View allAll Photos Tagged NASAHubble
NASA's #DARTMission intentionally impacted the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022, slightly changing the trajectory of its orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos. In the aftermath of that impact, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a swarm of boulders that were possibly shaken off the asteroid when the half-ton spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos at approximately 14,000 miles per hour. It is estimated that the impact shook off two percent of the boulders on the asteroid's surface.
Image description: Against the black of space, a line of blue light arcs from the lower left of the image to the upper right corner, from behind a bright, pale point shining at the end of the streak. Very faint blue dots surrounding this streaking asteroid are boulders that have been knocked away from it.
#NASA #Hubble #Space #DART #Asteroid #NASAHubble #Galaxy #HubbleSpaceTelescope #Telescope
This Hubble Space Telescope 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 the Hubble Space Telescope 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 telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2130a/
This glittering ball of stars is the globular cluster NGC 1898, which lies near the center of our galactic neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. That dwarf galaxy hosts an extremely rich population of star clusters, making it an ideal laboratory for investigating star formation.
Discovered in November 1834 by British astronomer John Herschel, NGC 1898 has been scrutinized numerous times by @NASAHubble. Today we know that globular clusters are some of the oldest known objects in the universe and are relics of the first epochs of galaxy formation.
We already have a pretty good understanding of the Milky Way’s globular clusters. Our studies on globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies just started. Observations of NGC 1898 will help to determine whether their properties are similar to the ones in our Milky Way, or if they have different features due to being in a different cosmic environment.
This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Find us on Instagram
Generally, globular star clusters tend to have really old stars, but @NASAHubble found one close to the Milky Way with a profusion of younger stars.
Called NGC 1866, this cluster is found at the very edges of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy located near the Milky Way. The cluster was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop, who cataloged thousands of stars and deep-sky objects during his career.
NGC 1866 is also situated close enough that its stars can be studied individually — no small feat given the mammoth distances involved in studying the cosmos! There is still debate over how globular clusters form, but generally, most of their stars are old and have few elements other than hydrogen and helium; since stars form heavier elements within their core as they carry out nuclear fusion throughout their lifetimes, stars with many heavier elements tend to be younger, formed later in the cosmic time-scale. It’s possible that the stars within globular clusters are so old that they were actually some of the very first to form after the big bang.
In the case of NGC 1866, though, not all stars are the same. Different populations, or generations, of stars are thought to coexist within the cluster. Once the first generation of stars formed, the cluster may have encountered a giant gas cloud that sparked a new wave of star formation and gave rise to a second, younger generation of stars — explaining why it seems surprisingly youthful.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Find us on Instagram
Looking at this Hubble image makes me want to eat cotton candy in the shape of an octopus. 🐙👀
But, the galaxy pictured in this @NASAHubble image has an especially evocative name: the Medusa merger. What do you think of when you look at it?
Often referred to by its somewhat drier designation of NGC 4194, this was not always one entity, but two. An early galaxy consumed a smaller gas-rich system, throwing out streams of stars and dust into space. These streams, seen rising from the top of the merged galaxy, resemble the writhing snakes that Medusa, a monster in ancient Greek mythology, famously had on her head in place of hair, lending the object its intriguing name.
The legend of Medusa also held that anyone who saw her face would transform into stone. In this case, you can feast your eyes without fear on the center of the merged galaxy, a region known as Medusa's eye. All the cool gas pooling here has triggered a burst of star formation, causing it to stand out brightly against the dark cosmic backdrop.
The Medusa merger is located about 130 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear).
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Adamo
The tranquil spiral galaxy UGC 12295 basks leisurely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies around 192 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces and is almost face-on when viewed from Earth, displaying a bright central bar and tightly wound spiral arms.
Despite its tranquil appearance, UGC 12295 played host to a catastrophically violent explosion – a supernova – detected in 2015. Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars and are responsible for forging many of the elements found here on Earth.
Two different teams of astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to observe UGC 12295 and sift through the wreckage of this vast stellar explosion. The first team examined the supernova’s detritus to better understand the evolution of matter in our universe.
The second team of astronomers also explored the aftermath of UGC 12295’s supernova, but their investigation focused on returning to the sites of some of the best-studied nearby earlier supernovae. Hubble’s keen vision can reveal lingering traces of these energetic events, shedding light on the nature of the systems that host them.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko, J. Lyman
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-peers-at-a...
Dotted across the sky in the constellation of Pictor (the Painter’s Easel) is the galaxy cluster highlighted here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: SPT-CL J0615-5746, or SPT0615 for short.
