NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has recorded plenty of breathtaking images of the cosmos in the last decade or two. But this time, it’s really outdone itself. You’re looking at the sharpest, most detailed image ever of the Triangulum Galaxy—it contains a whopping 665 million pixels. To achieve such splendid detail, the Hubble took 54 individual images and stitched them together. The result, released Monday by NASA and ESA, is a lovely galactic spiral containing 25 million distinct, resolved stars out of the galaxy’s total 40 billion.

Though only 19,000 light-years are shown in this image, the Triangulum Galaxy is about 60,000 light-years across altogether. For reference, the Milky Way spans 100,000 light-years, and the Andromeda stretches to 200,000. Though it’s the smallest of the trio—known collectively as the Local Group—you can still see the Triangulum without a telescope on clear nights. Just under three light-years away, it appears in the northern sky as a somewhat faint blur of light in the Triangulum constellation.

Related: See how NASA’s iconic Earthrise image was shot

The image joins the ranks of other impressive Hubble shots, like this 1.5 billion pixel behemoth of the Andromeda. As noted in ESA’s press release, images like these continue to help astronomers understand the births of stars and galaxies alike.

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It’s not every day that we discover a new species that looks like cthulhu is possessing the face of a fish. Luckily, today is one of those days. In fact, we found six—researchers from the Field Museum of Natural History announced a sextet of newly discovered tentacle-nosed catfish in the journal Zootaxa on Wednesday.

All six have snouts adorned with tentacles, but the intrigue doesn’t stop there. The catfish also have “spines that stick out from their heads, almost like claws, to protect themselves and their nests, and their [bodies are] covered with bony plates like armor,” Lesley de Souza, an ichthyologist (AKA fish scientist) at the Field and lead author of the study, says in a press release. “They’re warriors, they’re fish superheroes.”

The catfish swim in clear, fast-moving streams and rivers in the Amazon and Orinoco River basins in South America. Only the males have tentacles on their noses, a feature that is meant to impress females and signal that they’d be good catfish dads. To females, the researchers say, the males’ tentacles can look like catfish eggs in the water. That gives a lady catfish reason to believe a male might be especially attentive when caring for their future babies.

And indeed, male tentacle-nosed catfish have been observed defending nests from predators and looking after young quite frequently. One of the new species was named Ancistrus patronus, the species name meaning latin for protector, a translation which likely comes as no surprise to any Harry Potter fan.

RELATED: These flying squirrels fluoresce hot pink, and no one knows exactly why

The researchers gave other catfish meaningful names as well. A. saudades, pictured above, features the Portuguese word for melancholy. De Souza chose that one to express her homesickness for the country. A. yutajae is named for ill-fated lovers in an Indigenous Amazonian legend, and A. leoni after a late colleague.

Naming new species, the researchers say, is a crucial part of getting people to care about the animals and their habitats. “Everything begins with naming a species and determining how many species you have,” de Souza says in the release. “Once you have done the taxonomy then you can study the ecology, behavior, and do conservation action.”

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Often compared to a Van Gogh painting, a block of marble, or a cup of coffee with a fresh splash of milk, Jupiter’s clouds are positively dazzling, time after time. This latest color-enhanced shot was captured by the Juno spacecraft in February and processed by Kevin Gill, a NASA software engineer who renders breathtaking images like this one from raw data in his free time.

Juno snapped this image while orbiting just 8,000 miles from Jupiter’s cloud-tops, according to a NASA press release. This was the spacecraft’s 18th close flyby since it dropped into Jovian orbit in mid-2016.

NASA scientists named Juno after the goddess of the same name—in mythology, Juno was one of the oldest and most important Roman deities, and was the wife of Jupiter. As a protector of the nation, and more specifically a protector of married women, she was hotly passionate about loyalty and truth.

RELATED: New Hubble image offers a detailed look at the Triangulum Galaxy

Just like goddess Juno saw right through the B.S. of countless husbands in ancient Rome, spacecraft Juno sees through Jupiter’s clouds using scientific instruments that sense ultraviolet and infrared light, magnetic energy, and more. The mission goal is to better understand Jupiter’s origins and planetary makeup, but the craft’s JunoCam that captures stunning cloud photos like this one doesn’t hurt either.

