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Explore Hubble Science Hubble Space Telescope NASA’s Hubble Sees White… Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Universe Uncovered Hubble’s Partners in Science AI and Hubble Science Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Science Operations Astronaut Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 5 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Sees White Dwarf Eating Piece of Pluto-Like Object
This artist’s concept shows a white dwarf surrounded by a large debris disk. Debris from pieces of a captured, Pluto-like object is falling onto the white dwarf. Credits:
Artwork: NASA, Tim Pyle (NASA/JPL-Caltech) In our nearby stellar neighborhood, a burned-out star is snacking on a fragment of a Pluto-like object. With its unique ultraviolet capability, only NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could identify that this meal is taking place.
The stellar remnant is a white dwarf about half the mass of our Sun, but that is densely packed into a body about the size of Earth. Scientists think the dwarf’s immense gravity pulled in and tore apart an icy Pluto analog from the system’s own version of the Kuiper Belt, an icy ring of debris that encircles our solar system. The findings were reported on September 18 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The researchers were able to determine this carnage by analyzing the chemical composition of the doomed object as its pieces fell onto the white dwarf. In particular, they detected “volatiles” — substances with low boiling points — including carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, and a high oxygen content that suggests the strong presence of water.
“We were surprised,” said Snehalata Sahu of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Sahu led the data analysis of a Hubble survey of white dwarfs. “We did not expect to find water or other icy content. This is because the comets and Kuiper Belt-like objects are thrown out of their planetary systems early, as their stars evolve into white dwarfs. But here, we are detecting this very volatile-rich material. This is surprising for astronomers studying white dwarfs as well as exoplanets, planets outside our solar system.”
This artist’s concept shows a white dwarf surrounded by a large debris disk. Debris from pieces of a captured, Pluto-like object is falling onto the white dwarf. Artwork: NASA, Tim Pyle (NASA/JPL-Caltech) Only with Hubble
Using Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, the team found that the fragments were composed of 64 percent water ice. The fact that they detected so much ice meant that the pieces were part of a very massive object that formed far out in the star system’s icy Kuiper Belt analog. Using Hubble data, scientists calculated that the object was bigger than typical comets and may be a fragment of an exo-Pluto.
They also detected a large fraction of nitrogen – the highest ever detected in white dwarf debris systems. “We know that Pluto’s surface is covered with nitrogen ices,” said Sahu. “We think that the white dwarf accreted fragments of the crust and mantle of a dwarf planet.”
Accretion of these volatile-rich objects by white dwarfs is very difficult to detect in visible light. These volatile elements can only be detected with Hubble’s unique ultraviolet light sensitivity. In optical light, the white dwarf would appear ordinary.
About 260 light-years away, the white dwarf is a relatively close cosmic neighbor. In the past, when it was a Sun-like star, it would have been expected to host planets and an analog to our Kuiper Belt.
Like seeing our Sun in future
Billions of years from now, when our Sun burns out and collapses to a white dwarf, Kuiper Belt objects will be pulled in by the stellar remnant’s immense gravity. “These planetesimals will then be disrupted and accreted,” said Sahu. “If an alien observer looks into our solar system in the far future, they might see the same kind of remains we see today around this white dwarf.”
The team hopes to use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to detect molecular features of volatiles such as water vapor and carbonates by observing this white dwarf in infrared light. By further studying white dwarfs, scientists can better understand the frequency and composition of these volatile-rich accretion events.
Sahu is also following the recent discovery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. She is eager to learn its chemical composition, especially its fraction of water. “These types of studies will help us learn more about planet formation. They can also help us understand how water is delivered to rocky planets,” said Sahu.
Boris Gänsicke, of the University of Warwick and a visitor at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, was the principal investigator of the Hubble program that led to this discovery. “We observed over 500 white dwarfs with Hubble. We’ve already learned so much about the building blocks and fragments of planets, but I’ve been absolutely thrilled that we now identified a system that resembles the objects in the frigid outer edges of our solar system,” said Gänsicke. “Measuring the composition of an exo-Pluto is an important contribution toward our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies.”
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
To learn more about Hubble, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/hubble
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White Dwarf Accreting Icy Object (Illustration)
This artist’s concept shows a white dwarf surrounded by a large debris disk. Debris from pieces of a captured, Pluto-like object is falling onto the white dwarf.