SPT0615, first discovered by the South Pole Telescope less than a decade ago, is a massive cluster of galaxies, one of the farthest observed to cause gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object is deflected around mass between the object and the observer. Among the identified background objects, there is SPT0615-JD, a galaxy that is thought to have emerged just 500 million years after the big bang. This puts it among the very earliest structures to form in the universe. It is also the farthest galaxy ever imaged by means of gravitational lensing.
Just as ancient paintings can tell us about the period of history in which they were painted, so too can ancient galaxies tell us about the era of the universe in which they existed. To learn about cosmological history, astronomers explore the most distant reaches of the universe, probing ever further out into the cosmos. The light from distant objects travels to us from so far away that it takes an immensely long time to reach us, meaning that it carries information from the past — information about the time at which it was emitted.
By studying such distant objects, astronomers are continuing to fill the gaps in our picture of what the very early universe looked like, and uncover more about how it evolved into its current state.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, I. Karachentsev et al., F. High et al.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Find us on Instagram
Hubble YouTube
See more Hubble videos on YouTube: bit.ly/2VonVim
Follow NASA's Hubble Space Telescope:
Facebook: www.facebo ok.com/NASAHubble
Twitter: twitter.com/NASAHubble
Instagram: www.instagram.com/NASAHubble
Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/nasahubble
More info: www.nasa.gov/hubble
Although astronomers have been studying galaxy IC 5063 for decades, it took a non-scientist to make the surprising discovery. Judy Schmidt, an artist and amateur astronomer based in Modesto, California, uncovered the dark shadows when she reprocessed @NASAHubble exposures of the galaxy in December 2019. Schmidt routinely culls the Hubble archive for interesting observations that she can turn into beautiful images. She shares those images on her Twitter feed with her many followers, who include astronomers such as Peter Maksym of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Schmidt selected the Hubble observations of IC 5063 from the archive because she is interested in galaxies that have active cores. The cone-shaped shadows were not apparent in the original exposures, so she was surprised to see them in her reprocessed image. "I had no idea they were there, and even after I'd processed it, I kept blinking my eyes wondering if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing," she said.
She immediately posted her image to her Twitter account. "It was something I'd never seen before, and even though I had strong suspicions about them being shadow rays or 'crepuscular rays,' as Peter has dubbed them, it's easy to let one's imagination and wishful thinking run wild," she explained. "I figured if I was wrong, someone would come to ground me."
The image prompted a Twitter discussion among her followers, including Maksym, who debated the rays' origin. Maksym had already been analyzing Hubble images of the jets produced by the galaxy's black hole. So he took the lead in studying the rays and writing a science paper. His study is based on near-infrared observations made by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys in March and November 2019. Red and near-infrared light pierces the dusty galaxy to reveal the details that may be enshrouded in dust.
Read more: go.nasa.gov/3fdtRkG
Credit: NASA, ESA, and W.P. Maksym (CfA)
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Find us on Instagram
This spectacular image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures the spiral galaxy NGC 105, which lies roughly 215 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces.
While it looks like NGC 105 is plunging edge-on into a neighboring galaxy, this is just a circumstance of perspective. NGC 105’s elongated neighbor is actually far more distant. Such visual associations are the result of our Earthly perspective and they occur frequently in astronomy.
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 observations in this image are from a vast collection of Hubble measurements examining nearby galaxies that contain two fascinating astronomical phenomena – Cepheid variable stars and cataclysmic supernova explosions. While these two phenomena may appear unrelated – one is a peculiar class of pulsating stars and the other is the explosion caused by the catastrophic death of a massive star – astronomers use both to measure the vast distances to astronomical objects.
Both Cepheids and supernovae have very predictable luminosities. Astronomers use these so-called “standard candles” to determine distances by comparing how bright these objects appear from Earth to their actual brightness. NGC 105 contains both supernovae and Cepheid variables, giving astronomers the opportunity to calibrate the two distance measurement techniques against one another.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Jones, A. Riess et al.
Acknowledgement: R. Colombari
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2201a/
Sweeping spiral arms extend from NGC 4536, littered with bright blue clusters of star formation and red clumps of hydrogen gas shining among dark lanes of dust. The galaxy’s shape may seem a little unusual, and that’s because it’s what’s known as an “intermediate galaxy”: not quite a barred spiral, but not exactly an unbarred spiral, either - a hybrid of the two.
NGC 4536 is also a starburst galaxy, in which star formation is happening at a tremendous rate that uses up the gas in the galaxy relatively quickly, by galactic standards. Starburst galaxies can happen due to gravitational interactions with other galaxies or - as seems to be the case for NGC 4536 - when gas is packed into a small region. The bar-like structure of NGC 4536 may be driving gas inwards toward the nucleus, giving rise to a crescendo of star formation in a ring around the nucleus. Starburst galaxies birth lots of hot blue stars that burn fast and die quickly in explosions that unleash intense ultraviolet light (visible in blue), turning their surroundings into glowing clouds of ionized hydrogen, called HII regions (visible in red).
