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This latest Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features Messier 77 (M77), a barred spiral galaxy famous and appreciated among astronomers for its combination of relative proximity and spectacular features to study. It is located 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (The Whale).ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

The heart of galaxy M77 shines brightly in this May 7, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The intense glow is due to gas being pulled by the strong gravity of the central black hole into a tight and rapid orbit around it. The motion of the gas causes it to heat up, releasing tremendous amounts of radiation.

The bright lines radiating out of the center are diffraction spikes. The spikes are not a physical feature of the galaxy, but an optical effect caused by the telescope itself.

Read more about M77.

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

This latest Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features Messier 77 (M77), a barred spiral galaxy famous and appreciated among astronomers for its combination of relative proximity and spectacular features to study. It is located 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (The Whale).ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

The heart of galaxy M77 shines brightly in this May 7, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The intense glow is due to gas being pulled by the strong gravity of the central black hole into a tight and rapid orbit around it. The motion of the gas causes it to heat up, releasing tremendous amounts of radiation.

The bright lines radiating out of the center are diffraction spikes. The spikes are not a physical feature of the galaxy, but an optical effect caused by the telescope itself.

Read more about M77.

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

The asteroid will swing by Earth on Monday and be close enough to be visible using an amateur telescope

Run Hawking's machinery and out pops something startling: the most likely universe looks an awful lot like ours, complete with inflation, a low-entropy beginning, and an arrow of time. All of cosmology, falling out for free. Almost.

We may be getting better images of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in the future. Astronomers used 10 years of observations of a distant blazar to detect turbulence in the Milky Way's interstellar medium. This turbulence makes images of Sagittarius A-star blurry.

Why have so many people become fixated on protein? Donald Layman is one of the people behind the research showing the benefits of getting more protein in your diet, but he thinks things have gone too far and wants to set the record straight

Why have so many people become fixated on protein? Donald Layman is one of the people behind the research showing the benefits of getting more protein in your diet, but he thinks things have gone too far and wants to set the record straight

Eight of the top 10 officials at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have now been pushed out since President Donald Trump took office

The Traveling Salesman is a classic problem in mathematics that requires a solution to the most efficient path to take to visit a given number of cities in the least amount of time. But scale this relatively simple concept up to space travel and the calculation becomes much more complex. Instead of visiting a stationary spot on Earth, when calculating the most efficient path to visit asteroids you must account for the fact they are traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour, and their exact position will change based on when a spacecraft leaves. This is known as the Asteroid Routing Problem, and a new paper from a group of Canadian and European researchers lays out a framework that can find the exact solution to any particular combination of asteroids to be visited.

A little-known strain of Ebola virus is behind an ongoing health emergency, prompting researchers to call for the acceleration of vaccine candidates against such infections

A little-known strain of Ebola virus is behind an ongoing health emergency, prompting researchers to call for the acceleration of vaccine candidates against such infections

Sharla Boehm, a math teacher, spent her summers coding. She’d go on to build what would eventually evolve into the Internet

Astronomers have identified the likely source of gas that flows into the maw of the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*.

The post What's Feeding Our Supermassive Black Hole? appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

We think of our body clock ticking over on a 24-hour cycle, but evidence is growing that it has seasonal rhythms, which could affect our response to vaccines

We think of our body clock ticking over on a 24-hour cycle, but evidence is growing that it has seasonal rhythms, which could affect our response to vaccines

A growing body of research suggests cannabis poses risks to the developing brain

The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise

The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise

What you should know about hantavirus, why PCOS is getting a new name, and how some fish hide in an unusual spot

Inside some very special black holes, there may be a boundary called a Cauchy horizon. Columnist Leah Crane explores the place beyond which physics breaks and anything is possible