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By NASA
ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, P. Massey, E. Sabbi, C. Murray, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble) This new image, released on April 4, 2025, showcases the dazzling young star cluster NGC 346. Although both the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have released images of NGC 346 previously, this image includes new data and is the first to combine Hubble observations made at infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths into an intricately detailed view of this vibrant star-forming factory.
Hubble’s exquisite sensitivity and resolution were instrumental in uncovering the secrets of NGC 346’s star formation. Using two sets of observations taken 11 years apart, researchers traced the motions of NGC 346’s stars, revealing them to be spiraling in toward the center of the cluster. This spiraling motion arises from a stream of gas from outside of the cluster that fuels star formation in the center of the turbulent cloud.
Learn more about NGC 346 and the nebula it has shaped.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, P. Massey, E. Sabbi, C. Murray, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
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By NASA
Explore This Section Exoplanets Home Exoplanets Overview Exoplanets Facts Types of Exoplanets Stars What is the Universe Search for Life The Big Questions Are We Alone? Can We Find Life? The Habitable Zone Why We Search Target Star Catalog Discoveries Discoveries Dashboard How We Find and Characterize Missions People Exoplanet Catalog Immersive The Exoplaneteers Exoplanet Travel Bureau 5 Ways to Find a Planet Strange New Worlds Universe of Monsters Galaxy of Horrors News Stories Blog Resources Get Involved Glossary Eyes on Exoplanets Exoplanet Watch More Multimedia ExEP This artist’s concept pictures the planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, as seen from close to the surface of one of them. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld The Discovery
Four rocky planets much smaller than Earth orbit Barnard’s Star, the next closest to ours after the three-star Alpha Centauri system. Barnard’s is the nearest single star.
Key Facts
Barnard’s Star, six light-years away, is notorious among astronomers for a history of false planet detections. But with the help of high-precision technology, the latest discovery — a family of four — appears to be solidly confirmed. The tiny size of the planets is also remarkable: Capturing evidence of small worlds at great distance is a tall order, even using state-of-the-art instruments and observational techniques.
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Watching for wobbles in the light from a star is one of the leading methods for detecting exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. This “radial velocity” technique tracks subtle shifts in the spectrum of starlight caused by the gravity of a planet pulling its star back and forth as the planet orbits. But tiny planets pose a major challenge: the smaller the planet, the smaller the pull. These four are each between about a fifth and a third as massive as Earth. Stars also are known to jitter and quake, creating background “noise” that potentially could swamp the comparatively quiet signals from smaller, orbiting worlds.
Astronomers measure the back-and-forth shifting of starlight in meters per second; in this case the radial velocity signals from all four planets amount to faint whispers — from 0.2 to 0.5 meters per second (a person walks at about 1 meter per second). But the noise from stellar activity is nearly 10 times larger at roughly 2 meters per second.
How to separate planet signals from stellar noise? The astronomers made detailed mathematical models of Barnard’s Star’s quakes and jitters, allowing them to recognize and remove those signals from the data collected from the star.
The new paper confirming the four tiny worlds — labeled b, c, d, and e — relies on data from MAROON-X, an “extreme precision” radial velocity instrument attached to the Gemini Telescope on the Maunakea mountaintop in Hawaii. It confirms the detection of the “b” planet, made with previous data from ESPRESSO, a radial velocity instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. And the new work reveals three new sibling planets in the same system.
Fun Facts
These planets orbit their red-dwarf star much too closely to be habitable. The closest planet’s “year” lasts a little more than two days; for the farthest planet, it’s is just shy of seven days. That likely makes them too hot to support life. Yet their detection bodes well in the search for life beyond Earth. Scientists say small, rocky planets like ours are probably the best places to look for evidence of life as we know it. But so far they’ve been the most difficult to detect and characterize. High-precision radial velocity measurements, combined with more sharply focused techniques for extracting data, could open new windows into habitable, potentially life-bearing worlds.
Barnard’s star was discovered in 1916 by Edward Emerson Barnard, a pioneering astrophotographer.
The Discoverers
An international team of scientists led by Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago published their paper on the discovery, “Four Sub-Earth Planets Orbiting Barnard’s Star from MAROON-X and ESPRESSO,” in the science journal, “The Astrophysical Journal Letters,” in March 2025. The planets were entered into the NASA Exoplanet Archive on March 13, 2025.
