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Your backstage pass to the universe and how NASA studies it. Exoplanets, black holes, dark energy, and more!
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#nasaswift#gravitationalwaves#exoplanets#nasahubble#milkyway#sun#mondaymotivation#scarystories#nasaroman#nasaspherex
Recent posts
How could ripples in space-time help us find worlds beyond our solar system?
@EuropeanSpaceAgency and @NASA are partnering on LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), a trio of spacecraft slated to launch in the mid-2030s to detect gravitational waves created by distant orbiting objects.
Binary white dwarf stars, the Earth-sized remnants of stars like the Sun, are the sources LISA is expected to detect most often. Two studies by NASA scientists found that if those binary stars have a planet orbiting them, the detected signal will be different. This could help us discover a new and unique population of exoplanets throughout our galaxy.
Video credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Music: “A Light Left Burning,” Lukas Knoebl [SESAC], Universal Production Music
Video description is in the comments.
#GravitationalWaves #Exoplanets
Hear a simulated gravitational-wave signal from a pair of orbiting white dwarf stars, boosted into the range of human hearing.
Video description: An artist’s concept of orbiting white dwarf stars shows two light-blue orbs circling each other on a speckled dark-blue background. Purple gravitational waves ripple outward from the system. A graph appears below the system with a single purple bar at the center. The bottom is labeled “frequency” and the left side “power.” Text reads “Here’s the tone from just the white dwarf binary stars.”
Now listen to a simulated gravitational-wave signal from the same pair of orbiting white dwarf stars, this time with a large planet circling them.
Video description: An artist’s concept of orbiting white dwarf stars shows two light-blue orbs circling each other on a speckled dark-blue background. A large tan planet orbits the pair much more distantly than the stars orbit one another. The stars’ orbit wobbles due to the gravitational tug of the planet. Purple gravitational waves ripple outward from the system. A graph appears below the system with five evenly spaced purple bars. The central one is the tallest with the bars on each side decreasing in height. The bottom is labeled “frequency” and the left side “power.” Text reads “Here’s the tone with an exoplanet added.”
10 Nov 2026
Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched? 👁️👄👁️
Even though starburst galaxy NGC 1482 is about 64 million light-years away (that’s over 370 million trillion miles), its eyes are giving us goosebumps!
Though it looks unsettling, NGC 1482 is full of baby stars! It’s forming new stars at a much higher rate than other galaxies.
Credit: NASA/Swift/E. Hoversten, PSU
Image description: Starburst galaxy NGC 1482 glows in the darkness as observed by the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope on NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Two bright white stars appear as dots spaced apart from each other at an angle. They are both surrounded by small bright halos of light and faint dark purple outer rings. Coming from each star are long, white spikes of light. Surrounding the stars is a very faint galaxy almost hidden by the stars’ brightness with smaller stars and galaxies speckled throughout.
#NASASwift
When we stare into the void … the void stares back. 👀
@NASAHubble captured the eerie smile of galaxy cluster SDSS J0952+3434. But why does it look like that? A phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which occurs when the strong gravity from a galaxy cluster warps the light from more distant galaxies, creates a twisted, magnified image.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt (geckzilla)
Image description: Galaxy cluster SDSS J0952+3434 looks like it has a smiley face in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Near the bottom center of the image are two bright orange galaxies that form “eyes,” and a reddish one forms a “smile” as it is warped by gravitational lensing. Sprinkled throughout the rest of the image are other galaxies in a variety of shapes and colors.
#NASAHubble
Is this skull laughing at us? 💀
This @NASAChandraXray image shows X-ray emission from the hot gas surrounding the galaxies in the Perseus cluster. Its “eyes” are magnetized bubbles that could each hold half of our Milky Way galaxy.
Credit: NASA/IoA/A. Fabian et al.
Image description: The Chandra X-ray Observatory’s view of the Perseus galaxy cluster looks like a flaming skull in space. In the center of the image are two large orange bubbles of gas with smaller bubbl
28 Oct 2026
We see a brand new day dawning 🦋
We’re celebrating the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with a little Dolly Parton. Both appreciated the light of a clear blue morning, like the telescope launched into.
