of the Universe. Now? We’re not even a special galaxy. Key Takeaways Our galaxy, if you measure its longest axis from end-to-end, extends for over 100,000 light-years in space: a remarkable distance to fathom that’s billions of times the Earth-Sun separation. Yet if we compare our Milky Way to the largest galaxies in the Universe, we learn that not only are we nothing special, but we’re not even in the same league as the largest ones of all. How large can the largest galaxy truly...

Explanation: This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in visible light (bottom panel) actually glows brightly in infrared light (top panel). The featured image shows the infrared glow in false blue, recorded recently by the space-based James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and released yesterday, pictured above an archival image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope...

Explanation: A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula is more modestly known as NGC 3372. One of our Galaxy's largest star forming regions, it spans over 300 light-years. Like the smaller, more northerly Great Orion Nebula, the Carina Nebula is easily visible to the unaided eye. But at a distance of 7,500 light-years it lies some 5 times farther away. This stunning telescopic view reveals remarkable details of the region's glowing filaments of interstellar gas and obscuring cosmic dust clouds. The Carina Nebula is home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae,...

Explanation: Something strange happened to this galaxy, but what? Known as the Cigar Galaxy and cataloged as M82, red glowing gas and dust are being cast out from the center. Although this starburst galaxy was surely stirred up by a recent pass near its neighbor, large spiral galaxy M81, this doesn't fully explain the source of the red-glowing outwardly expanding gas and dust. Evidence indicates that this material is being driven out by the combined emerging particle winds of many stars, together creating a galactic superwind. In the featured images, a Hubble Space Telescope image in visible light is shown...

Explanation: What kind of celestial object is this? A relatively normal galaxy -- but seen from its edge. Many disk galaxies are actually just as thin as NGC 5866, the Spindle galaxy, pictured here, but are not seen edge-on from our vantage point. A perhaps more familiar galaxy seen edge-on is our own Milky Way galaxy. Also cataloged as M102, the Spindle galaxy has numerous and complex dust lanes appearing dark and red, while many of the bright stars in the disk give it a more blue underlying hue. The blue disk of young stars can be seen in this...

Combination of a Hubble Space Telescope image of SN 1987A and the compact argon source. The faint blue source in the centre is the emission from the compact source detected with the JWST/NIRSpec instrument. Outside this is the stellar debris, containing most of the mass, expanding at thousands of km/second. The inner bright "string of pearls" is the gas from the outer layers of the star that was expelled about 20,000 years before the final explosion. The is the fast debris are now colliding with the ring, explaining the bright spots. Outside of the inner ring are two outer rings,...

"Stars could be there, we just can't see them." Hydrogen gas in the primordial galaxy J0613+52 with red indicating regions turning away from Earth and blue showing regions turning toward us (Image credit: STScI POSS-II with additional illustration by NSF/GBO/P.Vosteen.) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Astronomers have accidentally discovered a dark galaxy filled with primordial gas untouched that appears to have no visible stars. The researchers behind the discovery say this galaxy, designated J0613+52, could be "the faintest galaxy found to date." Interestingly, scientists using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) discovered the "dark" galaxy through a complete error. "The GBT was accidentally pointed to...

The Orion: A molecular cloud shows cosmic filamentary structures where stars are being born. Image: ESA / Herschel / Ph. André, D Polychroni, A. Roy, V Könyves, N Schneider for the Gould Belt survey Key Program ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In the first part of this series, we saw that electromagnetic processes in plasmas – electrically conducting gases – could, over trillions of years, produce the giant filaments that we see today as the largest structures in the universe. This happened without a Big Bang, without dark energy or dark matter, based on processes that we observe here on Earth in the laboratory...

Explanation: Galaxies are fascinating not only for what is visible, but for what is invisible. Grand spiral galaxy NGC 1232, captured in detail by one of the Very Large Telescopes, is a good example. The visible is dominated by millions of bright stars and dark dust, caught up in a gravitational swirl of spiral arms revolving about the center. Open clusters containing bright blue stars can be seen sprinkled along these spiral arms, while dark lanes of dense interstellar dust can be seen sprinkled between them. Less visible, but detectable, are billions of dim normal stars and vast tracts of...

This image shows the orientation of the magnetic field in the distant 9io9 galaxy, seen here when the Universe was only 20% of its current age — the furthest ever detection of a galaxy’s magnetic field. Dust grains within 9io9 are somewhat aligned with the galaxy’s magnetic field, and due to this, they emit polarized light, meaning that light waves oscillate along a preferred direction rather than randomly. ALMA detected this polarization signal, from which astronomers could work out the orientation of the magnetic field, shown here as curved lines overlaid on the ALMA image. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/J. Geach et...

Explanation: This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy, one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in optical light actually glows brightly in infrared light. The featured image, digitally sharpened, shows the infrared glow, recently recorded by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, superposed in false-color on an existing image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in visible light. The Sombrero Galaxy, also known as...

SORRY, THE PREVIOUS POST HAD AN ERROR SOMEHOW AND I COULD NOT POST THE ENTIRE CONTENT. Explanation: If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe containing billions of stars and situated about 40 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado), NGC 1566 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as a grand design spiral, NGC 1566 shows two prominent and graceful spiral arms that are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. Numerous Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 1566 have been taken to...

Composite X-ray, radio and optical image of the distant quasar galaxy 3C 297. (NASA/CXC/Univ. of Torino/V. Missaglia et al./ESA/STScI & International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/NRAO/AUI/NSF) It's the classic social faux pas. You're in a happy clique, surrounded by all your friends – and one by one, you subsume them, absorbing them into yourself, until you're all alone, a grotesque agglomeration alone in what was once a crowded environment. That seems to be what happened to a galaxy 9.2 billion years ago, scientists have determined. A galaxy in the relatively early Universe named 3C 297 is mysteriously all alone – even though its...

Scientists have just spotted a strange circular filament wobbling around the sun's pole that has them really excited. A huge filament of solar plasma has broken off the sun's surface and is circling its north pole like a vortex of powerful winds, but scientists have no clue what caused it. "Talk about polar vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our star," space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov said on Twitter while sharing a video sequence taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics...

The location of the most distant galaxy ever detected. (NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani/ESA/Webb) Light that has traveled for over 13.4 billion years to reach our neighborhood of space has been confirmed as originating from the earliest, most distant galaxy detected yet. That places the most distant of these four very young objects at the very dawn of the Universe, just a short time after the Big Bang – a time period when the Universe was still foggy and bleary and the first rays of light were penetrating the darkness. So detailed are the JWST's long spectroscopic observations that researchers...

The spiral galaxy NGC 1068, also known as the squid galaxy, is a bustling 'Disneyland' of neutrino production, researchers said. At the heart of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 1068, researchers found a thriving 'factory' of ghostly particles called neutrinos. A nearby spiral galaxy is pumping out ghostly neutrinos — mysterious particles that barely interact with the matter around them, scientists have found. The elusive particles are coming from a hotspot of neutrino production in the heart of the spiral galaxy Messier 77, which is anchored by a black hole. The region is rich in dense gas and electromagnetic fields,...

Explanation: This 180 degree panoramic night skyscape captures our Milky Way Galaxy as it arcs above the horizon on a winter's night in August. Near midnight, the galactic center is close to the zenith with the clear waters of Lake Traful, Neuquen, Argentina, South America, planet Earth below. Zodiacal light, dust reflected sunlight along the Solar System's ecliptic plane, is also visible in the region's very dark night sky. The faint band of light reaches up from the distant snowy peaks toward the galaxy's center. Follow the arc of the Milky Way to the left to find the southern hemisphere...