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Space telescopes

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JWST and Hubble take stunning image of the 'Christmas tree' cluster

JWST and Hubble take stunning image of the 'Christmas tree' cluster, so-called because of the colourful flickering lights found within

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Galaxy cluster MACS0416, also known as the Christmas tree

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Stunning JWST image of Uranus shows 13 rings and nine moons

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Uranus, showing its rings and nine of the planet's 27 moons

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Astronomers have spotted what may be the smallest stars ever seen

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Possibly the smallest stars ever discovered
Wolf-Rayet stars are known to be efficient dust producers, and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on NASA?s James Webb Space Telescope shows this to great effect. Cooler cosmic dust glows at the longer mid-infrared wavelengths, displaying the structure of WR 124?s nebula. The nebula is made of material cast off from the aging star in random ejections, and from dust produced in the ensuing turbulence. This brilliant stage of mass loss precedes the star?s eventual supernova, when nuclear fusion in its core stops and the pressure of gravity causes it to collapse in on itself, and then explode. As MIRI demonstrates here, Webb will help astronomers to explore questions that were previously only left to theory about how much dust stars like this create before exploding in a supernova, and how much of that dust is large enough to survive the blast and go on to serve as building blocks of future stars and planets.

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Six of the most amazing space pictures from 2023

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Artist's impression of WASP-107b and its parent star

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Fluffy exoplanet blasted by its sun has clouds that rain sand

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location of distant black hole

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Astronomers have found the most distant black hole ever confirmed

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Artistic representation of how the Milky Way-like galaxy ceers-2112 would look from Earth

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Distant Milky Way-like galaxy is older than we thought possible

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The Horsehead Nebula

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Euclid space telescope releases its first stunning full-colour images

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Herbig-Haro 46/47, captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

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JWST should soon glimpse the very first stars born after the big bang

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A fully deployed OTIS, with the secondary mirror extended over the primary mirror, is removed from Chamber A after a successful thermal-vacuum test in 2017. Seen still in the chamber is a sunshield simulator, called the L5 Simulator, representing the fifth and innermost layer of the sunshield. The telescope would be shipped to the Northrop Grumman facility in California to be integrated with the real sunshield. I was suspended on a lift for this shot. Page 119

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A glimpse inside how the James Webb Space Telescope was put together

Three decades in the making, JWST is one of the most ambitious space projects ever embarked on. These photographs, from a new book, Inside the Star Factory, show how it was developed

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image of the galaxy cluster El Gordo

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Distant galaxies are gobbling up an unexpected amount of gas

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Artist's concept of Makemake

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Eris and Makemake might be hiding unexpected oceans of liquid water

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Herbig-Haro 211

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JWST has taken an astonishing image of a baby star with powerful jets

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The earliest black holes seen by JWST appear to be unusually massive

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