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Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis.
A decade ago this small galaxy set off debate among astronomers as to whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes proportional to the supermassive behemoths found in the hearts of larger galaxies. This new discovery has little Henize 2-10, containing only one-tenth the number of stars found in our Milky Way, poised to play a big part in solving the mystery of where supermassive black holes came from in the first place.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Zachary Schutte (XGI), Amy Reines (XGI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 imaged this lonely spiral galaxy called UGC 9391. The galaxy resides 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco near the north celestial pole. Its star-studded spiral arms stand in splendid isolation against a backdrop of distant galaxies, which are only visible as indistinct swirls or smudges thanks to their vast distances from Earth. The image also features some much brighter foreground stars closer to home. These bright nearby stars are ringed with diffraction spikes – prominent spikes caused by light interacting with the inner workings of Hubble’s secondary mirror supports.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al
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The secret has been hiding in plain view for 40 years. But it took the insight of a veteran astronomer to pull it all together within a year, using observations of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and retired Cassini probe, in addition to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and the retired International Ultraviolet Explorer mission.
The discovery: Saturn's vast ring system is heating the giant planet's upper atmosphere. The phenomenon has never before been seen in the solar system. It's an unexpected interaction between Saturn and its rings that potentially could provide a tool for predicting if planets around other stars have glorious Saturn-like ring systems, too.
The telltale evidence is an excess of ultraviolet radiation, seen as a spectral line of hot hydrogen in Saturn's atmosphere. The bump in radiation means that something is contaminating and heating the upper atmosphere from the outside.
The most feasible explanation is that icy ring particles raining down onto Saturn's atmosphere cause this heating. This could be due to the impact of micrometeorites, solar wind particle bombardment, solar ultraviolet radiation, or electromagnetic forces picking up electrically charged dust. All this happens under the influence of Saturn's gravitational field pulling particles into the planet. When NASA's Cassini probe plunged into Saturn's atmosphere at the end of its mission in 2017, it measured the atmospheric constituents and confirmed that many particles are falling in from the rings.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Lotfi Ben-Jaffel (IAP & LPL)
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This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a section of the spiral galaxy nicknamed the Needle’s Eye – an appropriately diminutive name for a dwarf spiral galaxy. The Needle’s Eye, also known as NGC 247 and Caldwell 62, is located about 11 million light-years away in the Sculptor Group – the closest group of galaxies to our own (the Local Group). The galaxy was given its nickname because one end of it features a strange void of stars (not seen in this Hubble close-up).
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Feng (Tsinghua University); Image processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
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The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), located 210,000 light-years away, is one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space. At the center of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. A dramatic structure of arched, ragged filaments with a distinct ridge surrounds the cluster.
A torrent of radiation from the cluster's hot stars eats into denser areas creating a fantasy sculpture of dust and gas. The dark, intricately beaded edge of the ridge, seen in silhouette by Hubble, is particularly dramatic. It contains several small dust globules that point back towards the central cluster, like windsocks caught in a gale.
Energetic outflows and radiation from hot young stars are eroding the dense outer portions of the star-forming region, formally known as N66, exposing new stellar nurseries. The diffuse fringes of the nebula prevent the energetic outflows from streaming directly away from the cluster, leaving instead a trail of filaments marking the swirling path of the outflows.
The NGC 346 cluster at the center of this image from the Hubble Space Telescope contains dozens of hot, blue, high-mass stars, more than half of the known high-mass stars in the entire SMC galaxy. A myriad of smaller, compact clusters is also visible throughout the region.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Nota (STScI/ESA)
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The subject of this image is a group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A. They were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. The two galaxies in the upper right of the image appear to be interacting with one another. The long trails of stars and gas extending from them give the impression that they have both just been struck at great speed, thrown into disarray by the bowling-ball-shaped galaxy to the lower left of the image. In reality, interactions between galaxies happen over very long time periods, and galaxies rarely collide head-on with one another. It is also unclear whether the galaxy to the lower left is interacting with the other two, although they are so relatively close in space that it seems possible that they are. By happy coincidence, the collective interaction between these galaxies has caused the two on the upper right to form a shape, which from our solar system's perspective, resembles the starship known as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek!
NGC 7764A, which lies about 425 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, is a fascinating example of just how awkward astronomical nomenclature can be. The three galaxies are individually referred as NGC 7764A1, NGC 7764A2, and NGC 7764A3. This rather haphazard naming makes more sense when we consider that many astronomical catalogs were compiled well over 100 years ago, long before modern technology made standardizing scientific terminology much easier. As it is, many astronomical objects have several different names, or might have names that are so similar to other objects’ names that they cause confusion.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Fermilab (FNAL), Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, European Southern Observatory (ESO); Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
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The twin galaxies NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B dominate the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Both galaxies lie in the constellation Virgo, but despite appearing side-by-side in this image they are at vastly different distances from both Earth and one another. NGC 4496A is 47 million light-years from Earth while NGC 4496B is 212 million light-years away. The enormous distances between the two galaxies mean that the two are not interacting, and only appear to overlap because of a chance alignment.