In 2021, Juno will pull a Cassini and purposefully crash into Jupiter to put an end to its mission. Thankfully, there’ll be no shortage of cloud photos to enjoy until then.

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The best photography reminds us of the supreme beauty of our natural world, the pain we inflict on it, why we must protect our planet, and what it means to be human. The winners and finalists of this year’s Smithsonian Photo Contest do all of that (and more), depicting scenes of playful whales, the humbling aftermath of wildfires, a sneaky Arctic fox stealing a hunk of meat bigger than its own head, and a newborn baby on his father’s lap. You can see the complete collection of the winning photos here. Scroll down to see a sampling of our favorites.

Playing With the Wave

The Impassable

Walrus Beach Masters

The Painful Aftermath

Red-Fronted Lemur

Newest Cowboy in Town

Flying at the Infamous Mara River Crossing

Hungry Fox

Giddyup, Partner

Spring Snow

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This story was originally published on Popular Science.

Last October, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft dropped a toaster-sized lander onto the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu. The Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) tumbled around a bit, but accomplished its objective with flying colors. It cruised the rocky landscape for 17 hours, measuring temperature and magnetism, and taking some flash-photography using LEDs. The robot was battery-powered, so after it had done its duty, the little guy powered down… forever.

But MASCOT didn’t “die” for nothing, as exemplified by a report published last week in Science. New analyses of the lander’s photos show that Ryugu’s surface is composed of two kinds of rock: bright and smooth, and dark and rough. The two types are distributed pretty evenly, too. This backs the theory that Ryugu was born from a cataclysmic event of some sort—for example, an asteroid (perhaps made up of bright, smooth stone) could have smashed into another (potentially dark and rough) object, sending debris flying. Ryugu could have been born when gravity compacted that rubble.

After analyzing color and reflective flashback in the photos, the researchers also note that some rocks may be similar in makeup to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which have crash landed on Earth before and are thought to be 4.5 billion years old. Ryugu’s rocks might also contain olivine, a very common mineral on Earth that often takes on a signature green hue. Olivine has also been found in meteorites as well as on the moon and Mars.

Peculiarly, the researchers couldn’t see any dust on Ryugu’s rocks, which all clocked in at between four inches to one foot across. Small dust particles should be present thanks to frequent bombardment of micrometeorites and weathering, but it was nowhere to be found. “As the asteroid has very low gravity, only one-sixtieth of that experienced on Earth’s surface, the dust has either disappeared into cavities on the asteroid or has escaped into space,” lead author Ralf Jaumann said in a German Aerospace Center press release. The team is still puzzling out the physical mechanism behind this unexpected dust behavior.

This isn’t the last we’ll hear of this near-Earth asteroid. Hayabusa2 will begin its journey back to us in December, carrying along samples it took from Ryugu’s surface. Researchers hope the samples, combined with these images of the asteroid’s surface, will help them finally unlock Ryugu’s origin story.

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By peering into the center of the Milky Way, astronomers have revealed new evidence of how stars in our galaxy were born—and it seems like things went down much more dramatically than we thought.

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert to capture the section of sky pictured above, which has a simply flabbergasting amount of detail. Imaging stars with such precision is the equivalent of spotting a soccer ball in Zurich while standing 150 miles away in Munich, according to an ESO press release.

To get such detail, astronomers used the VLT’s HAWK-I instrument, which detects near-infrared light at varying wavelengths in order to see what lies beyond dense clouds of gas and dust. The resultant image was first published in Astronomy & Astrophysics in October of this year, but a new analysis of the dazzling Milky Way snapshot appeared this week in Nature Astronomy. In that analysis, a team of astronomers from Spain, the U.S., Japan, and Germany agree that the image reveals crucial information on how stars populated the Milky Way’s center billions and billions of years ago.