This observatory joins our eyes like @NASAHubble and @NASAWebb observing the long dark night of our universe. Roman will explore even further into the unseen in dark energy and dark matter. With our fleet of explorers studying the universe, everything’s gonna be alright.
As the telescope travels to its new home 1 million miles away from Earth, its instruments will keep turning on and preparing to bring us the light of a brand-new day.
0:00 Screen divided into three sections showing Hubble - 1990 on top, James Webb - 2021 in the middle, and Roman - 2026 on the bottom. The videos show each telescope in space and Roman and Webb separating from their launch vehicles.
0:07 Footage of all three launches.
0:27 Full screen Roman launch footage.
0:35 Back to three sections showing footage of each telescope in a cleanroom at Goddard being assembled and tested.
0:51 Each telescope separating from their launch vehicles.
0:55 Graphic depicting Hubble, Webb, and Roman’s field of view on the light spectrum. All three overlap in visible light. Hubble stretches slightly into infrared and UV. Webb stretches significantly into the infrared. And Roman stretches from visible into the infrared.
0:58 Model graphics of all three telescopes spinning.
1:01 Visualization fly through of Webb’s Cat’s Paw Nebula zooming out into Roman’s field of view, showing Cat’s Paw within one of the detector footprints.
1:23 NASA insignia appears then fades to black.
25 Sep 2026
Our Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy, traveling at an average of 450,000 miles per hour relative to its position. Even at that speed, it takes about 230 million years to complete one orbit.
In this artist’s concept of the Milky Way, the location of the Sun is labeled with a dot below the central region of the galaxy. Our solar system lies near a small, partial arm called the Orion Arm, or Orion Spur, located between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms. Zoom around to explore all of the labels!
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)
Image description: This illustration shows what our Milky Way galaxy might look like if we could see it from the outside. Near the center is a bright, elongated oval in shades of pale yellow. Two main spiral arms come off the two ends of the oval. These arms are dominated by bluish light with patches of white and red throughout. Additional, less prominent arms spiral out from between the main arms. These are labeled in the illustration with names like Norma Arm and Scutum-Centaurus Arm. In addition, there's a faint coordinate system centered on the Sun. The Sun is part of the Orion Spur.
#MilkyWay #Sun #MondayMotivation
01 Jan 1970
Listen to the spectral echoes of a dying star… 🎧
Turn up your volume and experience an immersive—and slightly unsettling—way to explore our universe. What you are hearing here is the otherworldly near-infrared view of the Southern Ring Nebula, captured by @NASAWebb and located at approximately 2,000 light-years from Earth.
In sonifications like this one, NASA takes observational data from telescopes and translates it into hidden frequencies that the human ear can perceive. Note that these aren't sounds actually recorded in space. Instead, musicians meticulously mapped frequencies of light directly to pitches of sound.
At the center of this planetary nebula, two stars are locked in a cosmic dance. The smaller, fainter red star is at the very end of its lifetime, having puffed off ethereal layers of gas and dust into the dark for thousands of years. Its larger companion stirs up these shadowy ejections. Because near-infrared light involves shorter wavelengths, this data translates into a higher range of spine-tingling frequencies.
Adapted by a team of scientists, musicians, and a member of the blind and visually impaired community, audio tracks like this one support blind and low-vision listeners first—but are designed to send a captivating chill down the spine of anyone who tunes in.
Listen closely and let this mesmerizing cosmic symphony transport you...
30 Oct 2026
Which one is SO you today? 🎃👀
Space is full of spooky sights, but there’s real science behind these cosmic creeps! From stellar remnants to swirling storms on Jupiter, the universe has plenty of tricks up its sleeve.
Tell us which spooky space scene matches your mood in the comments!
29 Oct 2026
Skeletons don’t make puns. They don’t have the bones for it! But these telescopes do.
Check out some ‘boo’nus images of the skeletons of some of our favorite very undead telescopes, @NASAHubble, @NASAWebb, and Roman!
