New Hubble view of the Lagoon Nebula

Twenty-five years ago this month, spacewalking astronauts installed corrective optics aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, correcting its famously blurred vision. Galaxy M100 was used to demonstrate the success of the repair, and the imagery has steadily improved since then.

A glancing collision between two galaxies in the distant past triggered a firestorm of starbirth in the smaller of the two, leaving one side relatively intact while the other was set ablaze by gravitational stresses.

Astrophysicists have taken a major step forward in understanding how supermassive black holes formed. Using data from three of NASA’s space telescopes, Italian researchers have found the best evidence to date that the direct collapse of a gas cloud produced supermassive black holes in the early universe.