Chance galactic alignments such as this provide astronomers with the opportunity to delve into the distribution of dust in these galaxies. Galactic dust – the dark tendrils threading through both NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B – adds to the beauty of astronomical images, but it also complicates astronomers’ observations. Dust in the universe tends to scatter and absorb blue light, making stars seem dimmer and redder in a process called “reddening.” Reddening due to dust is different from redshift, which is due to the expansion of space itself. By carefully measuring how dust in the foreground galaxy affects starlight from the background galaxy, astronomers can map the dust in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms. The resulting “dust maps” help astronomers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars populating these galaxies.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Boeker, B. Holwerda, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/National Science Foundation/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: R. Colombari
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This Hubble image shows the star cluster NGC 1850, located about 160,000 light-years away. For this image, five filters were used with the camera to gather data. Two of the filters were at near-ultraviolet wavelengths, two more at visible light wavelengths, and the final one was in the near-infrared. The data gathered through the two ultraviolet filters is violet and blue. The data from the two visible light filters is green and orange. The color red denotes near-infrared data. The image follows chromatic order, which means the shortest wavelength in the image is blue while the longest wavelength is red. Chromatic order allows us to visualize wavelengths of light beyond our eye’s sensitivity in a way that is familiar to us.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and N. Bastian (Donostia International Physics Center); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
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The dwarf galaxy NGC 1705 featured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope lies in the southern constellation Pictor, approximately 17 million light-years from Earth. NGC 1705 is a cosmic oddball – it is small, irregularly shaped, and has recently undergone a spate of star formation known as a starburst.
Despite these eccentricities, NGC 1705 and other dwarf irregular galaxies like it can provide valuable insights into the overall evolution of galaxies. Dwarf irregular galaxies tend to contain few elements other than hydrogen or helium and are thought to be similar to the earliest galaxies that populated the universe.
The data shown in this image come from a series of observations designed to unveil the interplay between stars, star clusters, and ionized gas in nearby star-forming galaxies. By observing a specific wavelength of light known as H-alpha with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, astronomers aimed to discover thousands of emission nebulae – regions created when hot, young stars bathe the clouds of gas surrounding them in ultraviolet light, causing them to glow.
This is not the first time that Hubble has imaged NGC 1705. Astronomers peered into the heart of the galaxy in 1999 using Hubble’s workhorse camera at the time, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. This instrument was replaced with the Wide Field Camera 3 during the fifth and final Space Shuttle mission to Hubble in 2009, and the newer instrument has provided a richer and far more detailed portrait of NGC 1705 than the 1999 observation.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar
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NGC 346, shown here in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a dynamic star cluster that lies within a nebula 200,000 light years away. Webb reveals the presence of many more building blocks than previously expected, not only for stars, but also planets, in the form of clouds packed with dust and hydrogen. The plumes and arcs of gas in this image contain two types of hydrogen. The pink gas represents energized hydrogen, which is typically as hot as around 10,000 °C (approximately 18,000 °F) or more, while the more orange gas represents dense, molecular hydrogen, which is much colder at around -200 °C or less (approximately -300 °F), and associated dust. The colder gas provides an excellent environment for stars to form, and, as they do, they change the environment around them. The effect of this is seen in the various ridges throughout, which are created as the light of these young stars breaks down the dense clouds. The many pillars of glowing gas show the effects of this stellar erosion throughout the region. In this image blue was assigned to the wavelength of 2.0 microns (F200W), green was assigned to 2.77 microns (F277W), orange was assigned to 3.35 microns (F335M), and red was assigned to 4.44 microns (F444W).
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, O. Jones (UK ATC), G. De Marchi (ESTEC), and M. Meixner (USRA). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI), N. Habel (USRA), L. Lenkic (USRA) and L. Chu (NASA/Ames)
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Shining like a brilliant beacon amidst a sea of galaxies, Arp 220 lights up the night sky in this view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Actually two spiral galaxies in the process of merging, Arp 220 glows brightest in infrared light, making it an ideal target for Webb. It is an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG) with a luminosity of more than a trillion suns. In comparison, our Milky Way galaxy has a much more modest luminosity of about ten billion suns.
Located 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Serpens, the Serpent, Arp 220 is the 220th object in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. It is the nearest ULIRG and the brightest of the three galactic mergers closest to Earth.