NGC 4536 is approximately 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. It was discovered in 1784 by astronomer William Herschel. Hubble took this image of NGC 4536 as part of a project to study galactic environments to understand connections between young stars and cold gas, particularly star clusters and molecular clouds, throughout the local universe.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lee (Space Telescope Science Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #DwarfGalaxy #StarCluster #StarburstGalaxy #SpiralGalaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 4535, which is situated about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). Through a small telescope, this galaxy appears extremely faint, giving it the nickname ‘Lost Galaxy’. With a mirror spanning nearly eight feet (2.4 meters) across and its location above Earth’s light-obscuring atmosphere, Hubble can easily observe dim galaxies like NGC 4535 and pick out features like its massive spiral arms and central bar of stars.
The image features NGC 4535’s young star clusters, which dot the galaxy’s spiral arms. Glowing-pink clouds surround many of these bright-blue star groupings. These clouds, called H II (‘H-two’) regions, are a sign that the galaxy is home to especially young, hot, and massive stars that blaze with high-energy radiation. Such massive stars shake up their surroundings by heating their birth clouds with powerful stellar winds, eventually exploding as supernovae.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have imaged the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed circling a young star. For the first time in visible light, Hubble has revealed the disk is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, with wisps of material stretching much farther above and below the disk than astronomers have seen in any similar system. Strangely, more extended filaments are only visible on one side of the disk. The findings, which published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal, mark a new milestone for Hubble and shed light on how planets may form in extreme environments, as NASA’s missions lead humanity’s exploration of the universe and our place in it.
Located roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth, IRAS 23077+6707, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito,” spans nearly 400 billion miles — 40 times the diameter of our solar system to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt of cometary bodies. The disk obscures the young star within it, which scientists believe may be either a hot, massive star, or a pair of stars. And the enormous disk is not only the largest known planet-forming disk; it’s also shaping up to be one of the most unusual.
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard
A sideways spiral galaxy shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden), NGC 4388 is a resident of the Virgo galaxy cluster. This enormous cluster of galaxies contains more than a thousand members and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to the Milky Way.
NGC 4388 appears to tilt at an extreme angle relative to our point of view, giving us a nearly edge-on prospect of the galaxy. This perspective reveals a curious feature that wasn’t visible in a previous Hubble image of this galaxy released in 2016: a plume of gas from the galaxy’s nucleus, here seen billowing out from the galaxy’s disk toward the lower-right corner of the image. But where did this outflow come from, and why does it glow?
The answer likely lies in the vast stretches of space that separate the galaxies of the Virgo cluster. Though the space between galaxies appears empty, this space is occupied by hot wisps of gas called the intracluster medium. As NGC 4388 moves within the Virgo cluster, it plunges through the intracluster medium. Pressure from hot intracluster gas whisks away gas from within NGC 4388’s disk, causing it to trail behind as NGC 4388 moves.
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
This is a sparkling scene of star birth captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and radiation of nearby, massive, infant stars.
Called Pismis 24, this young star cluster resides in the core of the nearby Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Home to a vibrant stellar nursery and one of the closest sites of massive star birth, Pismis 24 provides rare insight into large and massive stars. Its proximity makes this region one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve.
At the heart of this glittering cluster is the brilliant Pismis 24-1. It is at the center of a clump of stars above the jagged orange peaks, and the tallest spire is pointing directly toward it. Pismis 24-1 appears as a gigantic single star, and it was once thought to be the most massive known star. Scientists have since learned that it is composed of at least two stars, though they cannot be resolved in this image. At 74 and 66 solar masses, respectively, the two known stars are still among the most massive and luminous stars ever seen.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #StarCluster
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy that’s hard to categorize. The galaxy in question is NGC 2775, which lies 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (the Crab). NGC 2775 sports a smooth, featureless center that is devoid of gas, resembling an elliptical galaxy. It also has a dusty ring with patchy star clusters, like a spiral galaxy. Which is it: spiral or elliptical — or neither?
Because we can only view NGC 2775 from one angle, it’s difficult to say for sure. Some researchers classify NGC 2775 as a spiral galaxy because of its feathery ring of stars and dust, while others classify it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have features common to both spiral and elliptical galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a glittering blue dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). The galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).
Mrk 178 is one of more than 1,500 Markarian galaxies. These galaxies get their name from the Armenian astrophysicist Benjamin Markarian, who compiled a list of galaxies that were surprisingly bright in ultraviolet light.
