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At the center is a thin horizontal pinkish cloud known as Herbig-Haro 211 that is uneven with rounded ends, and tilted from bottom left to top right. It takes up about two-thirds of the length of the left side, but is thinner and longer at the opposite angle. At its center is a dark spot. On either side of the dark spot, there are orangish-yellow wisps that extend to light blue wisps. Within the center of those clouds, a pink fluffy streak runs through each lobe. At the ends of each lobe, pink becomes the dominant color. The lobe to the left is fatter. The right lobe is thinner, and ends in a smaller pink semi-circle. Just off the edge of this lobe is a slightly smaller pink semicircle, then a pink sponge-like blob.

Hubble and Webb made headlines throughout the year.

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Both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes kicked off 2023 with exciting news announced at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society and never stopped, keeping journalists, and the public, informed and engaged with the latest science. Below are some of the stories that stood out in 2023.

January 2023 ׀ Webb

NASA’s Webb Confirms Its First Exoplanet

Illustration of a planet and its star on a black background. The planet is large, in the foreground at the center and the star is smaller, in the background and also at the center. The planet is rocky and has no atmosphere. The top quarter of the planet (the side facing the star) is lit, while the rest is in shadow. The star is bright yellowish-white, with no clear features.A team of researchers used Webb to confirm exoplanet LHS 475 b’s existence, and also discover that it is a small, rocky planet almost exactly the same size as Earth. Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) captured the planet easily and clearly with only two transit observations. “There is no question that the planet is there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” said astronomer Jacob Lustig-Yaeger of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The discovery holds promise that Webb’s observations will lead to an improved understanding of Earth-like worlds outside our solar system in the years to come. Learn more about Webb’s first exoplanet.

January 2023 ׀ Hubble

Gravitational Sinkhole Swallows Unlucky Bypassing Star

Four-panel illustration titled Black Hole Devours Bypassing Star. All four illustrations are on a black background. (1) Glowing white sphere representing the star on the left. Smaller black sphere representing the black hole on the right. Black hole is surrounded by faint white arcs. Arrow at the top right of the star points toward 2 o’clock. (2) Top right portion of the star stretches out to form a wispy brown tail winding clockwise around the black hole. (3) The black hole is surrounded by an opaque disk-shaped cloud of orange-brown bands of material spiraling in clockwise. Outer portion of the disk is much thicker than the inner portion. Material near the black hole appears to be glowing. There is no sign of the original star. (4) Similar to panel 3, but disk has expanded laterally. Coloring is more homogeneous and distinct spiral bands are no longer visible. Central part of the disk is mostly cleared out, giving the disk a donut shape. Material near the black hole is glowing brightly.Researchers used Hubble to record a star's final moments in detail as it was destroyed by a black hole, which astronomers term a tidal disruption event. Changes in the doomed star's condition take place on the order of days or months, allowing astronomers to learn a lot about the black hole. The Hubble ultraviolet spectroscopic data are interpreted as coming from a very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star. This area, known as a torus, is the size of the Solar System and is swirling around a black hole in the middle. 

"We're looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. We're seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that's being projected towards us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light)," said astronomer Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "You've got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you've got what you actually see. This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown." Discover more about Hubble's study of the black hole.

April 2023 ׀ Hubble

Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

Illustration shows a black field speckled with white, yellow, and red galaxies. A black hole near the bottom-left corner of the image plows through space, leaving a diagonal trail of newborn stars stretching back to the black hole's parent galaxy in the upper right corner. The black hole is represented by a black half-sphere. It is encircled by an elongated disk of material compressed on the lower left side and trailing off on the upper right side. The material closest to the black hole appears pink, white, and streaky. Beyond this, the leading edge of the disk, near the bottom-left corner, is milky violet. The disk trails off behind the black hole, becoming black. Beyond the disk, a diagonal “contrail” of blue and pink stars extends toward the blue-and-pink parent galaxy. The bridge of stars trails off, becoming narrower as it approaches the galaxy.A supermassive black hole weighing as much as 20 million Suns is barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. Hubble captured a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars in the black hole's wake. Astronomers suspect the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. 

"Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. van Dokkum and his colleagues think that the trail of stars stretches between the back hole and the galaxy it was ejected from. Read about the runaway black hole.

May 2023 ׀ Webb

Nearby Planetary System Seen in Breathtaking Detail

An orange oval extends from the 7 o’clock to 1 o’clock positions. It features a prominent outer ring, a darker gap, an intermediate ring, a narrower dark gap, and a bright inner disk. At the center is a ragged black spot where the detector is saturated.Webb observations of the nearby star Fomalhaut revealed its planetary system in never-before-seen detail, including nested concentric rings of dust. These dust belts are most likely carved by the gravitational forces of embedded, unseen planets. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star—that’s 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system's Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune, which consists of small rocky bodies and cold dust. The inner belts of the Fomalhaut system were revealed by Webb for the first time. See what else Webb revealed around Fomalhaut.

