High above Earth, thin veils of metallic haze drift through the edge of space. Known as sporadic E layers, these high-altitude “clouds” form from the vaporized dust of burnt-up meteors, earning their name from the unpredictable way they emerge and then dissipate. Now, new results from a NASA sounding rocket — a suborbital research rocket — that flew five detectors through one of these layers simultaneously reveal unexpected complexity in the layer for the first time.

Though invisible to the eye, sporadic E layers make their presence known to the radio signals we rely on for long-distance communication. When present, sporadic E can send those signals ping-ponging off in unexpected directions, rendering the technology temporarily unreliable.

Scientists have long sought a fuller understanding of these radio-disrupting clouds, but until recently, they had only sampled them one narrow slice at a time. The rocket, called the sporadic E Electrodynamics Demonstration, or SpEED Demon for short, launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Aug. 24, 2022, and demonstrated the first concurrent, multi-point view inside sporadic E.  Its results, from a team led by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, are described in a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Sporadic E layers form in the ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere beginning around 40 miles (60 kilometers) up where the neutral gases begin to transform into plasma, or ionized gas. Some of the particles there come from meteors, which burn up and leave behind traces of iron, magnesium, and other metals. These metals occasionally clump into dense, cloud-like sheets — the sporadic E layers — that reflect radio waves.

“Sporadic E layers are, in one sense, giant mirrors of radio frequency waves in the sky,” said Aroh Barjatya, the mission’s principal investigator and a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, Florida.

When a sporadic E layer forms, signals meant to travel out to space can ricochet back toward the ground. Air traffic controllers and marine radio users may pick up distant transmissions as though they were nearby, and radars scanning beyond the horizon can register so-called “ghosts,” or false targets. The effects reach everyday technology, too.

“The biggest source of error in the GPS in your phone, for example, is from the plasma in the ionosphere, and sporadic E layers can contribute to this uncertainty,” said Henry Valentine, the study’s lead author, who conducted the work at Embry-Riddle and is now a researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Because sporadic E layers hover around 60 miles (100 kilometers) up—too high for weather balloons, too low for satellites — and form and dissipate unpredictably, they have long been the province of sounding rockets, which can be launched on short notice to catch one in the act. But a single rocket flies a single path, taking measurements only along a line. Barjatya likens the situation to viewing a scene through a crack in a wall. One can only observe what is happening along that narrow slit, missing out on the crucial context of whatever is occurring to the left or right of one’s view.

The SpEED Demon mission changed that. The mission was the first to deploy ejectable probes, called dropsondes, inside a sporadic E layer. Once inside, the rocket released four dropsondes that flew away from the main payload and from one another, each measuring the plasma along its own track and beaming its measurements back to ground stations. Together with the main payload, the probes sampled the layer in a total of five places at the same moment.

“Now with multiple sensors, we’ve turned that crack into a picket fence,” Barjatya said.

The data revealed surprising complexity inside the sporadic E layer. Rather than a smooth, dense pancake of metallic particles, the layer that SpEED Demon flew through appeared uneven and structured, shaped by turbulent winds moving through the neutral air around it.

“A lot of times you think of sporadic E as this single sharp density layer, but what we saw in ours is it’s interacting with neutral wind and these swirling atmospheric turbulences,” Valentine said. “Rather than a flat pancake, it’s closer to a cinnamon roll.”

On the way down, the layer even split into two distinct peaks. The team found that shape was consistent with modulation by Kelvin-Helmholtz billows, the curling, wave-like instability that produces breaking-wave patterns in ordinary clouds. Because the flight was unable to measure the local winds and electric fields directly, the researchers are careful to call the billow explanation plausible rather than confirmed.

The SpEED Demon mission was designed as a technology demonstration — a test of whether the dropsonde technique would work at all. It did, and the team was quick to apply it again. Barjatya’s team used a similar multi-probe strategy to launch rockets into the paths of the October 2023 annular eclipse and April 2024 total solar eclipse, studying how the sudden darkness disturbed the upper atmosphere. In June 2025, they flew SpEED Demon’s most direct descendant, Sporadic-E ElectroDynamics, or SEED, into sporadic E layers from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, studying them at lower latitudes. Papers from those missions are in preparation.

