Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.
Observatories, assemble! The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes combined forces to produce this amazing view of star clusters NGC 460 and NGC 456, which reside in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Hubble’s view captures the glowing, ionized gas as stellar winds and high-energy light blow “bubbles” in the clouds of gas and dust (shown in blue), while Webb’s infrared vision highlights the clumps and delicate filamentary structures of dust (shown in red).
In Hubble images, dust often blocks light, but in Webb’s view, the dust—warmed by starlight—shines with its own infrared glow.
The mixture of gas and dust between the universe’s stars is known as the interstellar medium.
The nodules visible in these images are scenes of active star formation, with stars ranging from just 1 to 10 million years old. In contrast, our Sun is 4.5 billion years old.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America).
Against all odds. Apollo 13 astronauts Fred Haise, James Lovell & Jim Swigert stand with President Nixon following their harrowing ordeal in space. An oxygen tank in the service module ruptured 2 days into the mission which crippled the craft’s life support system. Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 film captures the essence of the frightening experience beautifully.
Two Gemini. Two Apollo. The first rendezvous in space. The first around the Moon. Commander of Apollo 13. Jim Lovell passed away yesterday at the age of 97. His legacy will forever live on in humanity's return to the Moon.
To celebrate here's a fun fact: Only twelve people have walked on the moon, meanwhile 24 people have made the trip from the earth to the moon. And only three men have gone twice: James Lovell (Apollo 8 and Apollo 13), John Young (Apollo 10 and Apollo 16) and Gene Cernan (Apollo 10 and Apollo 17) the latter was also the last person to walk on the satellite!
This shepherd moon (a moon that thanks to its gravitational influence helps to hold the planet's rings) generates "ring streamers" when it's closest to said ring by pulling material to itself (as shown in the first photo).
Asteroids: they’re ancient, rocky, and way cooler than you might think. June 30 is International Asteroid Day, a global event to raise awareness about asteroids and what we’re doing to study them. Here’s why we’re obsessed with them (and why you should be, too).
What are asteroids?
Asteroids are leftover building blocks from the early solar system, orbiting the Sun like planetary time capsules. Most hang out in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but some—called Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs—orbit closer to home. They range in size from 329 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter to less than 33 feet (10 meters) across.
Why do we study them?
Studying asteroids helps us unlock the origins of our solar system.
In 2023, our OSIRIS-REx mission collected a sample from asteroid Bennu that could reveal whether asteroids delivered water and other ingredients for life when they collided with Earth billions of years ago.
Lucy in the sky…with asteroids? Our Lucy mission, which launched in 2021, is named for a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor, which was in turn named for the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Lucy is the first mission to explore asteroids that share an orbit around the Sun with Jupiter.
A timelapse of the asteroid Donaldjohanson taken on NASA’s Lucy spacecraft. The images, captured approximately every 2 seconds beginning at 1:50 p.m. EDT April 20, 2025, show a white, irregular, elongated shape rotating slowly. Its surface is covered in small craters and has a rough, uneven texture. The asteroid appears bright against a black background. Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL
What if an asteroid hits Earth?
NASA’s Planetary Defense Program uses telescopes to keep an eye out for asteroids and other NEOs, in case any get too close for comfort. Although a catastrophic collision is highly unlikely for the next 100 years or more, the telescopes detect smaller objects on a collision course with Earth a few times per year. No need to worry—these objects are just a few feet (meters) in size and cause no damage.
Rock on!
Hungry for more? Check out our asteroid portal for a cosmic crash course, or explore a real-time visualization of every known asteroid and comet classified as an NEO with NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids app.
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This computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. The black region in the center represents the black hole’s event horizon, beyond which no light can escape the massive object’s gravitational grip. The black hole’s powerful gravity distorts space around it like a funhouse mirror. Light from background stars is stretched and smeared as it skims by the black hole.
You might wonder — if this Tumblr post is about invisible things, what’s with all the pictures? Even though we can’t see these things with our eyes or even our telescopes, we can still learn about them by studying how they affect their surroundings. Then, we can use what we know to make visualizations that represent our understanding.
When you think of the invisible, you might first picture something fantastical like a magic Ring or Wonder Woman’s airplane, but invisible things surround us every day. Read on to learn about seven of our favorite invisible things in the universe!
1. Black Holes
This animation illustrates what happens when an unlucky star strays too close to a monster black hole. Gravitational forces create intense tides that break the star apart into a stream of gas. The trailing part of the stream escapes the system, while the leading part swings back around, surrounding the black hole with a disk of debris. A powerful jet can also form. This cataclysmic phenomenon is called a tidal disruption event.
You know ‘em, and we love ‘em. Black holes are balls of matter packed so tight that their gravity allows nothing — not even light — to escape. Most black holes form when heavy stars collapse under their own weight, crushing their mass to a theoretical singular point of infinite density.
Although they don’t reflect or emit light, we know black holes exist because they influence the environment around them — like tugging on star orbits. Black holes distort space-time, warping the path light travels through, so scientists can also identify black holes by noticing tiny changes in star brightness or position.
2. Dark Matter
A simulation of dark matter forming large-scale structure due to gravity.
What do you call something that doesn’t interact with light, has a gravitational pull, and outnumbers all the visible stuff in the universe by five times? Scientists went with “dark matter,” and they think it's the backbone of our universe’s large-scale structure. We don’t know what dark matter is — we just know it's nothing we already understand.