“Our unprecedented survey of a large part of the Galactic centre has given us detailed insights into the formation process of stars in this region of the Milky Way,” Rainer Schödel from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, said in a press release.

As detailed in their study, the team found that 80% of stars in this region formed when the galaxy was in its infancy, between 8 and 13.5 billion years ago. The following six billion years were quiet on the star-formation front. But then, suddenly, there was an intense bout of star formation once again. “Contrary to what had been accepted up to now, we found that the formation of stars has not been continuous,” Francisco Nogueras-Lara, another study-author, said in the same release.

This kind of behavior strongly resembles that of a starburst galaxy, like Messier 82 (also known as the Cigar Galaxy) or the Baby Boom Galaxy, in which the equivalent of 100 suns are born every year. Stars born in these situations are more massive than your typical star, and thus die more quickly, resulting in a vast number of violent supernova explosions.

Today, our galaxy only creates the equivalent of one or two suns a year. But way back when, the Milky Way might have behaved like a starburst. According to Nogueras-Lara, “this burst of activity, which must have resulted in the explosion of more than a hundred thousand supernovae, was probably one of the most energetic events in the whole history of the Milky Way.”

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In the National Basketball Association, teams really only succeed if they have a “big three”: a trio of powerhouse players that propels their squad to the finals. There was Lebron James, Chris Bosh, and Dwayne Wade on the Miami Heat; Klay Thompson, Steph Curry, and Draymond Green on the Golden State Warriors; and, of course, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman on the Chicago Bulls.

And now, it turns out NASA also has a big three: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Known collectively as the “Great Observatories,” they recently combined data to craft a three-dimensional image of the Crab Nebula just as dazzling as any NBA championship ring.

Researchers used 2D images from the Great Observatories to create this interpretation of the nebula: Chandra supplied the x-rays, Hubble the optical light, and Spitzer the infrared light. By closely studying these varying wavelengths and better understanding how they nest within one another, teams from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, the Caltech/IPAC in California, and the Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts were able to piece things together in three dimensions. You can see the complete result in the accompanying video they created. The image will debut at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“Seeing two-dimensional images of an object, especially of a complex structure like the Crab Nebula, doesn’t give you a good idea of its three-dimensional nature,” Space Telescope Science Institute visualization scientist Frank Summers said in a press release. “With this scientific interpretation, we want to help people understand the Crab Nebula’s nested and interconnected geometry. The interplay of the multiwavelength observations illuminate all of these structures. Without combining X-ray, infrared, and visible light, you don’t get the full picture.”

The stunning new visualization provides a new perspective on a stellar object we’ve been observing for centuries. Back in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers made note of what they thought was a new star, which at the time shone six times brighter than Venus. Native Americans, too, recorded evidence of this in petroglyphs. But they weren’t witnessing the birth of a new star—rather, the death of an old one. It was a supernova so bright that it was visible in the daytime for a month.

The dying star emanated with energy, lighting up surrounding gases to create a nebula: huge interstellar pockets of gas and dust. Though some nebulae form when living stars energize their contents, others, like this one, appear during star deaths, and are known as supernova remnants. When Anglo-Irish astronomer Lord Rosse spotted this one in 1844, he named it the Crab Nebula for its tentacle-like tendrils.

Now, in 2020, we have even more insight. The 3D image reveals that the Crab Nebula—which you can spot in the constellation Taurus—is not a classic supernova remnant where one big blast wave heats gases to millions of degrees. It’s actually a pulsar wind nebula, which burns a little cooler but still packs a punch. Essentially, it consists of a neutron star, which is the hyper-compacted, super dense core of the star that died in 1054. This core blasts out radiation pulses 30 times a second in a very precise manner, which in turn energizes the surrounding gasses and lights them up into what we see as the Crab Nebula.

NASA’s Universe of Learning program, which helped produce the image, hopes that it will help connect the general public to ongoing missions and improve scientific interest and literacy. The program has already made the Crab Nebula video available to museums and planetariums around the world. With any luck, many more people will soon realize just how powerful Big Threes like Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer truly are.

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