While the bulk of the galaxy is blue due to an abundance of young, hot stars with little dust shrouding them, Mrk 178 gets a red hue from a collection of rare massive Wolf–Rayet stars. These stars are concentrated in the brightest, reddish region near the galaxy’s edge. Wolf–Rayet stars cast off their atmospheres through powerful winds, and the bright emission lines from their hot stellar winds are etched upon the galaxy’s spectrum. Both ionized hydrogen and oxygen lines are particularly strong and appear as a red color in this photo.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Annibali, S. Hong
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a stormy and highly active spiral galaxy named NGC 1792. Located over 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Columba (the Dove), the bright glow of the galaxy’s center is offset by the flocculent and sparkling spiral arms swirling around it.
NGC 1792 is just as fascinating to astronomers as its chaotic look might imply. Classified as a starburst galaxy, it is a powerhouse of star formation, with spiral arms rich in star-forming regions. In fact, it is surprisingly luminous for its mass. The galaxy is close to a larger neighbor, NGC 1808, and astronomers think the strong gravitational interaction between the two stirred up the reserves of gas in this galaxy. The result is a torrent of star formation, concentrated on the side closest to its neighbor, where gravity has a stronger effect. NGC 1792 is a perfect target for astronomers seeking to understand the complex interactions between gas, star clusters, and supernovae in galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
Stars of all ages are on display in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the sparkling spiral galaxy called NGC 6000, located 102 million light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.
NGC 6000 has a glowing yellow center and glittering blue outskirts. These colors reflect differences in the average ages, masses, and temperatures of the galaxy’s stars. At the heart of the galaxy, the stars tend to be older and smaller. Less massive stars are cooler than more massive stars, and somewhat counterintuitively, cooler stars are redder, while hotter stars are bluer. Farther out along NGC 6000’s spiral arms, brilliant star clusters host young, massive stars that appear distinctly blue.
Hubble collected the data for this image while surveying the sites of recent supernova explosions in nearby galaxies. NGC 6000 hosted two recent supernovae: SN 2007ch in 2007 and SN 2010as in 2010. Using Hubble’s sensitive detectors, researchers can discern the faint glow of supernovae years after the initial explosion. These observations help constrain the masses of supernovae progenitor stars and can indicate if they had any stellar companions.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko; Acknowledgment: M. H. Özsaraç
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
Pismis 24, the star cluster seen here in an image released on Dec. 11, 2006, lies within the much larger emission nebula called NGC 6357, located about 8,000 light-years from Earth. The brightest object in the picture was once thought to be a single star with an incredibly large mass of 200 to 300 solar masses. That would have made it by far the most massive known star in the galaxy and would have put it considerably above the currently believed upper mass limit of about 150 solar masses for individual stars. Measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, however, discovered that Pismis 24-1 is actually two separate stars, and, in doing so, “halved” their mass to around 100-150 solar masses each.
Credit: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain); Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #nebula
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed Herbig-Haro 49/50, an outflow from a nearby still-forming star, in high-resolution near- and mid-infrared light. The intricate features of the outflow, represented in reddish-orange color, provide detailed clues about how young stars form and how their jet activity affects the environment around them. Like the wake of a speeding boat, the bow shocks in this image have an arc-like appearance as the fast-moving jet from the young star slams into the surrounding dust and gas. A chance alignment in this direction of the sky provides a beautiful juxtaposition of this nearby Herbig-Haro object with a more distant spiral galaxy in the background. Herbig-Haro 49/50 gives researchers insights into the early phases of the formation of low-mass stars similar to our own Sun. In this Webb image, blue represents light at 2.0-microns (F200W), cyan represents light at 3.3-microns (F335M), green is 4.4-microns (F444W), orange is 4.7-microns (F470N), and red is 7.7-microns (F770W).
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #star
NGC 1068 is a relatively nearby spiral galaxy containing a black hole at its center that is twice as massive as the Milky Way’s. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a million-mile-per-hour wind is being driven from NGC 1068’s black hole and lighting up the center of the galaxy in X-rays.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical/IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (HST and JWST); Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and N. Wolk
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASAChandra #Space #Chandra #Telescope #beautiful #space #science #astronomy #galaxy #supernova #Hubble #JWST #NASAWebb #NASAHubble
NGC 1569 Hubble Palette Credit: NASA/Hubble, Color/Effects thedemon-hauntedworld
Source by NathalieTachet
sportsheadsunblocked.com/2016/08/13/billions-and-billions...
Rich with detail, the spiral galaxy NGC 1309 shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. NGC 1309 is about 100 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.
