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This image of comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on Aug. 8, 2020. Hubble’s image represents the first time a comet of this brightness has been photographed at such resolution after this close of a pass by the Sun. The two structures appearing on the left and right sides of the comet’s center are jets made up of ice sublimating from beneath the surface of the nucleus, with the resulting dust and gas being squeezed through at a high velocity. The jets emerge as cone-like structures, then are fanned out by the rotation of comet NEOWISE’s nucleus.

Illustration of the LCRD payload transmitting an optical signal to OGS-2 in Haleakala, Hawaii.

Animation inspired by the bright, burning glow of meteors as they enter Earth's atmosphere.

Electron microscopy experiments revealed meandering stripes formed by metal atoms of rhenium and niobium in the lattice structure of a 2D transition metal dichalcogenide alloy.

A new sequence of Chandra images, taken over nearly a decade and a half, captures motion in Kepler's supernova remnant. Pieces of this debris field are still moving at about 23 million miles per hour over 400 years after the explosion was spotted by early astronomers. Scientists are still trying to determine whether an extremely powerful explosion or an unusual environment around it is responsible for these high speeds so long after the explosion. The Kepler supernova was triggered by a white dwarf that reached a critical mass after interacting with a companion star and exploded.

Wildfires Increase in California and NASA's Terra Satellite Captures the Scene

When LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and its European counterpart, Virgo, detect a gravitational ripple from space, a public alert is sent out. That alert lets researchers know with a decently high confidence that this ripple was probably caused by an exceptional cosmic event, such as the collision of neutron stars or the merging of black holes, somewhere in the universe.

This ECOSTRESS temperature map shows the land surface temperatures throughout Los Angeles County on Aug. 14, 2020, during a heat wave.

To make the new material, the thin film is first deposited via a pulsed-laser deposition process in this chamber. The bright “plume” you see is the laser hitting the target and depositing the material.

Quasars—accreting supermassive black holes—are paradoxically some of the brightest objects in the universe. Astronomers widely consider the energy from quasars to be the main driver in limiting the growth of massive galaxies. Scientists plan to use Webb to study the impact of three carefully selected quasars on their host galaxies in a program called Q3D.