Articles by William Harwood

NASA unveiled more spectacular “first light” pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope Tuesday, showcasing interacting galaxies, the death throes of a doomed star and a stellar nursery where massive young suns are being born, blazing with gale-force solar winds that sculpt vast clouds of gas and dust.

After six months of tests and checkout, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to open a new window on the universe, capturing the faint light of the first stars and galaxies, probing the mysteries of black holes and studying the atmospheres of alien worlds.

A high-speed dust-size micrometeoroid slammed into one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments last month, causing a slight but noticeable effect on the segment’s performance, NASA said Wednesday. It was the fifth such impact detected since Webb’s Christmas Day launch.

Three years after capturing the first image of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 55 million light years away, astronomers have managed to “photograph” the gaping maw of the smaller but much closer black hole quietly lurking at the core of the Milky Way, researchers announced Thursday.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying four non-professional astronauts, the first fully commercial, non-government crew to visit the International Space Station, undocked from the outpost Sunday, heading for re-entry and splashdown Monday to close out an extended 17-day mission.