ALT This oval image represents a view of the entire sky unfolded and laid out flat. It is set against a white background and has a faint gray grid within. The grid is the equivalent of latitude and longitude lines on a map of Earth, but here they mark those lines for our galaxy. Colorful dots speckle the oval, each representing a source that has been observed by Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope. The light blue and gray dots are concentrated along the central line of the oval which is where our galaxy’s plane lies. These sources come from within our galaxy. Other dots, like the red, pink, and navy ones, are scattered over the entire image. They come from outside our galaxy. Below the oval is a key, identifying which colors are associated with which type of source. This image is watermarked with “Credit: Amy Y. Lien et al 2025 ApJ 989 161.”

ALT On an abstract purple space-inspired background, illustrations of 11 space telescopes form the shape of a heart around another. Each telescope is shaded in a monochrome blue palette, and they have a variety of different shapes and features. These spacecraft are not depicted to scale. Credit: NASA

ALT This oval map shows the whole sky as observed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. The background is a deep blue-gray speckled with countless tiny dots and streaks. The plane of our Milky Way galaxy appears as a large, wispy pale arc sweeping around the center of the image. Pink dots speckle the map, marking the locations of over 1,000 confirmed exoplanets. A bright patch along the bottom edge just left of center shows the location of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. A few black lines and blocks are visible in the image, mostly on the left side of the map, indicating regions TESS has not yet imaged. This image is watermarked with “Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Nicole Schanche (University of Maryland College Park).”

ALT A four-panel image with composite images of galaxies. At upper left is a spiral galaxy with gleaming blue and purple arms wind around its center. In the upper right, another spiral galaxy has a glowing pale-yellow core, surrounded by a muddle of clouds in shades of purple. In the lower left, an irregular galaxy resembles a splatter painting in orange, purple, blue, and white. Another spiral galaxy is in the lower right. It has a bright, golden orange and purple core with spiraling blue arms wrapped tightly around the center and spreading as they extend outward. The image is watermarked “Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO and ESA/XMM-Newton; UV: NASA/Penn State Univ/Swift and NASA/CAS/CNES/John Hopkins Univ. Applied Physics Laboratory; Optical: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/MCELS Team/Middlebury College/F. Winkler, Mark Hanson (used with permission), and Armen Akopian (used with permission); Infrared: ESA/NASA/JPL-CalTech/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare.”