July 2023 ׀ Webb

Webb Celebrates First Year of Science with Close-up on Birth of Sun-Like Stars

Red dual opposing jets coming from young stars fill the darker top half of the image, while a glowing pale-yellow, cave-like structure is bottom center, tilted toward two o’clock, with a bright star at its center. The dust of the cave structure becomes wispy toward eight o’clock. Above the arched top of the dust cave three groupings of stars with diffraction spikes are arranged. A dark cloud sits at the top of the arch of the glowing dust cave, with one streamer curling down the right-hand side. The dark shadow of the cloud appears pinched in the center, with light emerging in a triangle shape above and below the pinch, revealing the presence of a star inside the dark cloud. The largest jets of red material emanate from within this dark cloud. They are thick and display structure like the rough face of a cliff, glowing brighter at the edges. At the top center of the image, a star displays another, larger pinched dark shadow, this time vertically. To the left of this star is a more wispy, indistinct region.Webb capped a successful first year of science, and stunning imagery, with a detailed view of the closest star-forming region to Earth, the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. Its proximity at 390 light-years allowed a highly detailed close-up, with no foreground stars in the intervening space. Webb’s image shows a region containing approximately 50 young stars, all of them similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller. The darkest areas are the densest, where thick dust cocoons still-forming protostars. Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, represented in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally across the upper third and vertically on the right. A more massive star, S1, has carved out a glowing cave of dust in the lower half of the image.

“On its first anniversary, the James Webb Space Telescope has already delivered upon its promise to unfold the universe, gifting humanity with a breathtaking treasure trove of images and science that will last for decades,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. Revisit Webb's first science anniversary.

July 2023 ׀ Hubble

Hubble Sees Boulders Escaping from Asteroid Dimorphos

Against a black background, the bright white object at lower left is the asteroid Dimorphos. It has a bluish dust tail extending diagonally to the upper right. A cluster of blue dots surrounds the asteroid. These are boulders that were knocked off the asteroid when, on September 26, 2022, NASA deliberately slammed the half-ton DART impactor spacecraft into the asteroid.Astronomers used Hubble's extraordinary sensitivity to discover a swarm of boulders that were possibly shaken off of asteroid Dimorphos when NASA deliberately impacted it with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) on September 26, 2022. The 37 free-flung boulders range in size from three to 22 feet across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at little more than a half-mile per hour (one kilometer per hour).

"The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact," said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles who used Hubble to track changes in the asteroid during and after the DART impact. The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system. Read more about Dimorphos and DART.

October 2023 ׀ Hubble

Extraordinarily Bright Bursts of Light Found Between Galaxies

Three galaxies are set against the velvet-black backdrop of space. The largest is the white and blue spiral-shaped galaxy at center. Two smaller galaxies are whitish patches toward the left. A curious white spot near the top of the image is the brilliant glow from some unknown object that exploded, but is not associated with any of the galaxies. A red line above and to the dot’s right point it out.A Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT) nicknamed "the Finch" became even more puzzling after it was observed by Hubble. Unlike any other LFBOT seen before, Hubble found that the Finch is located between two neighboring galaxies, about 50,000 light-years from a nearby spiral galaxy and about 15,000 light-years from a smaller galaxy. All previous LFBOTs have been found in the spiral arms of galaxies. These awesome explosions have been assumed to be a rare type of supernova called core-collapse supernovae, but that does not fit with Hubble's findings of any LFBOT so far from the core of any galaxy. Massive progenitor stars don't have time to travel very far from their birthing place—a cluster of newborn stars—before exploding. "The discovery poses many more questions than it answers," said astronomer Ashley Chrimes, a European Space Agency Research Fellow. "More work is needed to figure out which of the many possible explanations is the right one." Learn more about the mysterious LFBOT.

November 2023 ׀ Hubble, Webb

A Vivid Landscape of Galaxies with Newfound, Time-Varying Objects

A field of galaxies on the black background of space. In the middle, stretching from left to right, is a collection of dozens of yellowish spiral and elliptical galaxies that form a foreground galaxy cluster. They form a rough, flat line along the center. Among them are distorted linear features, which mostly appear to follow invisible concentric circles curving around the center of the image. The linear features are created when the light of a background galaxy is bent and magnified through gravitational lensing. At center left, a particularly prominent example stretches vertically about three times the length of a nearby galaxy. A variety of brightly colored, red and blue galaxies of various shapes are scattered across the image, making it feel densely populated. Near the center are two tiny galaxies compared to the galaxy cluster: a very red edge-on spiral and a very blue face- on spiral, which provide a striking color contrastHubble and Webb collaborated to study an expansive galaxy cluster known as MACS 0416. The resulting panchromatic image combines visible and infrared light, revealing a wealth of details that are only possible by combining the power of both space telescopes. It includes a bounty of galaxies outside the cluster and a sprinkling of sources that vary in observed brightness over time, known as transients. 

Among the transients the team identified, one stood out in particular. Located in a galaxy that existed about 3 billion years after the big bang, it is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000. The team nicknamed the star system “Mothra” in a nod to its “monster nature,” being both extremely bright and extremely magnified. Read more about what the telescopes found.

 

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