This stunning Hubble image encompasses NGC 1309’s bluish stars, dark brown gas clouds, and pearly-white core, as well as hundreds of distant background galaxies. Nearly every smudge, streak, and blob of light in this image is an individual galaxy, some shining through less dense regions of NGC 1309 itself. The only exception to this extragalactic ensemble is a star near the top of the frame identified by its diffraction spikes. The star is positively neighborly at just a few thousand light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Galbany, S. Jha, K. Noll, A. Riess
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #GalaxyCluster #galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures incredible details in the dusty clouds of a star-forming factory called the Tarantula Nebula. Most of the nebulae Hubble images are in our galaxy, but this nebula is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region, not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs.
The Tarantula Nebula is home to the most massive stars known, some roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun. This image is very close to a rare type of star called a Wolf–Rayet star. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars that have lost their outer shell of hydrogen and are extremely hot and luminous, powering dense and furious stellar winds.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #GalaxyCluster #nebula
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy whose asymmetric appearance may be the result of a galactic tug of war. Located 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo, the spiral galaxy Messier 96 is the brightest of the galaxies in its group. The gravitational pull of its galactic neighbors may be responsible for Messier 96’s uneven distribution of gas and dust, asymmetric spiral arms, and off-center galactic core.
This asymmetric appearance is on full display in the new Hubble image that incorporates data from observations made in ultraviolet, near infrared, and visible/optical light. Earlier Hubble images of Messier 96 were released in 2015 and 2018. Each successive image added new data, building up a beautiful and scientifically valuable view of the galaxy.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, D. Calzetti
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
The light that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope collected to create this image reached the telescope after a journey of 250 million years. Its source was the spiral galaxy UGC 11397, which resides in the constellation Lyra (The Lyre). At first glance, UGC 11397 appears to be an average spiral galaxy: it sports two graceful spiral arms that are illuminated by stars and defined by dark, clumpy clouds of dust.
What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its center, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of our Sun grows. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show.
Material trapped by the black hole emits light from gamma rays to radio waves, and can brighten and fade without warning. But in some galaxies, including UGC 11397, thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397's actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust. This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a donut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. J. Koss, A. J. Barth
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
As part of ESA/Hubble's 35th anniversary celebrations, the European Space Agency (ESA) is sharing a new image series revisiting stunning, previously released Hubble targets with the addition of the latest Hubble data and new processing techniques.
ESA/Hubble published a new image of NGC 346 as the first installment in the series. Now, they are revisiting a fan-favorite galaxy with new image processing techniques. The new image reveals finer detail in the galaxy’s disk, as well as more background stars and galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope peers into the spiral galaxy NGC 1317 in the constellation Fornax, located more than 50 million light-years from Earth. Visible in this galaxy image is a bright blue ring that hosts hot, young stars. NGC 1317 is one of a pair, but its rowdy larger neighbor, NGC 1316, lies outside Hubble’s field of view. Despite the absence of its neighboring galaxy, this image finds NGC 1317 accompanied by two objects from very different parts of the universe. The bright point ringed with a crisscross pattern is a star from our own galaxy surrounded by diffraction spikes, whereas the redder elongated smudge is a distant galaxy lying far beyond NGC 1317.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
While it may appear as just another spiral galaxy among billions in the universe, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a galaxy with plenty to study. The galaxy, NGC 7456, is located over 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grus (the Crane).
This Hubble image reveals fine detail in the galaxy’s patchy spiral arms, followed by clumps of dark, obscuring dust. Blossoms of glowing pink are rich reservoirs of gas where new stars are forming, illuminating the clouds around them and causing the gas to emit this tell-tale red light. The Hubble observing program that collected this data focused on the galaxy’s stellar activity, tracking new stars, clouds of hydrogen, and star clusters to learn how the galaxy evolved through time.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the Milky Way’s many small satellite galaxies.
This view of dusty gas clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud is possible thanks to Hubble’s cameras, such as the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that collected the observations for this image. WFC3 holds a variety of filters, and each lets through specific wavelengths, or colors, of light. This image combines observations made with five different filters, including some that capture ultraviolet and infrared light that the human eye cannot see.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy #LargeMagellanicCloud
The subject of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is the stunning spiral galaxy NGC 5530. This galaxy is situated 40 million light-years away in the constellation Lupus, the Wolf, and classified as a ‘flocculent’ spiral, meaning its spiral arms are patchy and indistinct.
While some galaxies have extraordinarily bright centers that host a feasting supermassive black hole, the bright source near the center of NGC 5530 is not an active black hole but a star within our own galaxy, only 10,000 light-years from Earth. This chance alignment gives the appearance that the star is at the dense heart of NGC 5530.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image peers into the dusty recesses of the nearest massive star-forming region to Earth, the Orion Nebula (Messier 42, M42). Just 1,500 light-years away, the Orion Nebula is visible to the unaided eye below the three stars that form the ‘belt’ in the constellation Orion. The nebula is home to hundreds of newborn stars including the subject of this image: the protostars HOPS 150 and HOPS 153.
