The Universe is full of dust, and a striking new image from the Hubble Space Telescope highlights just how important it is.

In the process, it has exposed cosmic birthplaces. Stars take shape in clouds of gas and dust, and planets emerge in disks of debris around new stars. Early galaxies are also swathed in dust.

Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, this cosmic cloud was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Located around 5300 ...

Fluffy strands of cosmic gas and dust illuminated by bright young stars form a beautiful cloudscape in a neighboring nebula.

Here are five key facts about this groundbreaking mission. One of SPHEREx’s main goals is to study cosmic inflation ... exist in the cold interstellar clouds where new stars and planets are ...