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Last Updated Sep 18, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media Claire Andreoli
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Science Paper: Discovery of an icy and nitrogen-rich extra-solar planetesimal, PDF (674.84 KB)
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
It’s been 30 years since the discovery of the first planet around another star like our Sun. With every new discovery, scientists move closer to answering whether there are other planets like Earth that could host life as we know it. NASA/JPL-Caltech The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found.
The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no single planet is considered the 6,000th entry. The number is monitored by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), based at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California. There are more than 8,000 additional candidate planets awaiting confirmation, with NASA leading the world in searching for life in the universe.
See NASA's Exoplanet Discoveries Dashboard “This milestone represents decades of cosmic exploration driven by NASA space telescopes — exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Step by step, from discovery to characterization, NASA missions have built the foundation to answering a fundamental question: Are we alone? Now, with our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory, America will lead the next giant leap — studying worlds like our own around stars like our Sun. This is American ingenuity, and a promise of discovery that unites us all.”
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. Most can be studied only indirectly, but scientists know they vary widely, as depicted in this artist’s concept, from small, rocky worlds and gas giants to water-rich planets and those as hot as stars. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The milestone comes 30 years after the first exoplanet was discovered around a star similar to our Sun, in 1995. (Prior to that, a few planets had been identified around stars that had burned all their fuel and collapsed.) Although researchers think there are billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, finding them remains a challenge. In addition to discovering many individual planets with fascinating characteristics as the total number of known exoplanets climbs, scientists are able to see how the general planet population compares to the planets of our own solar system.
For example, while our solar system hosts an equal number of rocky and giant planets, rocky planets appear to be more common in the universe. Researchers have also found a range of planets entirely different from those in our solar system. There are Jupiter-size planets that orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun; planets that orbit two stars, no stars, and dead stars; planets covered in lava; some with the density of Styrofoam; and others with clouds made of gemstones.
“Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be looking for them,” said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), located at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “If we want to find out if we’re alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential.”
Searching for other worlds
Fewer than 100 exoplanets have been directly imaged, because most planets are so faint they get lost in the light from their parent star. The other four methods of planet detection are indirect. With the transit method, for instance, astronomers look for a star to dim for a short period as an orbiting planet passes in front of it.
To account for the possibility that something other than an exoplanet is responsible for a particular signal, most exoplanet candidates must be confirmed by follow-up observations, often using an additional telescope, and that takes time. That’s why there is a long list of candidates in the NASA Exoplanet Archive (hosted by NExScI) waiting to be confirmed.
“We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates,” said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at IPAC. “A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets.”
The rate of exoplanet discoveries has accelerated in recent years (the database reached 5,000 confirmed exoplanets just three years ago), and this trend seems likely to continue. Kesseli and her colleagues anticipate receiving thousands of additional exoplanet candidates from the ESA (European Space Agency) Gaia mission, which finds planets through a technique called astrometry, and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will discover thousands of new exoplanets primarily through a technique called gravitational microlensing.
Many telescopes contribute to the search for and study of exoplanets, including some in space (artists concepts shown here) and on the ground. Doing the work are organizations around the world, including ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and NSF (National Science Foundation). NASA/JPL-Caltech Future exoplanets
At NASA, the future of exoplanet science will emphasize finding rocky planets similar to Earth and studying their atmospheres for biosignatures — any characteristic, element, molecule, substance, or feature that can be used as evidence of past or present life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has already analyzed the chemistry of over 100 exoplanet atmospheres.
But studying the atmospheres of planets the size and temperature of Earth will require new technology. Specifically, scientists need better tools to block the glare of the star a planet orbits. And in the case of an Earth-like planet, the glare would be significant: The Sun is about 10 billion times brighter than Earth — which would be more than enough to drown out our home planet’s light if viewed by a distant observer.
NASA has two main initiatives to try overcoming this hurdle. The Roman telescope will carry a technology demonstration instrument called the Roman Coronagraph that will test new technologies for blocking starlight and making faint planets visible. At its peak performance, the coronagraph should be able to directly image a planet the size and temperature of Jupiter orbiting a star like our Sun, and at a similar distance from that star. With its microlensing survey and coronagraphic observations, Roman will reveal new details about the diversity of planetary systems, showing how common solar systems like our own may be across the galaxy.