Image description: A collage of Webb, Hubble, Roman, and Chandra in cleanrooms during their assembly. Text across the middle of the collage is “Telescope Bones.”
@NASAHubble being assembled in the cleanroom at Lockheed Space and Missile Company in Sunnyvale, California. This view was taken after the shroud was placed over the Optical Telescope Assembly.
Image description: The body of the Hubble Space Telescope is placed vertically in a cleanroom with white walls. Two technicians in white protective jumpsuits stand beneath the telescope by a black railing.
@NASAWebb in the @NASAGoddard cleanroom in Nov. 2015 after engineers successfully completed two deployments for Webb’s “wings,” or side portions of the backplane structure that fold up. The backplane, often called the “spine” of the telescope makes up the carbon fiber framework which holds all 18 of the telescope’s mirrors.
Image description: The frame of the Webb telescope’s 18 segment primary mirror sitting up right in the clean room. Each mirror segment location has a round frame to hold it in place. Four technicians in white protective jumpsuits stand near the bottom of the structure, showing how large it is.
NASA’S Roman Space Telescope in the @NASAGoddard cleanroom in Dec. 2024 as the spacecraft went through its integrated payload assembly.
Roman will study dark energy, exoplanets, and more! The spacecraft is on its journey to its final orbit, completing critical milestones along the way. We expect first images by early 2027!
Image description: The Roman Space Telescope structure sits on a silver metal ridged ring in the NASA Goddard clean room. Large pieces of hardware that appear to be stacked on top of each other, together standing about three to four times taller than a person. The Roman Optical Telescope Assembly is on top, and resembles the tip of a dull pencil. Six black beams attach to a small circular object at the top and extend outward and down in a cone-shaped formation t
27 Oct 2026
🎶 Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
You were bigger than the whole sky
You were more than just a short time 🎶
It’s the end of an era. After nearly 22 years in space, our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has made its final science observations and the spacecraft has been deactivated in preparation for its reentry in the coming weeks.
Swift was launched to help us learn more about gamma-ray bursts, outbursts that appear and disappear so quickly that previous telescopes couldn’t target them in time. In its lifetime, Swift observed over 2,000 of these bursts … and so much more. Swipe through this carousel to explore some of Swift’s greatest hits.
Image credits:
Andromeda Galaxy: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler (GSFC) and Erin Grand (UMCP)
Swift’s launch: NASA
M101, Cassiopeia A, and DG CVn superflare: NASA/Swift
Location of magnetar SGR 1806-20: University of Hawaii
Supernova 2008d before and after: NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler
Gamma-ray burst 090423: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
Artist’s concept of tidal disruption event Swift J1644+57: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab
Magnetar artist’s concept: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Wind nebula surrounding Swift J1834.9-0846: ESA/XMM-Newton and Younes et al. 2016
Comet Borisov: NASA/Swift/Z. Xing et al. 2020
Dust rings around gamma-ray burst 221009A: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
Artist’s concept of tidal disruption event in Swift J0230: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Swift mosaic: NASA/Swift and AndreaMosaic
Image descriptions are in the comments.
#NASASwift
26 Oct 2026
The universe has a musical side. 🎶
Meet the Treble Clef, an unusual radio structure stretching more than 2 million light-years across space. Its shape is striking, but the science behind it is even more fascinating.
Scientists think this structure may have originated when a supermassive black hole expelled charged particles into space. After their radio emission faded, a shock wave from colliding galaxy clusters may have compressed and reenergized those particles, causing them to emit radio waves again.
This composite image reveals the structure in three ways: radio emission appears in red, X-rays appear in blue, and infrared data appears in white. Observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the German Extended RÖntgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array (eROSITA) are helping scientists investigate this cosmic mystery. Studying unusual structures like the Treble Clef can reveal how galaxy clusters interact and evolve.
Download the image and learn more through Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) at the link in our bio.
22 Oct 2026
We asked this 8-year-old to draw the famous “Cosmic Cliffs” hidden within the Carina Nebula, based on the famous James Webb Space Telescope image.
