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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx mission is observing the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, or wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. This image shows a section of sky in one wavelength (3.29 microns), revealing a cloud of dust made of a molecule similar to soot or smoke.NASA/JPL-Caltech This image from NASA’s SPHEREx shows the same region of space in a different infrared wavelength (0.98 microns), but the dust cloud is no longer visible. The molecules that compose the dust — polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — do not radiate light in this color.NASA/JPL-Caltech After weeks of preparation, the space observatory has begun its science mission, taking about 3,600 unique images per day to create a map of the cosmos like no other.
Launched on March 11, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory has spent the last six weeks undergoing checkouts, calibrations, and other activities to ensure it is working as it should. Now it’s mapping the entire sky — not just a large part of it — to chart the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D to answer some big questions about the universe. On May 1, the spacecraft began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day for the next two years to provide new insights about the origins of the universe, galaxies, and the ingredients for life in the Milky Way.
This video shows SPHEREx’s field of view as it scans across one section of sky inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, with rainbow colors representing the infrared wavelengths the telescope’s detectors see. The view from one detector array moves from purple to green, followed by the second array’s view, which changes from yellow to red. The images are looped four times. NASA/JPL-Caltech “Thanks to the hard work of teams across NASA, industry, and academia that built this mission, SPHEREx is operating just as we’d expected and will produce maps of the full sky unlike any we’ve had before,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This new observatory is adding to the suite of space-based astrophysics survey missions leading up to the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Together with these other missions, SPHEREx will play a key role in answering the big questions about the universe we tackle at NASA every day.”
From its perch in Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its 25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14½ times a day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx’s field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.
When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it’s done with one exposure, the whole observatory shifts position — the mirrors and detectors don’t move as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to control its orientation.
Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx’s images will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillionfold.
“We’re going to study what happened on the smallest size scales in the universe’s earliest moments by looking at the modern universe on the largest scales,” said Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “I think there’s a poetic arc to that.”
Cosmic inflation subtly influenced the distribution of matter in the universe, and clues about how such an event could happen are written into the positions of galaxies across the universe. When cosmic inflation began, the universe was smaller than the size of an atom, but the properties of that early universe were stretched out and influence what we see today. No other known event or process involves the amount of energy that would have been required to drive cosmic inflation, so studying it presents a unique opportunity to understand more deeply how our universe works.
“Some of us have been working toward this goal for 12 years,” said Jamie Bock, the mission’s principal investigator at Caltech and JPL. “The performance of the instrument is as good as we hoped. That means we’re going to be able to do all the amazing science we planned on and perhaps even get some unexpected discoveries.”
Color Field
The SPHEREx observatory won’t be the first to map the entire sky, but it will be the first to do so in so many colors. It observes 102 wavelengths, or colors, of infrared light, which are undetectable to the human eye. Through a technique called spectroscopy, the telescope separates the light into wavelengths — much like a prism creates a rainbow from sunlight — revealing all kinds of information about cosmic sources.
For example, spectroscopy can be harnessed to determine the distance to a faraway galaxy, information that can be used to turn a 2D map of those galaxies into a 3D one. The technique will also enable the mission to measure the collective glow from all the galaxies that ever existed and see how that glow has changed over cosmic time.
And spectroscopy can reveal the composition of objects. Using this capability, the mission is searching for water and other key ingredients for life in these systems in our galaxy. It’s thought that the water in Earth’s oceans originated as frozen water molecules attached to dust in the interstellar cloud where the Sun formed.
The SPHEREx mission will make over 9 million observations of interstellar clouds in the Milky Way, mapping these materials across the galaxy and helping scientists understand how different conditions can affect the chemistry that produced many of the compounds found on Earth today.
More About SPHEREx
The SPHEREx mission is managed by JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Caltech in Pasadena managed and integrated the instrument. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more about SPHEREx, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated May 01, 2025 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Exoplanets Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
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By NASA
4 min read
May’s Night Sky Notes: How Do We Find Exoplanets?
Astronomers have been trying to discover evidence that worlds exist around stars other than our Sun since the 19th century. By the mid-1990s, technology finally caught up with the desire for discovery and led to the first discovery of a planet orbiting another sun-like star, Pegasi 51b. Why did it take so long to discover these distant worlds, and what techniques do astronomers use to find them?
The Transit Method
A planet passing in front of its parent star creates a drop in the star’s apparent brightness, called a transit. Exoplanet Watch participants can look for transits in data from ground-based telescopes, helping scientists refine measurements of the length of a planet’s orbit around its star. Credit: NASA’s Ames Research Center One of the most famous exoplanet detection methods is the transit method, used by Kepler and other observatories. When a planet crosses in front of its host star, the light from the star dips slightly in brightness. Scientists can confirm a planet orbits its host star by repeatedly detecting these incredibly tiny dips in brightness using sensitive instruments. If you can imagine trying to detect the dip in light from a massive searchlight when an ant crosses in front of it, at a distance of tens of miles away, you can begin to see how difficult it can be to spot a planet from light-years away! Another drawback to the transit method is that the distant solar system must be at a favorable angle to our point of view here on Earth – if the distant system’s angle is just slightly askew, there will be no transits. Even in our solar system, a transit is very rare. For example, there were two transits of Venus visible across our Sun from Earth in this century. But the next time Venus transits the Sun as seen from Earth will be in the year 2117 – more than a century from the 2012 transit, even though Venus will have completed nearly 150 orbits around the Sun by then!