The collision of the two spiral galaxies began about 700 million years ago. It sparked an enormous burst of star formation. About 200 huge star clusters reside in a packed, dusty region about 5,000 light-years across (about 5 percent of the Milky Way's diameter). The amount of gas in this tiny region is equal to all of the gas in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
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A vast galaxy cluster lurks in the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Like a submerged sea monster causing waves on the surface, this cosmic leviathan can be identified by the distortions in spacetime around it. The cluster’s enormous mass curves spacetime, creating a gravitational lens that bends the light from distant galaxies beyond the cluster. The contorted streaks and arcs of light we see in this image are the result. A host of other galaxies surrounds the cluster, and a handful of foreground stars with tell-tale diffraction spikes are scattered throughout the image.
This particular galaxy cluster, called eMACS J1823.1+7822, lies almost nine billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. It is one of five exceptionally massive galaxy clusters Hubble explored with the aim of measuring the strengths of these gravitational lenses, which would provide insights into the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters. Strong gravitational lenses like eMACS J1823.1+7822 can help astronomers study distant galaxies by acting as vast natural telescopes which magnify objects that would otherwise be too faint or distant to resolve.
This multiwavelength image layers data from eight different filters and two different instruments: Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. Both instruments can view astronomical objects in just a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum using filters, which allow astronomers to image objects at precisely selected wavelengths. The combination of observations at different wavelengths lets astronomers develop a more complete picture of the structure, composition, and behavior of an object than visible light alone would reveal.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling
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Can stars, like caterpillars, transform themselves into butterflies? No, but in the case of the Butterfly Nebula -- it sure looks like it. Though its wingspan covers over 3 light-years and its estimated surface temperature exceeds 200,000 degrees, C, the dying central star of NGC 6302, the featured planetary nebula, has become exceptionally hot, shining brightly in visible and ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This sharp close-up was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope and is reprocessed here to show off the remarkable details of the complex planetary nebula, highlighting in particular light emitted by iron, shown in red. NGC 6302 lies about 4,000 light-years away in the arachnologically correct constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). Planetary nebulas evolve from outer atmospheres of stars like our Sun, but usually fade in about 20,000 years.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt
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Auroras and hazes glow in this composite image of Jupiter taken by the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). NIRCam has three specialized infrared filters that showcase details of the planet.
Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been mapped onto the visible spectrum: the auroras are mapped to redder colors, hazes to yellows and greens, and light reflected from a deeper main cloud to blues.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.
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On April 29, 2015, NuSTAR, Hinode, and Solar Dynamics Observatory all stared at our Sun.
Flaring, active regions of our Sun are highlighted in this image combining observations from Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR (shown in blue); low-energy X-rays from Japan's Hinode spacecraft are green; and extreme ultraviolet light from Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, are yellow and red. This NuSTAR image is a mosaic made from combining smaller images.
The active regions across the Sun’s surface contain material heated to several millions of degrees. The blue-white areas showing the NuSTAR data pinpoint the most energetic spots. During the observations, microflares went off, which are smaller versions of the larger flares that also erupt from the sun's surface. The microflares rapidly release energy and heat the material in the active regions.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/JAXA
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Hubble was recently retrained on NGC 6302, known as the "Butterfly Nebula," to observe it across a more complete spectrum of light, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared, helping researchers better understand the mechanics at work in its technicolor "wings" of gas. The observations highlight a new pattern of near-infrared emission from singly ionized iron, which traces an S-shape from lower left to upper right. This iron emission likely traces the central star system’s most recent ejections of gas, which are moving at much faster speeds than the previously expelled mass. The star or stars at its center are responsible for the nebula's appearance. In their death throes, they have cast off layers of gas periodically over the past couple thousand years. The "wings" of NGC 6302 are regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit that are tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour. NGC 6302 lies between 2,500 and 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and J. Kastner (RIT)
This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a close-up view of a galaxy named NGC 2770. This galaxy is intriguing, as over time it has hosted four different observed supernovae (not visible here).
Supernovae form in a few different ways, but always involve a dying star. These stars become unbalanced, lose control, and explode violently, briefly shining as brightly as an entire galaxy before slowly fading away.
One of the four supernovae observed within this galaxy, SN 2015bh, is especially interesting. This particular supernova initially had its identity called into question. When it was first discovered in 2015, astronomers classified SN 2015bh as a supernova imposter, believing it to be not an exploding star but simply an unpredictable outburst from a massive star in its final phase of life. Thankfully, astronomers eventually discovered the truth and the object was given its correct classification as a Type II supernova, resulting from the death of a star between eight and 50 times the mass of the Sun.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko
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This detailed image features Abell 3827, a galaxy cluster that offers a wealth of exciting possibilities for study. Hubble observed it in order to study dark matter, which is one of the greatest puzzles cosmologists face today. The science team used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 to complete their observations. The two cameras have different specifications and can observe different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, so using them both allowed the astronomers to collect more complete information. Hubble also observed Abell 3827 previously because of the interesting gravitational lens at its core.
