Seven planets are set to appear in the night sky this month in a rare full planetary alignment.

Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, Neptune, Mercury and Saturn will appear in a row on the evening of 28 February, marking the last time for 15 years that all of the planets will be visible at the same time.

Planetary parades of four or five planets happen relatively regularly, though alignments of six or seven are remarkably rare.

NASA’s Europa Clipper is well on its way to Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, set to arrive in 2030. While its science instruments remain dormant for now, its star trackers are actively working, snapping images of distant stars to help orient the spacecraft. These starfield images, which include the constellation Corvus, are crucial for navigation and ensuring the spacecraft can correctly align its antennas and instruments.

Newly discovered Quipu, a superstructure in which galaxies group together in clusters and clusters of clusters, is the largest known structure in the universe in terms of length, scientists claim.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a cosmic bullseye. The gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1,313,424 is rippling with nine star-filled rings after an “arrow”—a far smaller blue dwarf galaxy—shot through its heart. Astronomers using Hubble identified eight visible rings, more than previously detected by any telescope in any galaxy, and confirmed a ninth using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Previous observations of other galaxies show a maximum of two or three rings.

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” said Imad Pasha, the lead researcher and a doctoral student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “I was looking at a ground-based imaging survey and when I saw a galaxy with several clear rings, I was immediately drawn to it. I had to stop to investigate it.” The team later nicknamed the galaxy the “Bullseye.”

Hubble and Keck’s follow-up observations also helped the researchers prove which galaxy plunged through the center of the Bullseye—a blue dwarf galaxy to its center-left. This relatively tiny interloper traveled like a dart through the core of the Bullseye about 50 million years ago, leaving rings in its wake like ripples in a pond. A thin trail of gas now links the pair, though they are currently separated by 130,000 light-years.

The jet is twice the length of our galaxy!

Leo P, a small galaxy and a distant neighbor of the Milky Way, is lighting the way for astronomers to better understand star formation and how a galaxy grows.

In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers led by Kristen McQuinn, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Rutgers University-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences, has reported finding that Leo P “reignited,” reactivating during a significant period on the timeline of the universe, producing stars when many other small galaxies didn’t.

By studying galaxies early in their formation and in different environments, astronomers said they may gain a deeper understanding of the universe’s origins and the fundamental processes that shape it.