These protostars get their names from the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey, conducted with ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory. The object visible in the upper-right corner of this image is HOPS 150: it’s a binary star system where two young protostars orbit each other.
Extending across the left side of the image is a narrow, colorful outflow called a jet. This jet comes from the nearby protostar HOPS 153, which is out of the frame. HOPS 153 is significantly younger than its neighbor.
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, and T. Megeath
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #stars
The swirling spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 3285B, which resides 137 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Water Snake). Hydra has the largest area of the 88 constellations that cover the entire sky in a celestial patchwork. It’s also the longest constellation, stretching 100 degrees across the sky. It would take nearly 200 full Moons, placed side by side, to reach from one side of the constellation to the other.
NGC 3285B is a member of the Hydra I cluster, one of the largest galaxy clusters in the nearby universe. Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound to one another by gravity. The Hydra I cluster is anchored by two giant elliptical galaxies at its center. Each of these galaxies is about 150,000 light-years across, making them about 50% larger than our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #GalaxyCluster #galaxy
This graphic features data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of the Cassiopeia A (Cas A) supernova remnant that reveals that the star’s interior violently rearranged itself mere hours before it exploded. The main panel of this graphic is Chandra data that shows the location of different elements in the remains of the explosion: silicon (represented in red), sulfur (yellow), calcium (green) and iron (purple). The blue color reveals the highest-energy X-ray emission detected by Chandra in Cas A and an expanding blast wave. The inset reveals regions with wide ranges of relative abundances of silicon and neon. This data, plus computer modeling, reveal new insight into how massive stars like Cas A end their lives.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Meiji Univ./T. Sato et al.; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #GalaxyCluster #galaxy
The swirling, paint-like clouds in the darkness of space in this stunning image seem surreal, like a portal to another world opening before us. In fact, the subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is very real. We are seeing vast clouds of ionized atoms thrown into space by a dying star. This is a planetary nebula named Kohoutek 4-55, a member of the Milky Way galaxy situated just 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan).
Planetary nebulae are the spectacular final display at the end of a giant star’s life. Once a red giant star has exhausted its available fuel and shed its last layers of gas, its compact core will contract further, enabling a final burst of nuclear fusion. The exposed core reaches extremely hot temperatures, radiating ultraviolet light that energizes the enormous clouds of gas cast off by the star. The ultraviolet light ionizes atoms in the gas, making the clouds glow brightly. In this image, red and orange indicate nitrogen, green is hydrogen, and blue shows oxygen. Kohoutek 4-55 has an uncommon, multi-layered form: a faint layer of gas surrounds a bright inner ring, all wrapped in a broad halo of ionized nitrogen. The spectacle is bittersweet, as the brief phase of fusion in the core will end after only tens of thousands of years, leaving a white dwarf that will never illuminate the clouds around it again.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #PlanetaryNebula #nebula
Westerlund 2, a giant cluster of 3,000 stars, resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29. The Hubble Space Telescope pierced through the dusty veil shrouding the stellar nursery by observing near-infrared light, giving astronomers a clear view of the nebula and the dense concentration of stars in the central cluster. The cluster measures between 6 to 13 light-years across. The giant star cluster is only about 2 million years old and contains some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars.
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #StarCluster
The universe is a dusty place, as this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image featuring swirling clouds of gas and dust near the Tarantula Nebula reveals. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Tarantula Nebula is the most productive star-forming region in the nearby universe, home to the most massive stars known.
The nebula’s colorful gas clouds hold wispy tendrils and dark clumps of dust. This dust is different from ordinary household dust, which may include of bits of soil, skin cells, hair, and even plastic. Cosmic dust is often comprised of carbon or of molecules called silicates, which contain silicon and oxygen. The data in this image was part of an observing program that aims to characterize the properties of cosmic dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud and other nearby galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #TarantulaNebula #nebula
The spiral galaxy NGC 3596 is on display in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image that incorporates six different wavelengths of light. NGC 3596 is situated 90 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, the Lion. British astronomer Sir William Herschel first documented the galaxy in 1784.
NGC 3596 appears almost perfectly face-on when viewed from Earth, showcasing the galaxy’s neatly wound spiral arms. These bright arms hold concentrations of stars, gas, and dust that mark the area where star formation is most active, illustrated by the brilliant pink star-forming regions and young blue stars tracing NGC 3596’s arms.
What causes these spiral arms to form? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, partly because spiral galaxies are so diverse. Some have clear spiral arms, while others have patchy, feathery arms. Some have prominent bars across their centers, while others have compact, circular nuclei. Some have close neighbors, while others are isolated.