Additional advances in coronagraph technology will be needed to build a coronagraph that can detect a planet like Earth. NASA is working on a concept for such a mission, currently named the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
More about ExEP, NExScI
NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program is responsible for implementing the agency’s plans for the discovery and understanding of planetary systems around nearby stars. It acts as a focal point for exoplanet science and technology and integrates cohesive strategies for future discoveries. The science operations and analysis center for ExEP is NExScI, based at IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Daily images of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean (left) and around Antarctica reveal sea ice formation and melting at the poles over the course of two years (Sept 14, 2023 to Sept. 13, 2025).Trent Schindler/NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio With the end of summer approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic shrank to its annual minimum on Sept. 10, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The total sea ice coverage was tied with 2008 for the 10th-lowest on record at 1.78 million square miles (4.60 million square kilometers). In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter is ending, Antarctic ice is still accumulating but remains relatively low compared to ice levels recorded before 2016.
The areas of ice covering the oceans at the poles fluctuate through the seasons. Ice accumulates as seawater freezes during colder months and melts away during the warmer months. But the ice never quite disappears entirely at the poles. In the Arctic Ocean, the area the ice covers typically reaches its yearly minimum in September. Since scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began tracking sea ice at the poles in 1978, sea ice extent has generally been declining as global temperatures have risen.
“While this year’s Arctic sea ice area did not set a record low, it’s consistent with the downward trend,” said Nathan Kurtz, chief of the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Arctic ice reached its lowest recorded extent in 2012. Ice scientist Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, attributes that record low to a combination of a warming atmosphere and unusual weather patterns. This year, the annual decline in ice initially resembled the changes in 2012. Although the melting tapered off in early August, it wasn’t enough to change the year-over-year downward trend. “For the past 19 years, the minimum ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean has fallen below the levels prior to 2007,” Meier said. “That continues in 2025.”
Antarctic sea ice nearing annual maximum
As ice in the Arctic reaches its annual minimum, sea ice around the Antarctic is approaching its annual maximum. Until recently, ice in the ocean around the Southern pole has been more resilient than sea ice in the North, with maximum coverage increasing slightly in the years before 2015. “This year looks lower than average,” Kurtz said. “But the Antarctic system as a whole is more complicated,” which makes predicting and understanding sea ice trends in the Antarctic more difficult.
It’s not yet clear whether lower ice coverage in the Antarctic will persist, Meier said. “For now, we’re keeping an eye on it” to see if the lower sea ice levels around the South Pole are here to stay or only part of a passing phase.
A history of tracking global ice
For nearly five decades, NASA and NOAA have relied on a variety of satellites to build a continuous sea ice record, beginning with the NASA Nimbus-7 satellite (1978–1987) and continuing with the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder on Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites that began in 1987. The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer–for EOS on NASA’s Aqua satellite also contributed data from 2002 to 2011. Scientists have extended data collection with the 2012 launch of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 aboard a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) satellite.
With the launch of ICESat-2 in 2018, NASA has added the continuous observation of ice thickness to its recording. The ICESat-2 satellite measures ice height by recording the time it takes for laser light from the satellite to reflect from the surface and travel back to detectors on board.
“We’ve hit 47 years of continuous monitoring of the global sea ice extent from satellites,” said Angela Bliss, assistant chief of NASA’s Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory. “This data record is one of the longest, most consistent satellite data records in existence, where every single day we have a look at the sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic.”
By James Riordon
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Media contact: Elizabeth Vlock
NASA Headquarters
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Universe Uncovered Hubble’s Partners in Science AI and Hubble Science Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Science Operations Astronaut Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Surveys Cloudy Cluster
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the nebula LMC N44C. ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. This scene is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies that orbit our galaxy.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to several massive stellar nurseries where gas clouds, like those strewn across this image, coalesce into new stars. Today’s image depicts a portion of the galaxy’s second-largest star-forming region, which is called N11. (The most massive and prolific star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula, is a frequent target for Hubble.) We see bright, young stars lighting up the gas clouds and sculpting clumps of dust with powerful ultraviolet radiation.
