A stellar nursery. The first-anniversary image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, affecting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. The heftiest star in this image is S1, which appears amid a glowing cave it is carving out with its stellar winds on the right side of the image. #

The Southern Pinwheel. The spiral galaxy M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, lies 15 million light-years away and contains some 40 billion stars. This close image was compiled using data collected through just two of the ten filters on MIRI, or the Mid-InfraRed Instrument, aboard the James Webb Space Telescope. The result is this extraordinarily detailed image, with its creeping tendrils of gas, dust, and stars. In this image, the bright blue shows the distribution of stars across the central part of the galaxy. The bright yellow regions that weave through the spiral arms indicate concentrations of active stellar nurseries, where new stars are forming. #

Saturn's Spokes. This latest image of the planet Saturn from the Hubble Space Telescope heralds the start of Saturn’s “spoke season,” with the appearance of two smudgy spokes in the B ring, on the left in the image. The shape and shading of spokes varies—they can appear light or dark, depending on the viewing angle, and sometimes appear more like blobs than classic radial spoke shapes, as seen here. The ephemeral features don’t last long, but as the planet’s autumnal equinox approaches on May 6, 2025, more will appear. Scientists will be looking for clues to explain the cause and nature of the spokes. It’s suspected they are ring material that is temporarily charged and levitated by interaction between Saturn’s magnetic field and the solar wind, but this hypothesis has not been confirmed. #

A Dying Star. The orange-red "cobwebs" in this Hubble image are dusty clouds of sooty carbon engulfing the dying star CW Leonis, about 310 light-years away. They were created from the outer layers of the star being thrown out into the inky black void. The carbon, cooked up through nuclear fusion in the star's interior, gives it a carbon-rich atmosphere. Blasting the carbon back into space provides raw material for the formation of future stars and planets. #

Galactic Clusters. A small section of a new deep-field image of Pandora’s Cluster, a conglomeration of massive clusters of galaxies about 3.5 billion light years away, viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers estimate that 50,000 sources of near-infrared light were captured in the full image, produced in a 30-hour exposure. #

A Wall of of Gas and Dust. Seen here is a portion of the open cluster NGC 6530, appearing as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4,350 light-years from Earth, set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. #

A Merging Trio. This spectacular group of three merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes center stage in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float serenely alongside the collision, and the smudged shapes of much more distant galaxies are visible in the background. #

The Spanish Dancer. This vibrant and dynamic-looking image features the spiral galaxy NGC 1566, sometimes informally referred to as the "Spanish Dancer Galaxy." NGC 1566 is a weakly-barred or intermediate spiral galaxy, about 60 million light-years from Earth. #

A Chaotic Nursery. This image of the nebula NGC 1333, about 970 light-years away, offers a peek into the chaotic and messy star-formation process. It shows that stars are not born in isolation but in batches, built from cold interstellar hydrogen that is laced with soot-like dust. Veils of dust block much of the Hubble Space Telescope’s view into the stellar cauldron, with young bright stars shooting out jets of hot gas. #

Twin Jets. This image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), a bipolar jet traveling through interstellar space at supersonic speeds. At roughly 1,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus, the object is one of the youngest and nearest protostellar outflows. Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, and are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. #

The Core of a Globular Cluster. The scattered stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355 are strewn across this image from the Hubble Space Telescope, seen about 30,000 light-years away. The dense populations of stars and mutual gravitational attraction give these clusters a roughly spherical shape, with a bright concentration of stars surrounded by an increasingly sparse sprinkling of stars. #

The Remnants of a Supernova. This new high-definition image from the James Webb Space Telescope unveils intricate details of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), and shows the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded. Bright orange and light pink colors—knots of gas comprised of sulfur, oxygen, argon, and neon—seen in the infrared image, making up the inner shell. The star that blew itself apart, causing this spectacular view, is estimated to have exploded about 340 years ago. #

A Molten Ring. The narrow galaxy elegantly curving around its spherical companion in this image is a fantastic example of a truly strange and very rare phenomenon. This Hubble image depicts GAL-CLUS-022058s, estimated to be about 9.4 billion light-years away, the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our Universe. First theorized to exist by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, this object’s unusual shape can be explained by a process called gravitational lensing, which causes light shining from far away to be bent, magnified, and pulled by the gravity of an object between its source and the observer. #