The region is actually the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, roughly 7,600 light-years away. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image. The high-energy radiation from these stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away.
Our artist managed to capture the beauty of this Webb image, along with her version of the telescope itself, a rocket ship, and there is even a cameo of "The Traveler" exploring the cosmos!
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Producer: Paul Morris
Special thanks to Candy Jar, ASMR, and Donut Dan
Music Credit:
"Pizz with Pizzazz" by Bertrand Allagnat [SACEM] via Illustration Musicale [SACEM], Universal Production Music France [SACEM], and Universal Production Music
"William Tell Overture" by Gabriel Anthony Johannes Ness [PRS] Via Ninja Tune Production Music [PRS] and Universal Production Music
"There Goes Fifi" by Bruce Campbell [PRS] via Chappell Recorded Music Library Ltd [PRS] and Universal Production Music
"Advertising Theme No. 1" by Eddie Warner [SACEM] and George Achille Teperino [SACEM] via Illustration Musicale [SACEM], Universal Production Music France [SACEM], and Universal Production Music
21 Oct 2026
When you hear about the eerie side of the universe, it might make you feel a little "’stitious." But our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which launched on August 30, will help shed light on some of these haunting sights!
Roman has a field of view that will open up exciting new avenues of cosmic exploration, helping us understand the universe on the largest scales. This visualization shows a fly-through of the cosmic web, which might look like a giant spider web, but is actually made of groups of galaxies! Clusters and superclusters of galaxies form along giant thread-like structures with voids in between.
Check out our Roman story highlights to read more about the creepy side of the universe and how the mission will study it!
Credit: NASA/NCSA University of Illinois Visualization; Frank Summers (STScI); Martin White & Lars Hernquist (Harvard)
Music: “Follower,” David Scott Butler [BMI], Killer Tracks, Icon Trailer Music, Universal Production Music
Video description: This visualization flies through the cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the universe. Dozens of bright knots each mark an entire galaxy, while countless purple filaments stringing them together show where material exists between the galaxies. To the human eye, only the galaxies would be visible, and this visualization allows us to see the connective strands forming the cosmic web.
#ScaryStories #NASARoman
16 Oct 2026
Our SPHEREx telescope is getting to know the universe’s dark wanderers.
Image credits:
Brown dwarf artist’s concept: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Brown dwarf composite grid: Zafar Rustamkulov/NASA/JPL-Caltech
Brown dwarf spectra chart: Zafar Rustamkulov/International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) et al. Acknowledgments: M. Zamani
Image descriptions:
Slide 1: Artist’s concept of a brown dwarf against a star-filled sky and the hazy Milky Way. The large sphere fills the right side, with swirling red-orange clouds across a dark purple atmosphere. Bold white text on orange-red rectangular bands reads: “Meet the universe’s goth worlds.”
Slide 2: White text on a black background reads: “Brown dwarfs blur the line between stars and exoplanets – drifting in darkness, ungoverned by a host star, and heated entirely from within. Only a few dozen of them have been studied in detail with space-based telescopes.”
Slide 3: A grid of small telescope images shows glowing points in white, yellow, orange, red, and blue against dark backgrounds. Each panel has small labels identifying its object’s classification, distance, and temperature. Below, white text reads: “But now, our SPHEREx telescope has studied 37 of these objects, measuring their brightness in 102 colors, each representing a wavelength of infrared light.”
Slide 4: Three rows compare pixelated telescope images on the left with rainbow-colored light spectra in the middle and depictions of cloudy brown dwarfs on the right. The upper two spheres glow orange and red; the bottom sphere is purple with pink-red bands. Shaded vertical regions mark methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. Below, white text reads: “With this spectral coverage, SPHEREx was able to reveal chemically rich atmospheres harboring water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane.”
Slide 5: Large, bold white text on a black background reads: “The findings are a call to action to explore even more of these dark worlds.” Beneath the quote, smaller white text attributes it to “J. Davy Kirkpatrick, study coauthor.”
#NASASPHEREx #BrownDwarfs
15 Oct 2026
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