This week features some incredible phenomena -- an interstellar visitor, a tarantula, a coral-shaped rock, a rosette, and a new moon for ice giant Uranus.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/K. Meech (IfA/U. Hawaii)
Image Processing: Jen Miller & Mahdi Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Monday, 18 August 2025
Comet 3I/ATLAS is captured in this image by the Gemini North telescope. The incredible sensitivity of Gemini North's Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N) reveals the comet’s compact coma — a cloud of gas and dust surrounding its icy nucleus.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
Tuesday, 19 August 2025
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures incredible details in the dusty clouds of a star-forming factory called the Tarantula Nebula. Most of the nebulae Hubble images are in our galaxy, but this nebula is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region, not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.
The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known, some roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. This image is very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/IRAP/IAS/LPG
Wednesday, 20 August 2025
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Remote Micro Imager, part of its ChemCam instrument, to view this wind-eroded rock shaped like a piece of coral on July 24, 2025, the 4,609th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Curiosity has found many rocks like this one, which were formed by ancient water combined with billions of years of sandblasting by the wind.
Curiosity has found many small features like this one, which formed billions of years ago when liquid water still existed on Mars. Water carried dissolved minerals into rock cracks and later dried, leaving the hardened minerals behind. Eons of sandblasting by the wind wore away the surrounding rock, producing the unique shapes seen today.
This common process, seen extensively on Earth, has produced fantastic shapes on Mars, including a flower-shaped rock.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA
Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Thursday, 21 August 2025
Cradled within the fiery petals of the Rosette Nebula is NGC 2244, the young star cluster that it nurtured. The cluster’s stars light up the nebula in vibrant hues of red, gold, and purple, and opaque towers of dust rise from the billowing clouds around its excavated core. This image was captured by the 570-megapixel Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. El Moutamid (SwRI), M. Hedman (University of Idaho)
Friday, 22 August 2025
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope discovered a new moon orbiting Uranus in images taken by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). This image shows the moon, designated S/2025 U1, as well as 13 of the 28 other known moons orbiting the planet. (The small moon Cordelia orbits just inside the outermost ring, but is not visible in these views due to glare from the rings.) Due to the drastic differences in brightness levels, the image is a composite of three different treatments of the data, allowing the viewer to see details in the planetary atmosphere, the surrounding rings, and the orbiting moons. The data was taken with NIRCam’s wide band F150W2 filter that transmits infrared wavelengths from about 1.0 to 2.4 microns.
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