After years of study, sporadic E layers are no longer as unpredictable as they once were. “They have a seasonality to them, with peak occurrence happening in the local summer,” Barjatya said.

Questions about how and when they form are increasingly fine-grained. The new deployable multi-point rocket sensor methodology, along with ground-based measurements, is likely to bring the picture even closer to completion. “The science community as a whole is now in its final stretches of fully understanding these giant radio frequency mirrors in the sky,” Barjatya said.

By Miles Hatfield 
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 

Source: science.nasa.gov

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured this Aug. 6, 2026, infrared image of part of the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region also home to the Cosmic Cliffs. This feature, called the “Treasure Chest,” is an object known as a cometary globule. A cometary globule is an isolated cloud of gas and dust with a dense, dark head and a sweeping tail.

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Reiter; Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

Source: www.nasa.gov

Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope combine to reveal a vibrant view of 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, in this Aug. 11, 2026, image. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a vibrant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.

By studying the data from Chandra, Hubble, and Webb, combined with data from the agency’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers determined that the Tarantula may be losing energy from several sources, including hot gas escaping from the nebula.

Learn more about this image.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio State Univ./J. Rodriguez et al; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds

Source: www.nasa.gov

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew to its current size in part by consuming smaller galaxies. Now, new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way galaxy in the earliest phases of its evolution. This finding extends our knowledge of our galaxy’s history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than before.

The results published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The Milky Way today is a massive spiral galaxy home to hundreds of billions of stars. However, our galaxy wasn’t always so large; it has grown by forming new stars from its gas clouds as well as collecting stars, gas, and dark matter from other galaxies through mergers.

The most recent massive merger in our galaxy’s history took place with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, beginning over 6 billion years ago and still ongoing today. Looking back into the even more distant past, researchers learned that the Milky Way galaxy consumed another dwarf galaxy called Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus 10 billion years ago. This ancient merger greatly affected the structure of our galaxy’s disk of stars. Other, smaller mergers occurred between these two.

But our galaxy’s history doesn’t stop there. Both observations and simulations have suggested that another large merger preceded these two, though the specifics of the event have been heavily debated. Now, Hubble has uncovered definitive evidence of an earlier merger that occurred about 11.8 billion years ago, or just 2 billion years after the big bang.

“Our home is the Milky Way galaxy, but we do not know how our house was built,” said Davide Massari, lead author, Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna in Italy. “In this paper we discover where the first significant batch of bricks came from: a dwarf galaxy that we call LKH.”

Cosmic archaeological sites

Immense astronomical surveys and precision data from spacecraft like ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission have been instrumental in piecing together the history of our galaxy. The farther back into our galaxy’s history that scientists attempt to look, the more difficult it becomes to tell what happened. When our galaxy was young, it was smaller and much closer in size to the galaxies it clashed with. It was also more chaotic, and it’s possible that the signs of mergers have been erased over billions of years.

It’s into this murky past that Hubble peered. Researchers used Hubble to study some of the Milky Way galaxy’s globular clusters: immense, roughly spherical collections of tens of thousands to a few million stars. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, and they can act as cosmic archaeological sites that preserve stars from other galaxies the Milky Way galaxy has collected.

“Thanks to the high resolution and depth of Hubble imaging, we could measure the age and the metal content of these clusters with unprecedented precision,” said Chiara Zerbinati, study co-author, University of Bologna in Italy. “Coupled with measurements from Gaia, this made it possible to distinguish a population of globular clusters that are different from the others. These are the clusters that were born in LKH, and they tell us when that galaxy was devoured by ours, and how massive it was.”

The team analyzed Hubble observations of 39 globular clusters in the inner 20,000 light-years of our galaxy, where evidence of the most ancient mergers should be preserved. They expected this sample to contain globular clusters that formed within the young Milky Way galaxy as well as those collected from the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus dwarf galaxy about 10 billion years ago.

