Space & Aviation
Explore Space & Aviation across the Smithsonian through stories, events, and exhibitions. Use the filters to browse by format, then bookmark events and exhibitions to keep track of what you want to visit or attend.
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Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula Nebula has thousands of young stars embedded in a radiant honeycomb-like structure of gas and dust.
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The galaxy’s light took about 12.5 billion years to reach the James Webb Space Telescope, meaning the instrument saw the black holes a little more than one billion years after the Big Bang.
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Since the James Webb Space Telescope started collecting data in 2022, it has found puzzling objects dubbed little red dots. A new study suggests they might be giant black holes with some characteristics of stars.
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Scientists swapped three of the probe’s heating devices for ones that use less energy, and they might do the same with Voyager 1. Both spacecraft launched almost 50 years ago.
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Observed directly in the solar photosphere for the first time, the vortices might braid magnetic fields, thought to be responsible for energy buildups and eventual outbursts.
This cosmic space-“craft” reveals the star formation region known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula.
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Make a pretend telescope out of a paper towel roll to help you focus on the night sky.
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.