Looking at this cluster of hundreds of galaxies, it is amazing to recall that less than 100 years ago, many astronomers thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe. Although astronomers debated the existence of other galaxies, it took Edwin Hubble’s observations of the Great Andromeda Nebula to confirm that it was in fact far too distant to be part of the Milky Way. The Great Andromeda Nebula became the Andromeda Galaxy, and astronomers recognized that our universe was much, much bigger than humanity had envisioned. We can only imagine how Edwin Hubble – after whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named – would have felt if he’d seen this spectacular image of Abell 3827.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Massey
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This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image spotlights the giant elliptical galaxy, UGC 10143, at the heart of galaxy cluster, Abell 2147, about 486 million light-years away in the head of the serpent, the constellation Serpens. UGC 10143 is the biggest and brightest member of Abell 2147, which itself may be part of the much larger Hercules Supercluster of galaxies. UGC 10143’s bright center, dim extended halo, and lack of spiral arms and star-forming dust lanes distinguish it as an elliptical galaxy. Ellipticals are often near the center of galaxy clusters, suggesting they may form when galaxies merge.
This image of UGC 10143 is part of a Hubble survey of globular star clusters associated with the brightest galaxies in galaxy clusters. Globular star clusters help astronomers trace the origin and evolution of their galactic neighbors. The Hubble survey looked at the distribution, brightness, and metal content of more than 35,000 globular star clusters.
The image uses data from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Any gaps were filled by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and the Pan-STARRS collaboration. The color blue represents visible blue light, and reddish-orange represents near infrared light.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and W. Harris (McMaster University); Image processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
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A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float serenely near this scene, and the smudged shapes of much more distant galaxies are visible in the background.
This colliding trio – known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189 – is a relatively rare combination of three large star-forming galaxies lying within only 50,000 light-years of one another. While that might sound like a safe distance, for galaxies this makes them extremely close neighbors. Our own galactic neighbors are much further away; Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, is more than 2.5 million light-years away from Earth.
This image comes from an observation designed to help astronomers understand the origin of the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe. These galactic behemoths are called Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs) and – as the name suggests – are defined as the brightest galaxies in any given galaxy cluster. Astronomers suspect that BCGs form through the merger of large, gas-rich galaxies like the ones seen here. They turned to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys to investigate this galactic trio in painstaking detail, hoping to shed light on the formation of the universe’s most massive galaxies.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun
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UGCA 307 hangs against an irregular backdrop of distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The small galaxy consists of a diffuse band of stars containing red bubbles of gas that mark regions of recent star formation and lies roughly 26 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus. Appearing as just a small patch of stars, UGCA 307 is a diminutive dwarf galaxy without a defined structure, resembling nothing more than a hazy patch of passing cloud.
This image is part of a Hubble project to explore every known nearby galaxy, giving astronomers insights into our galactic neighborhood. Before this set of observations, Hubble investigated almost three quarters of nearby galaxies in enough detail to spot the brightest stars and build up an understanding of the stars populating each galaxy. This Hubble project set out to explore the remaining quarter of nearby galaxies by taking advantage of short gaps in Hubble’s observing schedule.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully
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A small, dense cloud of gas and dust called CB 130-3 blots out the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. CB 130-3 is an object known as a dense core, a compact agglomeration of gas and dust. This particular dense core is in the constellation Serpens and seems to billow across a field of background stars.
Dense cores like CB 130-3 are the birthplaces of stars and are of particular interest to astronomers. During the collapse of these cores enough mass can accumulate in one place to reach the temperatures and densities required to ignite hydrogen fusion, marking the birth of a new star. While it may not be obvious from this image, a compact object teetering on the brink of becoming a star is embedded deep within CB 130-3.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA & STScI, C. Britt, T. Huard, A. Pagan
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The blue and orange stars of the faint galaxy named NGC 2188 sparkle in this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Although NGC 2188 appears at first glance to consist solely of a narrow band of stars, it is classified by astronomers as a barred spiral galaxy. It appears this way from our viewpoint on Earth as the center and spiral arms of the galaxy are tilted away from us, with only the very narrow outer edge of the galaxy’s disk visible to us. Astronomers liken this occurrence to turning a dinner plate in your hands so you see only its outer edge. The true shape of the galaxy was identified by studying the distribution of the stars in the inner central bulge and outer disk and by observing the stars’ colors.
NGC 2188 is estimated to be just half the size of our Milky Way, at 50,000 light-years across, and it is situated in the constellation of Columba (the Dove). Named in the late 1500s after Noah’s dove in biblical stories, the small constellation consists of many faint yet beautiful stars and astronomical objects.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully
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This new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope looks at two spiral galaxies, collectively known as Arp 303. The pair, individually called IC 563 (bottom right) and IC 564 (top left), are 275 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sextans.