Using Hubble’s sensitive observations to determine each cluster’s precise age and associated metallicity — the abundance of elements heavier than helium — they determined there was a third population of globular clusters in the inner regions of our galaxy. The team found that these clusters are older than the group collected in the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, but younger than those born in the Milky Way, regardless of their metal content. These  clusters, therefore, came from a separate and even earlier merger — in which the Milky Way galaxy absorbed a dwarf galaxy containing roughly 500 million times the mass of the Sun in stars, a significant fraction of our galaxy’s mass at the time. They named this dwarf galaxy Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, or LKH, in honor of three earlier research papers that championed the idea of a merger early in our galaxy’s history.

Such a large merger so early in the Milky Way galaxy’s formation has profound implications for the evolution of our galaxy.

“Some past studies have argued that the earliest phases of our galaxy’s evolution were defined by stars born only in our galaxy,” says Massari. “Here, we have shown that stars born in external galaxies also need to be considered.”

The team plans to continue their work to unravel the history of the Milky Way galaxy by studying its globular clusters, aiming to characterize all the massive mergers that our galaxy has experienced across cosmic history.

“Hubble is observing globular clusters that have never been studied before, and this will help us characterize the merger events that are far back in time in the Milky Way galaxy’s history,” said Fernando Aguado-Agelet, co-author, University of Vigo and the University of La Laguna in Spain.

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 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.

Source: science.nasa.gov

Observing across the starry “plains” of space, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken new images of NGC 2392, nicknamed the Lion Nebula. The nebula’s “mane” is clear and detailed in this image released on Aug. 10, 2026, due to Webb’s high-resolution imaging.

See more images of the Lion Nebula from Webb.

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Source: www.nasa.gov

Like a collage made of layered sheets of colored cellophane, a vibrant new image layers observations of a famous star-forming nebula from NASA space telescopes. The resulting cosmic “craft” reveals new details about the star formation region known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula.

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula has thousands of young stars embedded in a vibrant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.

The new composite image contains X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has repeatedly observed the Tarantula Nebula over the course of its mission, in the layer that appears in blue. The X-ray data reveals gas blown away by winds from the surfaces of young, massive stars and heated to millions of degrees by shock waves, like sonic booms from supersonic jets.

The red represents infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing thousands of young stars, plus swaths of cool dust that will provide the ingredients to form new stars and planets. Optical data in the green layer from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovers hydrogen gas that is warmer than seen with Webb, as well as some individual stars through the nebula.

The composite image shows the full Hubble and Webb images of this region, as well as a large section of the Chandra image, all recently published in a research paper in the Astrophysical Journal. In some regions the blue Chandra layer stands alone, and in others it combines with either the red Webb data or the green Hubble data. In the middle region all three images overlap to provide a holistic view in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

Previously, astronomers had studied the amount and the impact of energy produced by winds from young, massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula. Scientists expect that much of this energy should heat gas so that it produces X-rays. However, the research paper shows that there is much less X-ray-emitting gas in the nebula than expected. This led researchers to ask: Where has this energy gone and what tamed the Tarantula Nebula?

By studying the data from Chandra, Hubble, and Webb, combined with data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the team concluded the Tarantula may be losing energy from several sources.

First, up to half of the hot gas is leaking through the shell walls of the gas and dust structures and escaping the nebula. Next, there is stirring and mixing between the cold gas near the shell walls and some of the hot gas, lowering the overall temperature of the gas. Finally, comparisons with computer simulations suggest the Tarantula may be losing energy through conduction. This involves direct physical contact between hot and cooler material, like with a frying pan on a burner, causing the hot and cooler material to equalize in temperature. In the case of the Tarantula Nebula, the hot gas would be conducting heat by being in direct contact with the cooler gas in the shells, especially in the densest regions. This scenario does not necessarily involve mixing the hot and cooler gas.

