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Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy snacking on gas and then "burping" — not once, but twice.

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An intensive survey deep into the universe by NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes has yielded the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack: the farthest galaxy yet seen in an image that has been stretched and amplified by a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

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A new analysis of about 10,000 normal Sun-like stars in the Milky Way's bulge reveals that our galaxy’s hub is a dynamic environment of variously aged stars zipping around at different speeds. This conclusion is based on nine years’ worth of archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

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By combining the visible and infrared capabilities of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers and visualization specialists from NASA's Universe of Learning program have created a new three-dimensional fly-through movie of the Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery.

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It's beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in this Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling snowstorm in a snow globe. The stars are residents of the globular star cluster Messier 79 (also known as M79 or NGC 1904), located 41,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Lepus.

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Astronomers around the world will have immediate access to early data from specific science observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which will be completed within the first five months of Webb’s science operations. These observing programs were chosen from a Space Telescope Science Institute call for early release science proposals.

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A movie assembled from more two years’ worth of Hubble images reveals an expanding shell of light from a supernova explosion sweeping through interstellar space three years after the stellar blast was discovered. The “echoing” light looks like a ripple expanding on a pond. The supernova, called SN 2014J, was discovered on Jan. 21, 2014.

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Photobombing asteroids from our solar system have snuck their way into this deep image of the universe taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. These asteroids reside roughly 160 million miles from Earth, yet they’ve horned their way into this picture of thousands of galaxies scattered across space and time at inconceivably farther distances.

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Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a blistering hot planet outside our solar system where it “snows” sunscreen. The problem is the sunscreen (titanium dioxide) precipitation only happens on the planet’s permanent nighttime side.

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For the first time, NASA scientists have detected light tied to a gravitational-wave event, thanks to two merging neutron stars in the galaxy NGC 4993, located about 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of 1.5 billion miles from the Sun (beyond Saturn's orbit).

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope helped an international team of astronomers find that an unusual object in the asteroid belt is, in fact, two asteroids orbiting each other that have comet-like features. These include a bright halo of material, called a coma, and a long tail of dust.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found that the well-studied exoplanet WASP-12b reflects almost no light and appears as black as fresh asphalt. Unlike other exoplanets in its class of hot Jupiters, it has the unique capability to trap at least 94 percent of the visible starlight falling into its super-heated atmosphere.

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Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence to date for a stratosphere on a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet WASP-121b results obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope are published in the journal Nature.

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While photographing Mars, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet. Hubble took 13 separate exposures over 22 minutes to create a time-lapse video showing the moon's orbital path.

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By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens, astronomers have obtained images 10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own.

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Astronomers combined the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to make a surprising discovery—the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang. Researchers say that finding such a galaxy so early in the history of the universe challenges the current understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve.

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Astronomers have used the sharp vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to repeat a century-old test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The team measured the mass of white dwarf Stein 2051 B, the burned-out remnant of a normal star, by seeing how much it deflects the light from a background star. The gravitational microlensing method data provide a solid estimate of the white dwarf’s mass and yield insights into theories of the structure and composition of the burned-out star.

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Boosted by natural magnifying lenses in space, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured unique close-up views of the universe's brightest infrared galaxies, which are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than our Milky Way. The results are being presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

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Solar flares and associated eruptions can trigger auroras on Earth or, more ominously, damage satellites and power grids. Could flares on cool, red dwarf stars cause even more havoc to orbiting planets, even rendering them uninhabitable? To help answer that question, astronomers sought to find out how many flares such stars typically unleash.

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Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study two "hot Jupiter" exoplanets--having virtually the same size and temperature, and orbiting around nearly identical stars at the same distance--hypothesized that the planets' atmospheres should be alike. But the researchers found that one planet's atmosphere was much cloudier than the other.

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Astronomers have watched as a massive, dying star was likely reborn as a black hole. It took the combined power of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to go looking for remnants of the vanquished star, only to find that it disappeared out of sight.

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An international team of astronomers have uncovered a moon around a dwarf planet by using the combined power of three space observatories, including archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Called 2007 OR₁₀, it is the third-largest dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt.

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Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the powerful X-ray glow as seen by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. And, in between that range of wavelengths, the Hubble Space Telescope's crisp visible-light view, and the infrared perspective of the Spitzer Space Telescope.

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Like the quirky characters in the upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the Hubble Space Telescope has some amazing superpowers, specifically when it comes to observing galaxies across time and space. One stunning example is galaxy cluster Abell 370, which contains a vast assortment of several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull of gravity. That's a lot of galaxies to be guarding, and just in this one cluster!

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Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 27th birthday with a striking pair of very different looking spiral galaxies. The edge-on galaxy (left) is called NGC 4302, and the tilted galaxy (right) is called NGC 4298. Although the pinwheel galaxies look quite different because they are angled at different positions on the sky, they are actually quite similar in terms of their structure and contents.

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Recent observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a probable plume of material erupting from the moon's surface at precisely the same location as a similar apparent plume seen two years earlier by Hubble. These images bolster evidence that the plumes are a real phenomenon, flaring up intermittently in the same region on the satellite.