This image marries observations made roughly 20 years apart, a testament to Hubble’s longevity. The first set of observations, which were carried out in 2002–2003, capitalized on the exquisite sensitivity and resolution of the then-newly-installed Advanced Camera for Surveys. Astronomers turned Hubble toward the N11 star cluster to do something that had never been done before at the time: catalog all the stars in a young cluster with masses between 10% of the Sun’s mass and 100 times the Sun’s mass.
The second set of observations came from Hubble’s newest camera, the Wide Field Camera 3. These images focused on the dusty clouds that permeate the cluster, providing us with a new perspective on cosmic dust.
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Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s Nebulae
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows a brown dwarf — an object larger than a planet but not massive enough to kickstart fusion in its core like a star. Brown dwarfs are hot when they form and may glow like this one, but over time they get closer in temperature to gas giant planets like Jupiter. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why has silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, gone largely undetected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and gas planets like them orbiting other stars? A new study using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sheds light on this question by focusing on a peculiar object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “The Accident.”
The results were published on Sept. 4 in the journal Nature.
As shown in this graphic, brown dwarfs can be far more massive than even large gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn. However, they tend to lack the mass that kickstarts nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, causing them to shine. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Accident is a brown dwarf, a ball of gas that’s not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its already hard-to-classify peers, The Accident has a perplexing mix of physical features, some of which have been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs and others seen only in ancient ones. Because of those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The program lets people around the globe look for new discoveries in data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The brown dwarf nicknamed “The Accident” can be seen moving in the bottom left corner of this video, which shows data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), launched in 2009 with the moniker WISE. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dan Caselden The Accident is so faint and odd that researchers needed NASA’s most powerful space observatory, Webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule they couldn’t initially identify. It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called silane (SiH4). Researchers have long expected — but been unable — to find silane not only in our solar system’s gas giants, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and to the gas giants orbiting other stars. The Accident is the first such object where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are fairly confident that silicon exists in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres but that it is hidden. Bound to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz that can seed clouds on hot gas giants, bearing a resemblance to dust storms on Earth. On cooler gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would sink far beneath lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until any silicon-containing molecules are deep in the atmosphere, invisible even to the spacecraft that have studied those two planets up close.
Some researchers have also posited that lighter molecules of silicon, like silane, should be found higher up in these atmospheric layers, left behind like traces of flour on a baker’s table. That such molecules haven’t appeared anywhere except in a single, peculiar brown dwarf suggests something about the chemistry occurring in these environments.
“Sometimes it’s the extreme objects that help us understand what’s happening in the average ones,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and lead author on the new study.
Happy accident
Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident likely formed 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever discovered. The universe is about 14 billion years old, and at the time that The Accident developed, the cosmos contained mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements, including silicon. Over eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the cores of stars, so planets and stars that formed more recently possess more of those elements.
Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres. The fact that silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and gas giant planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it bonds with silicon at such a high rate and so easily, virtually no silicon is left over to bond with hydrogen and form silane.
So why is silane in The Accident? The study authors surmise it is because far less oxygen was present in the universe when the ancient brown dwarf formed, resulting in less oxygen in its atmosphere to gobble up all the silicon. The available silicon would have bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane.
“We weren’t looking to solve a mystery about Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said JPL’s Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which was later repurposed as NEOWISE. “A brown dwarf is a ball of gas like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it gets cooler and cooler, with an atmosphere like that of gas giant planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane. The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than gas giant exoplanets because the light from a faraway planet is typically drowned out by the star it orbits, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo. And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including ones outside our solar system that might feature potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we’re not finding life on brown dwarfs,” said Faherty. “But at a high level, by studying all of this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we’re setting up the scientists who are one day going to have to do this kind of chemical analysis for rocky, potentially Earth-like planets. It might not specifically involve silicon, but they’re going to get data that is complicated and confusing and doesn’t fit their models, just like we are. They’ll have to parse all those complexities if they want to answer those big questions.”
More about WISE, Webb
A division of Caltech, JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The NEOWISE mission was a project of JPL and the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
For more information about WISE, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory, and an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 Related Terms
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