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By NASA
This video sparkles with synthetic supernovae from the OpenUniverse project, which simulates observations from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. More than a million exploding stars flare into visibility and then slowly fade away. The true brightness of each transient event has been magnified by a factor of 10,000 for visibility, and no background light has been added to the simulated images. The pattern of squares shows Roman’s full field of view.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Troxel The universe is ballooning outward at an ever-faster clip under the power of an unknown force dubbed dark energy. One of the major goals for NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is to help astronomers gather clues to the mystery. One team is setting the stage now to help astronomers prepare for this exciting science.
“Roman will scan the cosmos a thousand times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can while offering Hubble-like image quality,” said Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore county working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-principal investigator of the Supernova Cosmology Project Infrastructure Team preparing for the mission’s High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. “We’re going to have an overwhelming amount of data, and we want to make it so scientists can use it from day one.”
Roman will repeatedly look at wide, deep regions of the sky in near-infrared light, opening up a whole new view of the universe and revealing all sorts of things going bump in the night. That includes stars being shredded as they pass too close to a black hole, intense emissions from galaxy centers, and a variety of stellar explosions called supernovae.
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This data sonification transforms a vast simulation of a cosmic survey from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into a symphony of stellar explosions. Each supernova’s brightness controls its volume, while its color sets its pitch –– redder, more distant supernovae correspond to deep, low tones while bluer, nearer ones correspond to higher frequencies. The sound in stereo mirrors their locations in the sky. The result sounds like celestial wind chimes, offering a way to “listen” to cosmic fireworks. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, M. Troxel, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida) Cosmic Radar Guns
Scientists estimate around half a dozen stars explode somewhere in the observable universe every minute. On average, one of them will be a special variety called type Ia that can help astronomers measure the universe.
These explosions peak at a similar intrinsic brightness, allowing scientists to find their distances simply by measuring how bright they appear.
Scientists can also study the light of these supernovae to find out how quickly they are moving away from us. By comparing how fast they’re receding at different distances, scientists will trace cosmic expansion over time.
Using dozens of type Ia supernovae, scientists discovered that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. Roman will find tens of thousands, including very distant ones, offering more clues about the nature of dark energy and how it may have changed throughout the history of the universe.
“Roman’s near-infrared view will help us peer farther because more distant light is stretched, or reddened, as it travels across expanding space,” said Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a co-principal investigator of the infrastructure team. “And opening a bigger window, so to speak, will help us get a better understanding of these objects as a whole,” which would allow scientists to learn more about dark energy. That could include discovering new physics, or figuring out the universe’s fate.
The People’s Telescope
Members of the planning team have been part of the community process to seek input from scientists worldwide on how the survey should be designed and how the analysis pipeline should work. Gathering public input in this way is unusual for a space telescope, but it’s essential for Roman because each large, deep observation will enable a wealth of science in addition to fulfilling the survey’s main goal of probing dark energy.
Rather than requiring that many individual scientists submit proposals to reserve their own slice of space telescope time, Roman’s major surveys will be coordinated openly, and all the data will become public right away.
“Instead of a single team pursuing one science goal, everyone will be able to comb through Roman’s data for a wide variety of purposes,” Rose said. “Everyone will get to play right away.”
This animation shows a possible tiling pattern of part of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s High Latitude Time-Domain Survey. The observing program, which is being designed by a community process, is expected to have two components: wide (covering 18 square degrees, a region of sky as large as about 90 full moons) and deep (covering about 5.5 square degrees, about as large as 25 full moons). This animation shows the deeper portion, which would peer back to when the universe was about 500 million years old, less than 4 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center This Is a Drill
NASA plans to announce the survey design for Roman’s three core surveys, including the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, this spring. Then the planning team will simulate it in its entirety.
“It’s kind of like a recipe,” Hounsell said. “You put in your observing strategy — how many days, which filters — and add in ‘spices’ like uncertainties, calibration effects, and the things we don’t know so well about the instrument or supernovae themselves that would affect our results. We can inject supernovae into the synthetic images and develop the tools we’ll need to analyze and evaluate the data.”
