James Webb Space Telescope celebrates its 4th birthday with stunning image of a galaxy crash site

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July 2026 marks four years since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images were first revealed to the general public, marking a new era for astronomy. To celebrate this anniversary of the most powerful space telescope ever launched, NASA has released a stunning image of the strangely shaped galaxy called Centaurus A. Located around 11 million light-years away, Centaurus A owes its unusual structure to a collision between two galaxies around 2 billion years ago. This merger provided the galaxy with an abundance of gas and dust, the raw material…

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Our Milky Way galaxy might be larger than we thought  

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Is the Milky Way even bigger than we thought? New observations have revealed that our galaxy’s spiral arms could stretch farther and wider than we previously concluded. The Milky Way’s spiral structure was discovered over 175 years ago in 1850. But new information could completely change our understanding of our cosmic home. Astronomers have taken a new look at our Milky Way galaxy using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory and have pieced together new, precise measurements of the galaxy’s spiral arms. And…

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NASA Transfers ‘Hundred Acre Wood’ to Patuxent Research Refuge

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2 Min Read NASA Transfers ‘Hundred Acre Wood’ to Patuxent Research Refuge Following a ceremony on July 7, 2026, officials hold up a U.S. 250th pennant at “Area 400,” a 105-acre parcel previously part of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and now part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Patuxent Research Refuge. NASA ceremonially transferred ownership of about 105 acres of wooded land at its Goddard Space Flight Center’s Greenbelt, Maryland, campus Tuesday to the adjoining Patuxent Research Refuge, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife…

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NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good Health

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3 min read NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good Health Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting science data gathered in the distant Kuiper Belt far beyond Pluto. From left, flight controllers Mark Lahr and Josh Albers, and Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, monitor telemetry streaming from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on June 24,…

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Artemis II Crew and Apollo 14 Moon Tree

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NASA/James Blair In this photograph, the Artemis II crew participates in the dedication of the Apollo 14 Moon tree at the Lunar Receiving Park at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on June 25, 2026. This tree is a second-generation Apollo Moon tree of the loblolly pine species. The original Apollo Moon trees were grown from seeds carried aboard Apollo 14 by NASA astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper. Upon return to Earth, the seeds were germinated by the Forest Service, and the resulting seedlings were planted throughout…

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Hayabusa 2 Completes Flyby Past Asteroid Torifune

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Japan’s Hayabusa 2 mission has revealed another “snowman” asteroid — a pair of asteroids attached with a narrow neck. The contact binary could help shed light on planet formation. The post Hayabusa 2 Completes Flyby Past Asteroid Torifune appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

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Even astronauts in space saw America 250 fireworks on the Fourth of July. See their ISS view of Los Angeles (video)

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The U.S. just celebrated its 250th birthday, and Americans living off the planet had a great view of some of the parties down below. “The International Space Station orbited over Los Angeles on July 4th as America marked 250 years of independence with a burst of fireworks lighting up the city below — a celebration so bright it reached all the way to space!” NASA officials said on Monday (July 6) via the agency’s ISS X account. That post featured a 15-second video captured from the orbiting lab, which showed…

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Watch SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch 81 satellites early on July 7

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SpaceX will launch a passel of satellites to orbit early Tuesday morning (July 7), and you can watch the action live. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 81 payloads is scheduled to lift off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday, during a 95-minute window that opens at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0410 GMT; 12:10 a.m. local California time). You can watch the mission, which is called Transporter-17, live via SpaceX. Coverage will begin about 15 minutes before launch. As its name suggests, Transporter-17 will be the 17th mission of SpaceX‘s…

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More clues surface about the origins of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

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More evidence that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is much older than our solar system has come to light, along with clues that it formed on the outskirts of the protoplanetary disk belonging to its parent star long ago. Earlier this year, researchers led by Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center revealed that data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggested that 3I/ATLAS is between 10 and 12 billion years old, based on the ratios of its carbon and deuterium isotopes. This would make it more than twice…

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