The combination of these three channels for losing large amounts of energy leads to this colorful and complex display revealed by NASA’s telescopes working together.

The paper describing these results was led by Jennifer Rodriguez of The Ohio State University in Columbus. Additional authors on the paper include Laura Lopez, Ohio State; Lachlan Lancaster, Columbia University in New York City; Anna Rosen, San Diego State University; Omnaraynai Nayak, Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; Sebastian Lopez, Ohio State; Tyler Holland-Ashford, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Trinity Webb, Ohio State.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

To learn more about Chandra, visit:

https://nasa.gov/chandra

Source: science.nasa.gov

Observing across the starry “plains” of space, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken new images of NGC 2392, nicknamed the Lion Nebula. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope previously viewed this planetary nebula in 2000, imaging the lion face-shaped target in visible light and revealing features such as the “mane” of hazy, comet-shaped objects. Now Webb has captured a clearer, more detailed view of the Lion Nebula due to its high-resolution imaging.

Lion Nebula (NIRCam and MIRI Image)

At first glance the nebula’s overall structure in Webb’s infrared images, with both the NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) instruments, may look quite similar to Hubble’s earlier visible-light view. However, Webb’s infrared vision highlights features like compact clumps of dust and a haze of ionized gas. It’s taken several thousand years for this collection of gas and dust to reach its current shape, and the nebula’s components continue to be altered.

The source of these constant changes and the reason for the Lion Nebula’s distinct appearance is located at the center: the remains of a dying star. Though it looks like the button nose of the lion, its energy and radiation are powering the intricate structures seen here.

Lion Nebula (MIRI Image)

Massive stars undergo supernova explosions at the end of their lives, but these kinds of events are few and far in between. Most of the universe’s stars have lower masses, like the one belonging to NGC 2392. When a lower-mass star can no longer sustain itself with nuclear reactions in its core, the star becomes unstable and pulsates, losing its mass by shedding its outer layers, which then turn into shells of gas and dust called a planetary nebula. (Stars at this life stage are responsible for producing much of the universe’s observable dust.) The star’s radiation drives the ejected material away, leaving behind the very hot stellar core, also known as a white dwarf.

In the Lion Nebula’s case, the death of the oxygen-rich central star has left behind a white dwarf that is “cooking” everything from the inside and producing a bubble of ionized gas as it does. The gas bubble, which forms the lion’s face, is expanding over time and destroying dust that is in its path. Understanding why the swept-up gas has a complex structure of rings and shells, a common feature in planetary nebulae, is an ongoing endeavor.

The mane of the lion is the interior of a dust shell that is being illuminated by the white dwarf at the center. The tufts of hair, which look like cometary tails of material, are compact clumps of dust that have survived the stellar core’s radiation and protect the material that lies behind them.

Webb’s imagery “freezes” this planetary nebula in time, though the star’s death, and its tumultuous effects, go on. NGC 2392 will continue to undergo changes as its gas and dust migrate away from the stellar core. Astronomers estimate the lion will eventually disperse in approximately 10,000 years — a relatively short period in astronomical terms.

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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Source: science.nasa.gov

Scientists using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) conducted more than 140 hours of observations of the magnetar 1E 1547-5408, shown in this Aug. 5, 2026, artist’s concept, between March and April 2025. In doing so, they may have captured empty space behaving in a way physicists have predicted for 90 years, but never directly observed.

Magnetars are a special class of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields, the strongest of any object in the observable universe, around a trillion times stronger than the strongest permanent magnets ever built on Earth.

Image credit: NASA/Pablo Garcia

Source: www.nasa.gov

For service members who carry out the bravest and most selfless acts in combat, the military bestows its most esteemed valor awards: the Medal of Honor, the Service Crosses and the Silver Star.

Source: www.war.gov

From defending America’s borders and fighting drug trafficking to changes in culture and business operations to better build the nation’s arsenal of freedom, President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth are ushering in a new era characterized by peace through strength.

Source: www.war.gov