The Wobble Method
As a planet orbits a star, the star wobbles. This causes a change in the appearance of the star’s spectrum called Doppler shift. Because the change in wavelength is directly related to relative speed, astronomers can use Doppler shift to calculate exactly how fast an object is moving toward or away from us. Astronomers can also track the Doppler shift of a star over time to estimate the mass of the planet orbiting it. NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI) Spotting the Doppler shift of a star’s spectra was used to find Pegasi 51b, the first planet detected around a Sun-like star. This technique is called the radial velocity or “wobble” method. Astronomers split up the visible light emitted by a star into a rainbow. These spectra, and gaps between the normally smooth bands of light, help determine the elements that make up the star. However, if there is a planet orbiting the star, it causes the star to wobble ever so slightly back and forth. This will, in turn, cause the lines within the spectra to shift ever so slightly towards the blue and red ends of the spectrum as the star wobbles slightly away and towards us. This is caused by the blue and red shifts of the star’s light. By carefully measuring the amount of shift in the star’s spectra, astronomers can determine the size of the object pulling on the host star and if the companion is indeed a planet. By tracking the variation in this periodic shift of the spectra, they can also determine the time it takes the planet to orbit its parent star.
Direct Imaging
Finally, exoplanets can be revealed by directly imaging them, such as this image of four planets found orbiting the star HR 8799! Space telescopes use instruments called coronagraphs to block the bright light from the host star and capture the dim light from planets. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of giant planets orbiting a few nearby systems, and the James Webb Space Telescope has only improved on these observations by uncovering more details, such as the colors and spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, temperatures, detecting potential exomoons, and even scanning atmospheres for potential biosignatures!
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the clearest look in the infrared yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. The closest planet to the star, HR 8799 e, orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, which in our solar system would be located between the orbit of Saturn and Neptune. The furthest, HR 8799 b, orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, more than twice Neptune’s orbital distance. Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to the 4.6 micron light. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI) You can find more information and activities on NASA’s Exoplanets page, such as the Eyes on Exoplanets browser-based program, The Exoplaneteers, and some of the latest exoplanet news. Lastly, you can find more resources in our News & Resources section, including a clever demo on how astronomers use the wobble method to detect planets!
The future of exoplanet discovery is only just beginning, promising rich rewards in humanity’s understanding of our place in the Universe, where we are from, and if there is life elsewhere in our cosmos.
Originally posted by Dave Prosper: July 2015
Last Updated by Kat Troche: April 2025
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By European Space Agency
Registrations are now open for the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium (LPS) – one of the largest Earth observation conferences in the world. The event will take place on 23–27 June 2025 in Vienna, Austria.
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By NASA
Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA Webb’s Autopsy of Planet Swallowed by Star Yields Surprise
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. Full illustration below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb’s observations show the planet’s orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.
“Because this is such a novel event, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,” said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tuscon, Arizona. “With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.”
Two instruments aboard Webb conducted the post-mortem of the scene – Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). The researchers were able to come to their conclusion using a two-pronged investigative approach.
Image A: Planetary Engulfment Illustration
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Constraining the How
The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth.
The brightening event, formally called ZTF SLRN-2020, was originally spotted as a flash of optical light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Data from NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) showed the star actually brightened in the infrared a year before the optical light flash, hinting at the presence of dust. This initial 2023 investigation led researchers to believe that the star was more Sun-like, and had been in the process of aging into a red giant over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
However, Webb’s MIRI told a different story. With powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, Webb was able to precisely measure the hidden emission from the star and its immediate surroundings, which lie in a very crowded region of space. The researchers found the star was not as bright as it should have been if it had evolved into a red giant, indicating there was no swelling to engulf the planet as once thought.
Reconstructing the Scene
Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.
“The planet eventually started to graze the star’s atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment,” said team member Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The planet, as it’s falling in, started to sort of smear around the star.”
In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.
Inspecting the Leftovers
While the researchers did expect an expanding cloud of cooler dust around the star, a look with the powerful NIRSpec revealed a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer in. Furthermore, Webb’s high spectral resolution was able to detect certain molecules in this accretion disk, including carbon monoxide.
“With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we’d find in the immediate surroundings of the star,” said Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, an exoplanet researcher and co-author on the new paper. “I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment.”
The ability to characterize this gas opens more questions for researchers about what actually happened once the planet was fully swallowed by the star.
“This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we’ve observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down,” Lau said. “We hope this is just the start of our sample.”
These observations, taken under Guaranteed Time Observation program 1240, which was specifically designed to investigate a family of mysterious, sudden, infrared brightening events, were among the first Target of Opportunity programs performed by Webb. These types of study are reserved for events, like supernova explosions, that are expected to occur, but researchers don’t exactly know when or where. NASA’s space telescopes are part of a growing, international network that stands ready to witness these fleeting changes, to help us understand how the universe works.
Researchers expect to add to their sample and identify future events like this using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will survey large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.
The team’s findings appear today in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is 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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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Apr 10, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
In about 5 billion years, our Sun will run out of fuel and expand, possibly engulfing Earth. These end stages of a star’s life can be utterly beautiful – as is the case with this planetary nebula called the Helix Nebula. Astronomers study these objects by looking at all kinds of light.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Univ Mexico/S. Estrada-Dorado et al.; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI (M. Meixner)/NRAO (T.A. Rector); Infrared: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Arcand This image of the Helix Nebula, released on March 4, 2025, shows a potentially destructive white dwarf at the nebula’s center: this star may have destroyed a planet. This has never been seen before – and could explain a mysterious X-ray signal that astronomers have detected from the nebula for over 40 years.
This view combines X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (magenta), optical light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (orange, light blue), infrared data from the European Southern Observatory VISTA telescope (gold, dark blue), and ultraviolet data from GALEX (purple) of the Helix Nebula. Data from Chandra indicates that this white dwarf has destroyed a very closely orbiting planet.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Univ Mexico/S. Estrada-Dorado et al.; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI (M. Meixner)/NRAO (T.A. Rector); Infrared: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Arcand
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