Space is big. Really big. You’ve heard that before, but seeing it is something else entirely. Even after three decades in the vacuum of low Earth orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope is still dropping photos that make you stop scrolling.
While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) gets all the hype for its infrared "heat vision," Hubble is the master of the visible light we actually see. And honestly? The latest Hubble telescope pictures released this week prove that the old guard isn't ready to retire. We’re talking about "failed galaxies," interstellar ghosts, and baby stars basically throwing cosmic tantrums.
The Ghostly Glow of Lupus 3
Just a few days ago, on January 16, 2026, NASA released a hauntingly beautiful shot of a region called Lupus 3. It’s about 500 light-years away in the Scorpius constellation.
Imagine a thick, dark soot cloud sitting in the middle of a glowing purple-and-blue neon sign. That’s basically what this is. It’s a star-forming nursery where the gas is so dense it blocks out the light from stars behind it. But the real stars of the show (pun intended) are the T Tauri stars.
These are "toddler" stars. They aren't quite stable yet. They flicker and flare because they’re still gravity-crunching themselves into existence. Hubble caught them at just the right moment, showing how their radiation is literally carving out the cloud around them. It’s messy. It’s violent. It’s gorgeous.
Why Everyone is Talking About Cloud-9
The biggest news of 2026 so far isn't a bright explosion, but something that is almost invisible. Astronomers are calling it Cloud-9.
On January 5, the ESA/Hubble team announced they’d found a "RELHIC"—a Reionization-Limited H I Cloud. If that sounds like jargon, think of it as a failed galaxy.
What is a RELHIC?
Most clouds of gas eventually collapse to form stars. Cloud-9 didn't. It’s a starless, gas-rich blob held together by dark matter. It’s a "relic" from the very early universe, a fossil that just... stayed a cloud.
- Mass: About 5 billion solar masses.
- Size: The core is roughly 4,900 light-years across.
- Location: Chilling near the galaxy M94.
Finding this was like finding a dinosaur egg that never hatched but is somehow still "alive" in the cosmic sense. It helps scientists understand dark matter because, since there are no bright stars in the way, they can see how the dark matter's gravity holds the gas in a perfect sphere.
The Interstellar "Anti-Tail" of 3I/ATLAS
If you follow Avi Loeb or the "Oumuamua" crowd, you’ve probably seen the January 7, 2026, images of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS.
This thing is weird.
Normally, a comet’s tail points away from the sun because of the solar wind. But Hubble’s latest look at 3I/ATLAS showed a prominent anti-tail jet pointing toward the sun. It’s a triple-jet structure that spans 400,000 kilometers—longer than the distance from Earth to the Moon.
Some scientists say it’s just weird geometry. Others think it’s evidence of a non-natural origin. Either way, the high-resolution "Picture of the Week" data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 is the only reason we can see these jets in such crisp detail.
Stars Behaving Badly in HH 80/81
We also just got a look at HH 80/81, which sounds like a tax form but is actually the most massive protostellar outflow ever found.
Hubble watched jets of ionized gas screaming out of a young star at 1,000 kilometers per second. That’s over 2 million miles per hour. These jets are 32 light-years long. To put that in perspective, the nearest star to our sun is only about 4 light-years away. This one star's "exhaust pipe" could stretch across eight of our neighboring solar systems.
The 35th Anniversary Refresh
Since it’s 2026, Hubble is hitting its 35th year of operation. To celebrate, NASA and the ESA have been re-processing "classic" targets with new algorithms.
Take the Sombrero Galaxy (M104). We’ve seen it a million times. But the 2025/2026 re-processing makes the dust lanes look like 4K HDR compared to the "standard definition" versions from the early 2000s. They also dropped a new look at NGC 346, a star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. It looks like a watercolor painting of pink and blue silk, but every "brushstroke" is a stream of gas light-years long.
Is Hubble Better Than Webb?
People ask this a lot. The answer is "no," but also "sorta."
Webb is great for looking through dust to see what’s inside. But Hubble sees ultraviolet (UV) light. This is crucial.
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Last September, Hubble caught a white dwarf "eating" a Pluto-sized planet. You can’t see that in infrared very well because the "crunching" happens in UV. Without Hubble, we’d miss the actual chemistry of these events. We need both. It's like having night-vision goggles (Webb) and a high-powered flashlight (Hubble). You want both in a dark cave.
What to Do With This Info
If you’re a space nerd, or just want a better desktop background, here is how to actually use the latest Hubble telescope pictures:
- Check the Source: Don't trust "Space-X-Fan-Club" on Facebook. Go to
hubblesite.orgoresahubble.org. They release a "Picture of the Week" every Monday. - Look for the "Full Size" Links: Most news sites compress the images. If you want to see the individual stars in a galaxy 60 million light-years away, download the TIFF files. They can be over 100MB, but the detail is insane.
- Track the "RELHICs": Keep an eye on Cloud-9. If astronomers find more of these starless clouds, it’s going to completely change how we think about "missing" matter in the universe.
The telescope is old, sure. It's running on aging gyroscopes and hardware that belongs in a museum. But as long as it stays in the sky, it's our best set of eyes on the colorful, violent, and utterly strange reality of the cosmos.
Next Steps for Your Cosmic Deep Dive:
Visit the official ESA/Hubble "Picture of the Week" archive to download the 2026 high-resolution wallpaper of the NGC 1333 star-forming region, and use a metadata viewer to check which specific filters (like H-alpha or Oxygen-III) were used to create the colors you see.