The Ring Nebula (M57), located about 2,500 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, is the remains of a dying Sun-like star. Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals incredibly detailed layers of gas, dust, and filament structures surrounding the central white dwarf.
https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/ring-nebula-nircam-image/
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Captured together with NIRCam target NGC 4569
"a white cluster of stars at the top left quarter, many remote orange galaxies in the background"
Yuval Harpaz
https://bsky.app/profile/yuvharpaz.bsky.social/post/3mlw4cebiec2i
Filters F115W, F150W, F277W
A galaxy with mostly white stars. Bright center, a spiral arm at the bottom with dust making stars redder. Hints of another spiral arm on the upper right, due to concentration of stars.
https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mlur52suek2o
Okay so I was looking at the Artemis II photos and it just hit me — we went 53 years without a single human going beyond low Earth orbit. Like my parents were kids the last time this happened. That's genuinely wild to process. And these new photos are stunning, but also kind of unsettling? Seeing Earth as this tiny marble from lunar distance in 2026 feels both inspiring and weirdly humbling. We spent half a century just... not doing this. Makes me wonder what else we've been sitting on that we just haven't gotten around to. What's your honest reaction seeing these images for the first time?
Every time I read about Neptune, I'm reminded of how truly terrifying and fascinating it is. It has 2,100 km/h permanent winds on a frozen world with barely any solar heat, a captured moon (Triton) that it's slowly pulling in to destroy into rings, and a magnetic field that literally rotates independently from the planet itself.
Voyager 2 only spent 6 hours there in 1989. With missions like Trident getting rejected or pushed back, the absolute earliest we might return is around 2045.
Why do you think ice giants get so little love compared to Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars? Is it purely the brutal 12-year travel time, or is the scientific justification harder to pitch to NASA compared to looking for life on Europa/Enceladus?
(For reference, this video covers a lot of the specific anomalies that made Voyager 2's data so unsettling at the time:https://youtu.be/ube7fjzEwaE)
James Webb Deep Field with lots of detail extracted from the original image.
The deep field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.
I processed this image of NGC 1097 to showcase the detail and to give the galaxy some depth.
A bright blue star in the middle and a less bright blue star on the lower left. A circular brown nebula around the central star, with a distinct ring.
https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mle3kkgd6k2n
A collection of stars, elongated from left to right. Some bright stars and a lot of background galaxies that are smaller in apparent size, but much larger in real size compared to the dwarf galaxy.
https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3ml7jn4jrm22f
Lonely, I drifted through the dark galaxy I was just an insignificant spiral galaxy. Unaware of what I was capable of. Until 400 million years ago a smaller galaxy decided it wanted to unite with me. It rushed through me but it didn't stayed with me.
I was all alone again, a floral film in space.
Out of the small spiral a beautiful flower shape emerged all that stardust formed petals. For 440 million years now I have been expanding my spiral. So that i became the only spiral galaxy that pieced together all the shattered stars – a gigantic flower, all alone.
Over time, the stars left me, they had to move on. I will have to let all the stars fall apart, just to be this lonely simple spiral galaxy once again. I was not destined to be viewed by everyone in my most beautiful form...
After all this has happened, would I ever be a flower again?
Image:
Location of star-forming region in M51
This image locates a star-forming complex in one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), measuring almost 800 light-years across. M51 is located about 27 million light-years away from Earth. The thick cloud of star-forming gas, in which clumps collapsed to form each of the individual star clusters, is shown here in red and orange colours that represent infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
Many of the bright dots that can be seen within the clouds are star clusters. The massive young stars within cast powerful radiation on the gas clouds that surround them, creating the cyan illumination shown here. Eventually, the combination of radiation, stellar wind and the supernova explosions of the most massive of these stars will disperse the gas clouds, putting an end to the star formation in this part of M51.
.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope together with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have looked deeply at thousands of young star clusters in four nearby galaxies, studying clusters at different stages of evolution. Their findings show that more massive star clusters emerge more quickly from the clouds they are born in, clearing away gas and filling the galaxy with ultraviolet light. The result gives us a better understanding of star formation in galaxies, as well as how and where planets can form.
CREDIT ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Pedrini, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope together with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have looked deeply at thousands of young star clusters in four nearby galaxies, studying clusters at different stages of evolution. Their findings show that more massive star clusters emerge more quickly from the clouds they are born in, clearing away gas and filling the galaxy with ultraviolet light. The result gives us a better understanding of star formation in galaxies, as well as how and where planets can form.
.
Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity.
As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, ending star formation before all the gas is used up.
Once the cloud of gas a star cluster was born in is gone, its light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy, too. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop, then, can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale.
Studies of the closest star-forming regions, in the Milky Way galaxy and the dwarf galaxies that orbit it, allow us to dissect star clusters in the smallest details, but our position in the disc of our galaxy means only a few such regions are visible to us.
By observing nearby galaxies, astronomers can survey thousands of star-forming regions and characterise entire populations of star clusters at many stages of evolution – a feat made possible with the launch of space telescopes, most prominently the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Both kinds of investigation are necessary to truly understand how star formation takes place in galaxies.
More
Paper
Details of this image when zoomed in and after brightness adjustments.
Left image (of the main post):
Upper left: Details of the lower left rim with swirls.
Upper right: Details of the upper right arm, showing emission from outflows and two bright stars.
Lower left: Outflow inside a cavity (90° rotated, middle below bright star in the original image).
Lower right: Two images. Left: Small arm extending from the top of the cometary globule. Right: A single small globule (maybe a globulette?)
Melina Thévenot
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:6hbls6v4tozdlh3q3xzkxlob/post/3ml6vtrjqgc2d