The image holds data from two separate Hubble observations of Arp 303. The first used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study the pair’s clumpy star-forming regions in infrared light. Galaxies like IC 563 and IC 564 are very bright at infrared wavelengths and host many bright star-forming regions.
The second used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to take quick looks at bright, interesting galaxies across the sky. The observations filled gaps in Hubble’s archive and looked for promising candidates that Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, and other telescopes could study further.
The colors red, orange, and green represent infrared wavelengths taken with WFC3, and the color blue represents ACS visible light data.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Larson (STScI), and J. Dalcanton (University of Washington); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
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This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope revisits the Veil Nebula, which was featured in a previous Hubble image release. In this image, new processing techniques have been applied, bringing out fine details of the nebula’s delicate threads and filaments of ionized gas.
To create this colorful image, observations were taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 instrument using five different filters. The new post-processing methods have further enhanced details of emissions from doubly ionized oxygen (seen here in blues), ionized hydrogen, and ionized nitrogen (seen here in reds).
The Veil Nebula lies around 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), making it a relatively close neighbor in astronomical terms. Only a small portion of the nebula was captured in this image.
The Veil Nebula is the visible portion of the nearby Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant formed roughly 10,000 years ago by the death of a massive star. That star – which was 20 times the mass of the Sun – lived fast and died young, ending its life in a cataclysmic release of energy. Despite this stellar violence, the shockwaves and debris from the supernova sculpted the Veil Nebula’s delicate tracery of ionized gas – creating a scene of surprising astronomical beauty.
The Veil Nebula is also featured in Hubble’s Caldwell Catalog, a collection of astronomical objects that have been imaged by Hubble and are visible to amateur astronomers in the night sky.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay
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Unlike some of its perpetually active neighbors on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Raikoke Volcano on the Kuril Islands rarely erupts. The small, oval-shaped island most recently exploded in 1924 and in 1778.
The dormant period ended around 4:00 a.m. local time on June 22, 2019, when a vast plume of ash and volcanic gases shot up from its 700-meter-wide crater. Several satellites—as well as astronauts on the International Space Station—observed as a thick plume rose and then streamed east as it was pulled into the circulation of a storm in the North Pacific.
Image credit: NASA/Joshua Stevens
This sparkling spiral galaxy looks almost stretched across the sky in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Known as NGC 4100, the galaxy boasts a neat spiral structure and swirling arms speckled with the bright blue hue of newly formed stars.
Like so many of the stunning images of galaxies we enjoy today, this image was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). This remarkable instrument was installed in 2002, and, with some servicing by intrepid astronauts, is still going strong.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Ho
A host of astronomical objects are scattered across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Background galaxies ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals are strewn across the image, while a smattering of bright foreground stars are closer to home. In the center of the image, the vague shape of the small galaxy UGC 7983 appears as a hazy cloud of light. UGC 7983 is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It is a dwarf irregular galaxy – a type thought to be similar to the very earliest galaxies in the universe.
This image also reveals a relatively nearby astronomical interloper. A minor asteroid in our own solar system streaks across the upper left-hand side of the image. The asteroid’s trail is visible as four streaks of light separated by small gaps. These streaks of light represent the four separate exposures that were combined to create this image. The small gaps between each observation reflect filter changes inside Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys between exposures.
Capturing an asteroid was a fortunate side effect of a larger effort to observe every known galaxy close to the Milky Way. Hubble had imaged roughly 75% of all the Milky Way’s near galactic neighbors, when a group of astronomers proposed using the gaps between longer Hubble observations to capture images of the remaining 25%. The project was an elegant efficient way to fill gaps in Hubble's observing schedule and in our knowledge of nearby galaxies.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully
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Astronomers using a previously captured Hubble imagery spotted a remarkable image of a young star's unseen, planet-forming disk casting a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. The star is called HBC 672, and the shadow feature was nicknamed the "Bat Shadow" because it resembles a pair of wings. The nickname turned out to be unexpectedly appropriate, because now those "wings" appear to be flapping!
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
Some of the most dramatic events in the universe occur when certain stars die — and explode catastrophically in the process.
Such explosions, known as supernovae, mainly occur in a couple of ways. In one scenario, a massive star depletes its fuel at the end of its life, becoming dynamically unstable and unable to support its bulk, causing it to collapse inward and violently explode. In another outcome, a white dwarf (the dense remnant of a once-normal star) in an orbiting stellar couple siphons more mass off its companion than it is able to support, igniting runaway nuclear fusion in its core and beginning the supernova process. Both types result in an intensely bright object in the sky that can rival the light of a whole galaxy.
In the last 20 years the galaxy NGC 5468, visible in this image, has hosted a number of observed supernovae of both the aforementioned types: SN 1999cp, SN 2002cr, SN2002ed, SN2005P and SN2018dfg. Despite being just over 130 million light-years away, the orientation of the galaxy with respect to us makes it easier to spot these new “stars” as they appear; we see NGC 5468 face on, meaning we can see the galaxy’s loose, open spiral pattern in beautiful detail in images such as this one from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Li et al.