We know about dark matter because of its gravitational effects on galaxies and galaxy clusters — observations of how they move tell us there must be something there that we can’t see. Like black holes, we can also see light bend as dark matter’s mass warps space-time.
3. Dark Energy
Animation showing a graph of the universe’s expansion over time. While cosmic expansion slowed following the end of inflation, it began picking up the pace around 5 billion years ago. Scientists still aren’t sure why.
No one knows what dark energy is either — just that it’s pushing our universe to expand faster and faster. Some potential theories include an ever-present energy, a defect in the universe’s fabric, or a flaw in our understanding of gravity.
Scientists previously thought that all the universe’s mass would gravitationally attract, slowing its expansion over time. But when they noticed distant galaxies moving away from us faster than expected, researchers knew something was beating gravity on cosmic scales. After further investigation, scientists found traces of dark energy’s influence everywhere — from large-scale structure to the background radiation that permeates the universe.
4. Gravitational Waves
Two black holes orbit each other and generate space-time ripples called gravitational waves in this animation.
Like the ripples in a pond, the most extreme events in the universe — such as black hole mergers — send waves through the fabric of space-time. All moving masses can create gravitational waves, but they are usually so small and weak that we can only detect those caused by massive collisions. Even then they only cause infinitesimal changes in space-time by the time they reach us. Scientists use lasers, like the ground-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) to detect this precise change. They also watch pulsar timing, like cosmic clocks, to catch tiny timing differences caused by gravitational waves.
This animation shows gamma rays (magenta), the most energetic form of light, and elusive particles called neutrinos (gray) formed in the jet of an active galaxy far, far away. The emission traveled for about 4 billion years before reaching Earth. On Sept. 22, 2017, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole detected the arrival of a single high-energy neutrino. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showed that the source was a black-hole-powered galaxy named TXS 0506+056, which at the time of the detection was producing the strongest gamma-ray activity Fermi had seen from it in a decade of observations.
5. Neutrinos
This animation shows gamma rays (magenta), the most energetic form of light, and elusive particles called neutrinos (gray) formed in the jet of an active galaxy far, far away. The emission traveled for about 4 billion years before reaching Earth. On Sept. 22, 2017, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole detected the arrival of a single high-energy neutrino. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope showed that the source was a black-hole-powered galaxy named TXS 0506+056, which at the time of the detection was producing the strongest gamma-ray activity Fermi had seen from it in a decade of observations.
Because only gravity and the weak force affect neutrinos, they don’t easily interact with other matter — hundreds of trillions of these tiny, uncharged particles pass through you every second! Neutrinos come from unstable atom decay all around us, from nuclear reactions in the Sun to exploding stars, black holes, and even bananas.
Scientists theoretically predicted neutrinos, but we know they actually exist because, like black holes, they sometimes influence their surroundings. The National Science Foundation’s IceCube Neutrino Observatory detects when neutrinos interact with other subatomic particles in ice via the weak force.
6. Cosmic Rays
This animation illustrates cosmic ray particles striking Earth's atmosphere and creating showers of particles.
Every day, trillions of cosmic rays pelt Earth’s atmosphere, careening in at nearly light-speed — mostly from outside our solar system. Magnetic fields knock these tiny charged particles around space until we can hardly tell where they came from, but we think high energy events like supernovae can accelerate them. Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from cosmic rays, meaning few actually make it to the ground.
Though we don’t see the cosmic rays that make it to the ground, they tamper with equipment, showing up as radiation or as “bright” dots that come and go between pictures on some digital cameras. Cosmic rays can harm astronauts in space, so there are plenty of precautions to protect and monitor them.
7. (Most) Electromagnetic Radiation
The electromagnetic spectrum is the name we use when we talk about different types of light as a group. The parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, arranged from highest to lowest energy are: gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves. All the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are the same thing — radiation. Radiation is made up of a stream of photons — particles without mass that move in a wave pattern all at the same speed, the speed of light. Each photon contains a certain amount of energy.
The light that we see is a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, which spans many wavelengths. We frequently use different wavelengths of light — from radios to airport security scanners and telescopes.
Visible light makes it possible for many of us to perceive the universe every day, but this range of light is just 0.0035 percent of the entire spectrum. With this in mind, it seems that we live in a universe that’s more invisible than not! NASA missions like NASA's Fermi, James Webb, and Nancy Grace Roman space telescopes will continue to uncloak the cosmos and answer some of science’s most mysterious questions.
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HH 49: Interstellar Jet from Webb
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JWST
Explanation: What’s at the tip of this interstellar jet? First let’s consider the jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH 49). The star system expelling this jet is not visible – it is off to the lower right. The complex conical structure featured in this infrared image by the James Webb Space Telescope also includes another jet cataloged as HH 50. The fast jet particles impact the surrounding interstellar gas and form shock waves that glow prominently in infrared light – shown here as reddish-brown ridges. This JWST image also resolved the mystery of the unusual object at HH 49’s tip: it is a spiral galaxy far in the distance. The blue center is therefore not one star but many, and the surrounding circular rings are actually spiral arms.
This weird-looking object, measuring 403 km in its longest dimension and 201 km in its shortest, is 624 Hektor. It is theorized to be a contact asteroid i.e. two asteroids attached to eachother because of their gravitational force