Early ideas of how spiral arms formed stumped astronomers with the ‘winding problem’. If a galaxy’s spiral arms are coherent structures, its arms would wind tighter and tighter as the galaxy spins, until the arms are no longer visible. Now, researchers believe that spiral arms represent a pattern of high-density and low-density areas rather than a physical structure. As stars, gas, and dust orbit within a galaxy’s disk, they pass in and out of the spiral arms. Much like cars moving through a traffic jam, these materials slow down and bunch up as they enter a spiral arm, before emerging and continuing their journey through the galaxy.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
A previously unexplored globular cluster glitters with multicolored stars in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. Globular clusters like this one, called ESO 591-12 or Palomar 8, are spherical collections of tens of thousands to millions of stars tightly bound together by gravity. Globular clusters generally form early in the galaxies’ histories in regions rich in gas and dust. Since the stars form from the same cloud of gas as it collapses, they typically hover around the same age. Strewn across this image of ESO 591-12 are a number of red and blue stars. The colors indicate their temperatures; red stars are cooler, while the blue stars are hotter.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Massari (INAF — Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #GlobularCluster
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have teamed up to identify a new possible example of a rare class of black holes. Called NGC 6099 HLX-1, this bright X-ray source seems to reside in a compact star cluster in a giant elliptical galaxy.
Just a few years after its 1990 launch, Hubble discovered that galaxies throughout the universe can contain supermassive black holes at their centers weighing millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun. In addition, galaxies also contain as many as millions of small black holes weighing less than 100 times the mass of the Sun. These form when massive stars reach the end of their lives.
Far more elusive are intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), weighing between a few hundred to a few 100,000 times the mass of our Sun. This not-too-big, not-too-small category of black holes is often invisible to us because IMBHs don’t gobble as much gas and stars as the supermassive ones, which would emit powerful radiation. They have to be caught in the act of foraging in order to be found. When they occasionally devour a hapless bypassing star — in what astronomers call a tidal disruption event— they pour out a gusher of radiation.
The newest probable IMBH, caught snacking in telescope data, is located on the galaxy NGC 6099’s outskirts at approximately 40,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center, as described in a new study in the Astrophysical Journal. The galaxy is located about 450 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, Yi-Chi Chang (National Tsing Hua University); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASAChandra #Space #Chandra #Telescope #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #blackhole #star
Read more about NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa.
Despite being only 10–20% as massive as the Milky Way galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud contains some of the most impressive nearby star-forming regions. The scene pictured here is on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula, the largest and most productive star-forming region in the local universe. At its center, the Tarantula Nebula hosts the most massive stars known, weighing roughly 200 times the mass of the Sun.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #TarantulaNebula
This is largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble overlapping snapshots that were challenging to stitch together. The galaxy is so close to us, that in angular size it is six times the apparent diameter of the full Moon, and can be seen with the unaided eye. For Hubble’s pinpoint view, that’s a lot of celestial real estate to cover. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars. That’s still a fraction of Andromeda’s population. And the stars are spread across about 2.5 billion pixels. The detailed look at the resolved stars will help astronomers piece together the galaxy’s past history that includes mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #AndromedaGalaxy
Between 2003 and 2004, @NASAHubble spent more than 11 days taking what would become known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a view of nearly 10,000 galaxies. In 2022, Webb took less than 24 hours to observe that same target in high-resolution.
Why are we revisiting this field? We don’t exactly know how galaxies became how they are today. With its sensitivity, Webb is helping astronomers hunt for the first galaxies and better understand star formation and other galactic properties in the early universe.
In addition, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field has long been studied by a variety of telescopes. Webb’s new data complements previous data sets by providing detailed information for just about all of the galaxies in this field, allowing scientists to piece together the bigger picture.
Read more: blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/04/12/webb-shows-areas-of-new-st...
This image: The capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera are on full display in this comparison between Hubble’s and Webb’s observation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The left, which demonstrates Hubble’s observation with its Wide Field Camera 3, required an exposure time of 11.3 days, while the right only took 0.83 days. Several areas within the Webb image reveal previously invisible, red galaxies.Download the full resolution from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Image description: A comparison between two images, one on the left and one on the right separated by a white line. The image on the left has a caption on the bottom that says, “Hubble UDF (exposure time: 11.3 days)”, while the image on the right has a caption on the bottom that says “Webb (exposure time: 0.83 days)”. The image on the left shows thousands of galaxies with many different colors. Most are orange and yellow while others are white and blue. Many of these galaxies appear as fuzzy ovals, but others look thin and long or have distinct spiral arms. Within the image is a yellow box, angled about 30 degrees off center, which contains a label on its bottom right that says “Webb’s field of view”. The image on the right shows a box with the same angle. Inside this box are many of the same galaxies seen in the box on the left in different colors. The orange galaxies on the left image are white or yellow on the right. There are a few galaxies spread throughout the right image that are clearer than those on the left.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a vibrant spiral galaxy called NGC 5042 resides about 48 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra (the water snake). The galaxy nicely fills the frame of this Hubble image, while a single, foreground star from the Milky Way shines with cross-shaped diffraction spikes near the galaxy’s edge toward the top, center of the image.