The galaxy NGC 6946 is nothing short of spectacular. In the last century alone, NGC 6946 has experienced 10 observed supernovae, earning its nickname as the Fireworks Galaxy. In comparison, our Milky Way averages just one to two supernova events per century. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the stars, spiral arms, and various stellar environments of NGC 6946 in phenomenal detail.
We are able to marvel at NGC 6946 as it is a face-on galaxy, which means that we see the galaxy “facing” us, rather than seeing it from the side (known as edge-on). The Fireworks Galaxy is further classified as an intermediate spiral galaxy and as a starburst galaxy. The former means the structure of NGC 6946 sits between a full spiral and a barred spiral galaxy, with only a slight bar in its center, and the latter means it has an exceptionally high rate of star formation.
The galaxy resides 25.2 million light-years away, along the border of the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus (The Swan).
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Leroy, K.S. Long
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The mass of dust and bright swirls of stars in this image are the distant galaxy merger IC 2431, which lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured what appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, as well as a tumultuous mixture of star formation and tidal distortions caused by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio. A thick cloud of dust obscures the center of this image – though light from a background galaxy is piercing its outer extremities. This image is from a series of Hubble observations investigating weird and wonderful galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab, Dark Energy Survey Camera, (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
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This image shows knots of cold, dense interstellar gas where new stars are forming. These Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules (frEGGs) were first seen in Hubble’s famous 1995 image of the Eagle Nebula. Because these lumps of gas are dark, they are rarely seen by telescopes. They can be observed when the newly forming stars ignite, their intense ultraviolet radiation eroding the surrounding gas away and letting the denser, more resistant frEGGs remain. These frEGGs are located in the Northern Coalsack Nebula in the direction of Cygnus, the Swan.
This Hubble image also features two giant stars. The left star is a rare, giant O-type star, very bright, blue-white stars known to be the hottest in the universe. These massive stars are 10,000 to a million times the brightness of the Sun and burn themselves out quickly, in a few million years. The right star is an even more massive supergiant B-type star. Supergiant stars also burn through their fuel quickly, anywhere between a few hundred thousand years to tens of millions of years, and die in titanic supernova explosions.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Sahai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
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A dramatic triplet of galaxies takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which captures a three-way gravitational tug-of-war between interacting galaxies. This system – known as Arp 195 – is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a list which showcases some of the weirder and more wonderful galaxies in the universe. Observing time with Hubble is extremely valuable, so astronomers don't want to waste a second. The schedule for Hubble observations is calculated using a computer algorithm which allows the spacecraft to occasionally gather bonus snapshots of data between longer observations. This image of the clashing triplet of galaxies in Arp 195 is one such snapshot. Extra observations such as these do more than provide spectacular images – they also help to identify promising targets to follow up with using telescopes such as the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton
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This June 2020 image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster MACS J0416. This is one of six galaxy clusters being studied by the Hubble Frontier Fields program, which produced the deepest images of gravitational lensing ever made. Scientists used intracluster light (visible in blue) to study the distribution of dark matter within the cluster.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)
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This luminescent image features multiple galaxies, perhaps most noticeably LEDA 58109, the lone galaxy in the upper right. LEDA 58109 is flanked by two further galactic objects to its lower left – a galaxy with an active galactic nucleus (AGN) called SDSS J162558.14+435746.4 that partially obscures the galaxy SDSS J162557.25+435743.5, which appears to poke out to the right behind the AGN.
Galaxy classification is sometimes presented as something of a dichotomy: spiral and elliptical. However, the diversity of galaxies in this image alone highlights the complex web of galaxy classifications that exist, including galaxies that house extremely luminous AGNs at their cores, and galaxies whose shapes defy the classification of either spiral or elliptical.
The sample of galaxies here also illustrates the wide variety of names that galaxies have: some relatively short, like LEDA 58109, and some very long and challenging to remember, such as the two galaxies to the left. This is due to the variety of cataloging systems that chart the celestial objects in the night sky. No one catalog is exhaustive, and they cover overlapping regions of the sky so that many galaxies belong to several different catalogs. For example, the galaxy on the right is LEDA 58109 in the LEDA galaxy database, but is also known as MCG+07-34-030 in the MCG galaxy catalog and SDSS J162551.50+435747.5 in the SDSS galaxy catalog – the same catalog that also lists the two galaxies to the left.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel
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An orange glow radiates from the center of NGC 1792, the heart of this stellar furnace. Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, this intimate view of NGC 1792 gives us some insight into this galactic powerhouse. The vast swathes of tell-tale blue seen throughout the galaxy indicate areas that are full of young, hot stars, and it is in the shades of orange, seen nearer the center, that the older, cooler stars reside.