Scientists will continue using the synthetic data even after Roman begins observing, tweaking all aspects of the simulation and correcting unknowns to see which resulting images best match real observations. Scientists can then fine-tune our understanding of the universe’s underlying physics.
“We assume that all supernovae are the same regardless of when they occurred in the history of the universe, but that might not be the case,” Hounsell said. “We’re going to look further back in time than we’ve ever done with type Ia supernovae, and we’re not completely sure if the physics we understand now will hold up.”
There are reasons to suspect they may not. The very first stars were made almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, compared to stars today which contain several dozen elements. Those ancient stars also lived in very different environments than stars today. Galaxies were growing and merging, and stars were forming at a furious pace before things began calming down between about 8 and 10 billion years ago.
“Roman will very dramatically add to our understanding of this cosmic era,” Rose said. “We’ll learn more about cosmic evolution and dark energy, and thanks to Roman’s large deep view, we’ll get to do much more science too with the same data. Our work will help everyone hit the ground running after Roman launches.”
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope visit www.nasa.gov/roman.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
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Last Updated Mar 11, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding contributions of (pictured left to right) Jessica Kong, Josh Alwood, and Sam Kim. Their commitment to the NASA mission represents the entrepreneurial spirit, technical expertise, and collaborative disposition needed to explore this world and beyond.
Space Science and Astrobiology Star: Jessica Kong
Jessica Kong is serving as the Facility Service Manager (FSM) for the Astrobiology and Life Science Lab building for the Exobiology Branch while the FSM is away on parental leave. She has applied her expertise as a chemist to connect seamlessly and effectively with N239 staff, and safety, and facility personnel, as well as to coordinate repairs and building shutdowns while minimizing disruption to laboratory research.
Space Biosciences Star: Josh Alwood
Josh Alwood is a researcher for the Space Biosciences Research Branch, focusing on bone biology and biomechanics, reproductive biology, and the nervous system. His pioneering research on molecular mechanisms of skeletal adaptation during spaceflight has advanced the development of countermeasures to protect astronaut health on long-duration missions.
Earth Science Star: Sam Kim
Sam Kim, a systems administrator and deputy project manager with the Earth Science Project Office (ESPO), serves many roles and excels in each one of them. During the 2024 ASIA-AQ field mission, Sam deployed for over two months as a key member of the advanced staging team at each of the mission’s four overseas field sites, ensuring that the facilities were ready for the arrival of the ASIA-AQ science and instrument team, while still performing his mission-critical role as systems administrator.
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Examines Stars Ensconced in a Cocoon of Gas
NGC 460 is an open cluster of stars within a greater collection of nebulae and star clusters known as the N83-84-85 complex. NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (The Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
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An open cluster of stars shines through misty, cocoon-like gas clouds in this Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 460.
NGC 460 is located in a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This particular region contains a number of young star clusters and nebulae of different sizes ― all likely related to each other. The clouds of gas and dust can give rise to stars as portions of them collapse, and radiation and stellar winds from those hot, young bright stars in turn shape and compress the clouds, triggering new waves of star formation. The hydrogen clouds are ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, causing them to glow.
The NGC 460 star cluster resides in one of the youngest parts of this interconnected complex of stellar clusters and nebulae, which is also home to a number of O-type stars: the brightest, hottest and most massive of the normal, hydrogen-burning stars (called main-sequence stars) like our Sun. O-type stars are rare ― out of more than 4 billion stars in the Milky Way, only about 20,000 are estimated to be O-type stars. The area that holds NGC 460, known as N83, may have been created when two hydrogen clouds in the region collided with one another, creating several O-type stars and nebulae.
Open clusters like NGC 460 are made of anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand stars loosely knitted together by gravity. Open clusters generally contain young stars, which may migrate outward into their galaxies as time progresses. NGC 460’s stars may someday disperse into the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors at about 200,000 light-years away. Because it is both close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies.
Six overlapping observations from a study of the gas and dust between stars, called the interstellar medium, were combined to create this Hubble image. The study aims to understand how gravitational forces between interacting galaxies can foster bursts of star formation. This highly detailed 65 megapixel mosaic includes both visible and infrared wavelengths. Download the 400 MB file and zoom in to see some of the intricacies captured by Hubble.
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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
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