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Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to take this dazzling photo of Jupiter when the planet was comparatively close to Earth, at a distance of 415 million miles.

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Hubble Space Telescope astronomers searched the gauzy remains of a Type Ia supernova in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. They found a sun-like star that showed signs of being associated with the supernova. Further investigations will be needed to learn if this star is truly the culprit behind a white dwarf's fiery demise.

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NASA has selected 28 Fellows for its prestigious Einstein, Hubble, and Sagan fellowships. Each post-doctoral fellowship provides three years of support to awardees to pursue independent research in astronomy and astrophysics. The new Fellows begin their programs in the fall of 2017 at a host university or research center of their choosing in the United States.

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An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the center of the distant galaxy 3C 186. The black hole was most likely ejected by the power of gravitational waves.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found what may be the missing piece of a cosmic puzzle; the third, long-lost member of a star system in the Orion Nebula that broke apart 500 years ago.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found that the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy ate its last big meal about 6 million years ago, when it consumed a large clump of infalling gas. After the meal, the engorged black hole burped out a colossal bubble of gas weighing the equivalent of millions of suns, which now billows above and below our galaxy's center.

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NASA is partnering with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Northrop Grumman Corporation to highlight the James Webb Space Telescope at South by Southwest (SXSW) from March 12 to 18, 2017. The Webb telescope exhibit will be located at the Austin Convention Center, 500 E. Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, Texas.

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Twenty years ago, astronauts on the Hubble telescope's second servicing mission installed the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) aboard Hubble. This pioneering instrument combines a camera with a spectrograph, which provides a "fingerprint" of a celestial object's temperature, chemical composition, density, and motion. STIS also reveals changes in the evolving universe and leads the way in the field of high-contrast imaging.

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Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery on Feb. 23, 1987. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of SN 1987A, new images, time-lapse movies, a data-based animation, and a three-dimensional model are being released. By combining data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, as well as the international Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers -- and the public -- can explore SN 1987A like never before.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found the best evidence yet of the remains of a comet-like object scattered in the atmosphere of a white dwarf. The icy object, which has been ripped apart, is similar to Halley's Comet in chemical composition, but it is 100,000 times more massive.

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Astronomers were surprised to see a huge shadow sweeping across a disk of dust and gas encircling the nearby, young star TW Hydrae. They have a bird's-eye view of the disk, because it is tilted face-on to Earth, and the shadow sweeps around the disk like the hands moving around a clock. But, unlike the hands of a clock, the shadow takes 16 years to make one rotation. Hubble has 18 years' worth of observations of the star; therefore, astronomers could assemble a time-lapse movie of the shadow's rotation.

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Interstellar forecast for a nearby star: Raining comets! The comets are plunging into the star HD 172555, which resides 95 light-years from Earth. The comets were not seen directly around the star. Astronomers inferred their presence when they used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to detect gas that is likely the vaporized remnants of their icy nuclei.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have measured the material along the Voyager 1 and 2 probes' trajectories as they move through space. Hubble data, combined with the Voyagers, have also provided new insights into how our sun travels through interstellar space.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have captured two festive-looking nebulas, situated so as to appear as one. Known as NGC 248, the nebula resides in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy.

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Data from the world's largest digital sky survey, Pan-STARRS1, is being publicly released today by the Space Telescope Science Institute, in conjunction with the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. The four years of data comprise 3 billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies, and various other objects. The collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies, or 100 times the total content of Wikipedia.

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Nancy A. Levenson and David R. Soderblom of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

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The Maryland Academy of Sciences has selected Dr. Laurent Pueyo of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, as the recipient of the 2016 Outstanding Young Scientist award. He will receive the award in a ceremony today (Nov. 16) at the Maryland Science Center, located in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

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The eerie glow of a dead star, which exploded long ago as a supernova, reveals itself in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab Nebula. But, the ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse. Buried at its center is the star's tell-tale heart, which beats with rhythmic precision. The green hue, representative of the broad color range of the camera filter used, gives the nebula a Halloween theme.

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Dr. Arfon Smith has been selected to lead the newly created Data Science Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Using data from deep-space surveys taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers have performed a census of the number of galaxies in the universe. The team came to the surprising conclusion that there are at least 10 times as many galaxies in the observable universe than previously thought. The results have clear implications for our understanding of galaxy formation, and also helps shed light on an ancient astronomical paradox — why is the sky dark at night?

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star. The host star, called V Hydrae, is a bloated red giant, residing 1,200 light-years away, which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes. But, astronomers believe the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star orbiting the red giant. This stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

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New findings from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show suspected water plumes erupting from Jupiter's icy moon Europa. These observations bolster earlier Hubble work suggesting that Europa is venting water vapor. A team of astronomers, led by William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, observed these finger-like projections while viewing Europa's limb as the moon passed in front of Jupiter. The study will be published on Sept. 29 in The Astrophysical Journal.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The Hubble observations represent the first time such a three-body system has been confirmed using the gravitational microlensing technique.