An illustration of the upcoming NASA ultraviolet spacecraft UVEX (Image credit: SDL/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

A new NASA space telescope will study the universe in ultraviolet light to reveal the violent and turbulent events that bubble under what appears to be a cosmic sea of tranquility.

The Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX) mission, developed by NASA in conjunction with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), will be the first mission to create deep all-sky maps in ultraviolet light. Thus, when it launches in 2031, UVEX will join new sky-mapping surveys like NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), which scans the cosmos in infrared, and the Vera C.…