Nestled in the constellation of Columba (The Dove), NGC 1792 is both a spiral galaxy and a starburst galaxy. Within starburst galaxies, stars are forming at comparatively exorbitant rates. The rate of star formation can be more than 10 times faster in a starburst galaxy than in our galaxy, the Milky Way. When galaxies have a large reservoir of gas, like NGC 1792, these short-lived starburst phases can be sparked by galactic events such as mergers and tidal interactions. One might think that these starburst galaxies would easily consume all of their gas in a large forming event. However, supernova explosions and intense stellar winds produced in these powerful starbursts can inject energy into the gas and disperse it. This halts the star formation before it can completely deplete the galaxy of all its fuel. Scientists are actively working to understand this complex interplay between the dynamics that drive and quench these fierce bursts of star formation.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee; Acknowledgement: Leo Shatz
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An energetic outburst from an infant star streaks across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This stellar tantrum – produced by an extremely young star in the earliest phase of formation – consists of an incandescent jet of gas travelling at supersonic speeds. As the jet collides with material surrounding the still-forming star, the shock heats this material and causes it to glow. The result is the colorfully wispy structures, which astronomers refer to as Herbig–Haro objects, billowing across the lower right of this image.
Herbig–Haro objects are seen to evolve and change significantly over just a few years. This particular object, called HH34, was previously captured by Hubble between 1994 and 2007, and again in glorious detail in 2015. HH34 resides approximately 1,250 light-years from Earth in the Orion Nebula, a large region of star formation visible to the unaided eye. The Orion Nebula is one of the closest sites of widespread star formation to Earth, and as such has been pored over by astronomers in search of insights into how stars and planetary systems are born.
The data in this image are from a set of Hubble observations of four nearby bright jets with the Wide Field Camera 3 taken to help pave the way for future science with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb – which will observe at predominantly infrared wavelengths – will be able to peer into the dusty envelopes surrounding still-forming protostars, revolutionizing the study of jets from these young stars. Hubble’s high-resolution images of HH34 and other jets will help astronomers interpret future observations with Webb.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini
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This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the sparkling globular cluster NGC 6569 in the constellation Sagittarius. Hubble explored the heart of this cluster with both its Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys, revealing a glittering hoard of stars in this astronomical treasure trove.
Globular clusters are stable, tightly bound clusters containing tens of thousands to millions of stars and are associated with all types of galaxies. The intense gravitational attraction of these closely packed clusters of stars means that globular clusters have a regular spherical shape with a densely populated center, as seen at the heart of this star-studded image.
This observation comes from an investigation of globular clusters which lie close to the center of the Milky Way. Previous surveys avoided these objects, as the dusty center of our galaxy blocks their light and alters the colors of the stars residing in them. A star’s color is particularly important for astronomers studying stellar evolution, and can give astronomers insights into their ages, compositions, and temperatures.
The astronomers who proposed these observations combined data from Hubble with data from astronomical archives, allowing them to measure the ages of globular clusters including NGC 6569. Their research also provided insights into the structure and density of globular clusters towards the center of the Milky Way.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen
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This remarkable spiral galaxy, known as NGC 4651, may look serene and peaceful as it swirls in the vast, silent emptiness of space, but don’t be fooled — it keeps a violent secret. It is believed that this galaxy consumed another smaller galaxy to become the large and beautiful spiral that we observe today.
Although only a telescope like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which captured this image, could give us a picture this clear, NGC 4651 can also be observed with an amateur telescope — so if you have a telescope at home and a star-gazing eye, look out for this glittering carnivorous spiral.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Leonard
This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and published in 2018, celebrated the Earth-orbiting observatory's 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.
At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.
This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core.
The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
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Following in the footsteps of the Neptune image released in 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of the solar system’s other ice giant, the planet Uranus. The new image features dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere. The Webb data demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity for the faintest dusty rings, which have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics.
The seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus is unique: It rotates on its side, at roughly a 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This causes extreme seasons since the planet’s poles experience many years of constant sunlight followed by an equal number of years of complete darkness. (Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun.) Currently, it is late spring for the northern pole, which is visible here; Uranus’ northern summer will be in 2028. In contrast, when Voyager 2 visited Uranus it was summer at the south pole. The south pole is now on the ‘dark side’ of the planet, out of view and facing the darkness of space.
This infrared image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) combines data from two filters at 1.4 and 3.0 microns, which are shown here in blue and orange, respectively. The planet displays a blue hue in the resulting representative-color image.
When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths. With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is.
On the right side of the planet there’s an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus – it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb’s NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
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This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors, lying only about 200,000 light-years from Earth. It makes a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, and both objects are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere, but are visible from some northern latitudes as well.