A Menagerie of Galaxies. This packed Hubble image showcases the galaxy cluster ACO S 295 among a crowd of background galaxies and foreground stars. As well as a range of sizes, this galactic menagerie boasts a range of orientations, with spiral galaxies such as the one at the center of this image appearing almost face on, and some edge-on spiral galaxies visible only as thin slivers of light. The huge mass of the galaxy cluster has gravitationally lensed some of the background galaxies, distorting and smearing their shapes. #

A Lenticular Haze. This galaxy, known as NGC 3156, is a lenticular galaxy, meaning that it falls somewhere between an elliptical and a spiral galaxy. It lies about 75 million light-years from Earth. NGC 3156 has been studied in many ways other than determining its precise position—from its cohort of globular clusters, to its relatively recent star formation, to the stars that are being destroyed by the supermassive black hole at its center. #

A Red Night Sky. This Hubble image shows a small region of the nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7,000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG), the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper right. This bubble is a region of gas that is dense enough to photoevaporate less easily than the gas surrounding it. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionized and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation—typically young, hot stars. #

A Cosmic Ring. The James Webb Space Telescope observed the well-known Ring Nebula with unprecedented detail. Formed by a star throwing off its outer layers as it runs out of fuel, the Ring Nebula is an archetypal planetary nebula. Also known as M57 and NGC 6720, it lies about 2,500 light-years away. #

A Galactic Quintet. This Hubble image looks at a collection of five galaxies called the Hickson Compact Group 40, made up of three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular galaxy. The whole group, about 300 million light-years away from Earth, is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter of our Milky Way’s stellar disk, and will will eventually collide and merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy. #

The Rings of Uranus. This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a spectacular bright view of the north pole, rings, and 14 of the 27 moons of the planet Uranus. Many of the light sources in the backdrop are much more distant galaxies. The reflected sunlight from Uranus took about two and a half hours to reach the Earth, compared to the millions or billions of years light has traveled from these background galaxies. #

A Galactic Black Eye. This Hubble image features NGC4826, a spiral galaxy located 17 million light-years away. This galaxy is often referred to as the "Black Eye" or "Evil Eye" galaxy because of the dark band of dust that sweeps across one side of its bright nucleus. NGC4826 is known by astronomers for its strange internal motion. The gas in the outer regions of this galaxy and the gas in its inner regions are rotating in opposite directions, which might be related to a recent merger. #

A Cluster of Gravitational Lenses. This combined Hubble-JWST view shows galaxy cluster MACS0416, about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, as it magnifies and distorts the light from more distant background galaxies through gravitational lensing in multiple places. Here, the bluest galaxies are relatively nearby and often show intense star formation, while the redder galaxies tend to be more distant, or else contain copious amounts of dust. #

A Sea of Stars. This sparkling Hubble image depicts a small section of the Carina Nebula, an enormous cloud of gas and dust, about 7,500 light-years from Earth, that is home to several massive and bright stars, including at least a dozen that are 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. This image shows only a small section of the nebula. Due to the nebula’s tremendous size—about 300 light-years—astronomers can only study it in sections, piecing together the data from separate images to get an understanding of the nebula’s large-scale structure and composition. #

A Galactic Bridge. This Hubble image shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248—also known as Wild's Triplet, about 200 million light-years from Earth. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image, which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy, appear to be connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it was formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies. #

A Spiral Among Thousands. A crowded field of galaxies fills this image from the James Webb Space Telescope, along with some bright nearby stars crowned with Webb’s signature six-pointed diffraction spikes. The larger galaxy at bottom, named LEDA 2046648, is situated a little over a billion light-years from Earth. #

The Pillars. This view of the Pillars of Creation by the James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared instruments strikes a chilling tone. Thousands of stars that exist in this region disappear from view in infrared—and seemingly endless layers of gas and dust become the centerpiece. Many stars are actively forming in these dense blue-grey pillars. When knots of gas and dust with sufficient mass form in these regions, they begin to collapse under their own gravitational attraction, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars. The Pillars of Creation is a part of the Eagle Nebula, about 7,000 light-years distant from Earth. #