Hubble observed NGC 5042 in six wavelength bands from the ultraviolet to infrared to create this multicolored portrait. The galaxy’s cream-colored center is packed with ancient stars, and the galaxy’s spiral arms are decorated with patches of young, blue stars. The elongated yellow-orange objects scattered around the image are background galaxies far more distant than NGC 5042.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image zooms in on the feathery spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 45, which lies just 22 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Whale).
The portrait uses data drawn from two complementary observing programs. The first took a broad view of 50 nearby galaxies, leveraging Hubble’s ability to observe ultraviolet through visible into near-infrared light to study star formation in these galaxies. The second program examined many of the same nearby galaxies as the first, narrowing in on a particular wavelength of red light called H-alpha. Star-forming nebulae are powerful producers of H-alpha light, and several of these regions are visible across NGC 45 as bright pink-red patches.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti, R. Chandar; Acknowledgment: M. H. Özsaraç
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
Arp 105 is a dazzling ongoing merger between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy drawn together by gravity, characterized by a long, drawn out tidal tail of stars and gas more than 362,000 light-years long. The immense tail, which extends beyond this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, was pulled from the two galaxies by their gravitational interactions and is embedded with star clusters and dwarf galaxies. The distinctively shaped arrangement of galaxies and tail gives the grouping its nickname: The Guitar.
The gravitational dance between elliptical galaxy NGC 3561B and spiral galaxy NGC 3561A creates a wealth of fascinating colliding galaxy features. A long lane of dark dust emerging from the elliptical galaxy ends in, and may be feeding, a bright blue area of star formation on the base of the guitar known as Ambartsumian’s Knot. Ambartsumian’s Knot is a tidal dwarf galaxy, a type of star-forming system that develops from the debris in tidal arms of interacting galaxies.
Two more bright blue areas of star formation are obvious in the Hubble image at the edges of the distorted spiral galaxy. The region to the left in the spiral galaxy is likely very similar to Ambartsumian’s Knot, a knot of intense star formation triggered by the merger. The region to the right is still under investigation - it could be part of the collision, but its velocity and spectral data (indicating distance) are different from the rest of the system, so it may be a foreground galaxy.
Thin, faint tendrils of gas and dust are just barely visible stretching between and connecting the two galaxies. These tendrils are particularly interesting to astronomers since they may help define the timescale of the evolution of this collision.
Credit: NASA, ESA and M. West (Lowell Observatory); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #SpiralGalaxy
The spiral galaxy known as Messier 81 (M81) has a rosy tint in this June 1, 2007, composite image that incorporates data from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. Discovered by the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode in 1774, M81 is one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky. It is located 11.6 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major.
The galaxy’s spiral arms, which wind all the way down into its nucleus, are made up of young, bluish, hot stars formed in the past few million years. They also host a population of stars formed in an episode of star formation that started about 600 million years ago.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #NASASpitzer
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has scored big, earning not one, but nine rings! 🏈💍
The telescope has been investigating the gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1313424, aptly nicknamed the Bullseye. 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.
Check out the big play that made this happen!
Credit: NASA, ESA, Imad Pasha (Yale), Pieter van Dokkum (Yale)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
An open cluster of stars shines through misty, cocoon-like gas clouds in this Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 460.
NGC 460 is located in a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This particular region contains a number of young star clusters and nebulae of different sizes - all likely related to each other. The clouds of gas and dust can give rise to stars as portions of them collapse, and radiation and stellar winds from those hot, young bright stars in turn shape and compress the clouds, triggering new waves of star formation. The hydrogen clouds are ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, causing them to glow.
The NGC 460 star cluster resides in one of the youngest parts of this interconnected complex of stellar clusters and nebulae, which is also home to a number of O-type stars: the brightest, hottest and most massive of the normal, hydrogen-burning stars (called main-sequence stars) like our Sun. O-type stars are rare - out of more than 4 billion stars in the Milky Way, only about 20,000 are estimated to be O-type stars. The area that holds NGC 460, known as N83, may have been created when two hydrogen clouds in the region collided with one another, creating several O-type stars and nebulae.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (The Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #DwarfGalaxy #StarCluster #SmallMagellanicCloud #nebula