The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated. This distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which generally appear as a continuous blur of starlight at their centers because they are so crammed with stars. In the case of NGC 376, individual stars are clearly discernable even in the most densely populated parts of this image.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, G. De Marchi
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The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices and is one of several jellyfish galaxies Hubble has been studying over the past two years.
Despite this jellyfish galaxy’s serene appearance, it is adrift in a ferociously hostile environment: a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbors, which can twist galaxies into a variety of shapes. If that was not enough, the space between galaxies in a cluster is also pervaded with a searingly hot plasma known as the intracluster medium. While this plasma is extremely tenuous, galaxies moving through it experience it almost like swimmers fighting against a current, and this interaction can strip galaxies of their star-forming gas.
This interaction between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is called ram-pressure stripping and is the process responsible for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 moved through the cluster, the pressure of the intracluster medium stripped away gas and dust into long trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disk of the galaxy.
Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 studied these trailing tendrils in detail, as they are a particularly extreme environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the ‘tentacles’ of jellyfish galaxies was not noticeably different from star formation in the galaxy disk.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
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Lying inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way, this Herbig–Haro object is a turbulent birthing ground for new stars in a region known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located 1,350 light-years away.
Herbig–Haro (HH) objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars that form when narrow jets of partially ionized gas ejected by stars collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust. This image of Herbig-Haro Jet HH 24 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015.
When stars form within giant clouds of cool molecular hydrogen, some of the surrounding material collapses under gravity to form a rotating, flattened disk encircling the newborn star.
Although planets will later congeal in the disk, at this early stage the protostar is feeding on the disk with a voracious appetite. Gas from the disk rains down onto the protostar and engorges it. Superheated material spills away and is shot outward from the star in opposite directions along an uncluttered escape route – the star's rotation axis.
Shock fronts develop along the jets and heat the surrounding gas to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. The jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust and clear vast spaces, like a stream of water plowing into a hill of sand.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)/Hubble-Europe (ESA) Collaboration, D. Padgett (GSFC), T. Megeath (University of Toledo), and B. Reipurth (University of Hawaii)
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The twisting patterns created by the multiple spiral arms of NGC 2835 create the illusion of an eye. This is a fitting description, as this magnificent galaxy resides near the head of the southern constellation of Hydra, the water snake. This stunning barred spiral galaxy, with a width of just over half that of the Milky Way, is brilliantly featured in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Although it cannot be seen in this image, a supermassive black hole with a mass millions of times that of our Sun is known to nestle in the very center of NGC 2835.
This galaxy was imaged as part of PHANGS-HST, a large galaxy survey with Hubble that aims to study the connections between cold gas and young stars in a variety of galaxies in the local universe. Within NGC 2835, this cold, dense gas produces large numbers of young stars within large star formation regions. The bright blue areas, commonly observed in the outer spiral arms of many galaxies, show where near-ultraviolet light is being emitted more strongly, indicating recent or ongoing star formation.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee, and the PHANGS-HST Team; acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)
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This jewel-bright image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 1385, a spiral galaxy 68 million light-years from Earth, which lies in the constellation Fornax. The image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which is often referred to as Hubble’s workhorse camera thanks to its reliability and versatility. It was installed in 2009 when astronauts last visited Hubble, and 12 years later it remains remarkably productive.
NGC 1385’s home – the Fornax constellation – is not named after an animal or an ancient god, as are many of the other constellations. Fornax is simply the Latin word for a furnace. The constellation was named Fornax by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer born in 1713. Lacaille named 14 of the 88 constellations we still recognize today. He seems to have had a penchant for naming constellations after scientific instruments, including Atlia (the air pump), Norma (the ruler, or set square), and Telescopium (the telescope).
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, exploring the universe near and far. The science instruments have returned to full operation, following recovery from a computer anomaly that suspended the telescope’s observations for more than a month.
Science observations restarted the afternoon of Saturday, July 17. The telescope’s targets this past weekend included the unusual galaxies shown in the images above.
These images, from a program led by Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, demonstrate Hubble's return to full science operations. [Left] ARP-MADORE2115-273 is a rarely observed example of a pair of interacting galaxies in the southern hemisphere. [Right] ARP-MADORE0002-503 is a large spiral galaxy with unusual, extended spiral arms. While most disk galaxies have an even number of spiral arms, this one has three.
Image Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (UW) Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
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undeniably steals the show.
This spotlight-hogging galaxy, seen set against a backdrop of more distant galaxies of all shapes and sizes, is known as PGC 29388. Although it dominates in this image, this galaxy is a small player on the cosmic stage and is known as a dwarf elliptical galaxy. As the “dwarf” moniker suggests, the galaxy is on the smaller side, and boasts a “mere” 100 million to a few billion stars — a very small number indeed when compared to the Milky Way's population of around 250 billion to 400 billion stellar residents.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Armandroff