The somewhat amorphous spiral galaxy UGC 2890 appears side-on in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with bright foreground stars studding the image. This galaxy lies around 30 million light-years away in the constellation Camelopardalis. In 2009 astronomers spotted a catastrophically powerful supernova explosion in UGC 2890. While the supernova itself has long since faded from view, Hubble recently took a break from its regular observing schedule to inspect the aftermath of this explosive event.

A Type II supernova is a spectacularly energetic explosion that marks the violent death of a massive star. As it runs out of the elements necessary to fuel nuclear fusion, the core of a massive star flickers out and stops producing energy. With nothing to support the crushing force of gravity, the core of the star shrinks and then suddenly implodes, leaving the star’s outer layers to collapse inwards and rebound out into space as a supernova explosion.

This observation is one of many Hubble investigations of Type II supernovae. Astronomers turned to Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to explore the surroundings of Type II supernovae in the hope of discovering the ages and masses of stars in the neighbourhood. This will reveal insights into the types of stars that eventually create Type II supernovae, as well as revealing any stellar survivors of colossal supernova explosions.

[Image description: A spiral galaxy is seen edge-on and tilted at an angle. The body of the galaxy is blue and obscured by threads of dark red dust, and it is surrounded by a pale glow. Three stars with prominent cross-shaped diffraction spikes are very bright in the foreground. The background is dark and sparsely-covered in small stars.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick; CC BY 4.0

This week’s Hubble/ESA Picture of the Week features NGC 7678 — a galaxy located approximately 164 million light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus (The Winged Horse). With a diameter of around 115 000 light-years, this bright spiral galaxy is a similar size to our own galaxy (the Milky Way), and was discovered in 1784 by the German-British astronomer William Herschel.

The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a catalogue which was produced in 1966 by the American astronomer Halton Arp. NGC 7678 is among the 338 galaxies presented in this catalogue, which organises peculiar galaxies according to their unusual features. Catalogued here as Arp 28, this galaxy is listed together with six others in the group “spiral galaxies with one heavy arm”.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spectacular galaxy NGC 2442.

This galaxy was host to a supernova explosion, known as SN2015F, that was created by a white dwarf star. The white dwarf was part of a binary star system and syphoned mass from its companion, eventually becoming too greedy and taking on more than it could handle. This unbalanced the star and triggered runaway nuclear fusion that eventually led to an intensely violent supernova explosion.

SN2015F was spotted in March 2015 in the galaxy named NGC 2442, nicknamed the Meathook Galaxy owing to its extremely asymmetrical and irregular shape. The supernova shone brightly for quite some time and was easily visible from Earth through even a small telescope until later that summer.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Smartt et al.; CC BY 4.0

The lazily winding spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 5921 snake across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies approximately 80 million light-years from Earth, and much like our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a prominent bar. Roughly half of all spiral galaxies are thought to contain bars, and these bars affect their parent galaxies by fuelling star formation and affecting the motion of stars and interstellar gas.

Appropriately, given NGC 5921’s serpentine spiral arms, this galaxy resides in the constellation Serpens in the northern celestial hemisphere. Serpens is the only one of the 88 modern constellations to consist of two unconnected regions — Serpens Caput and Serpens Cauda. These two regions — whose names mean the Serpent’s Head and the Serpent’s Tail, respectively — are separated by Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer.

The scientific study behind this image was also split into two parts — observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and observations from the ground-based Gemini Observatory. These two observatories joined forces to better understand the relationship between galaxies like NGC 5921 and the supermassive black holes they contain. Hubble’s contribution to the study was to determine the masses of stars in the galaxies and also to take measurements that help calibrate the observations from Gemini. Together, the Hubble and Gemini observations provided astronomers with a census of nearby supermassive black holes in a diverse variety of galaxies.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Walsh; CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: R. Colombari

This image shows comet Leonard streaming through the sky on the morning of 7 December 2021, taken by ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC), part of the Agency’s Planetary Defence Office, using the Calar Alto Schmidt telescope in Spain.

By superimposing a ‘stack’ of 90 images each five seconds ‘long’, the comet is revealed whizzing past background stars which appear here as colourful streaks going from green to red to blue – colours chosen to signify the three different filters used to observe Leonard.

Centred around the comet’s bright nucleus, these artificial colours come together to create a brilliant white glow of the nucleus, while the green-bluish hue around it is true-to-life, the typical colour emitted by comets due to their chemical composition.

Learn more.

Credits: ESA/NEOCC

It is now widely accepted amongst astronomers that an important aspect of how galaxies evolve is the way they interact with one another. Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery.

The subject of this image is named Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair that is composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top). If you’re interested in learning more about Seyfert galaxies, you can read about the Seyfert galaxy NGC 5728 here. Interestingly, both of the galaxies comprising Arp 282 have monumentally energetic cores, known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), although it is difficult to tell that from this image. This is actually rather fortunate, because if the full emission of two AGNs was visible in this image, then it would probably obscure the beautifully detailed tidal interactions occurring between NGC 169 and IC 1559. Tidal forces occur when an object’s gravity causes another object to distort or stretch. The direction of the tidal forces will be away from the lower-mass object and towards the higher mass object. When two galaxies interact, gas, dust and even entire solar systems will be drawn away from one galaxy towards the other by these tidal forces. This process can actually be seen in action in this image — delicate streams of matter have formed, visibly linking the two galaxies.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS; CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

NGC 4666 takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This majestic spiral galaxy lies about 80 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, and is undergoing a particularly intense episode of star formation. Astronomers refer to galaxies which are forming stars anomalously quickly as starburst galaxies. NGC 4666’s starburst is thought to be due to gravitational interactions with its unruly neighbours — including the nearby galaxy NGC 4668 and a dwarf galaxy.

NGC 4666’s burst of star formation is driving an unusual form of extreme galactic weather known as a superwind — a gigantic transfer of gas from the bright central heart of the galaxy out into space. This superwind is the result of driving winds from short-lived massive stars formed during NGC 4666’s starburst as well as spectacularly energetic supernova explosions. Two such supernova explosions have been seen in NGC 4666 within the last decade — one in 2014 and the other in 2019. The star which led to the 2019 supernova was recently determined to be 19 times as massive as our Sun!

At peak, supernovae are often the brightest sources of light in their galaxies, shining so bright that they can be seen clear across the Universe. The 2014 supernova in NGC 4666 is still active in this image, but more than 900 days after it peaked, the supernova has faded from its former glory and looks like just one more star in this busy galaxy.

Though the torrent of superheated gas emanating from NGC 4666 is truly vast in scale — extending for tens of thousands of light-years — it is invisible in this image. The superwind’s extremely high temperature makes it stand out as a luminous plume in x-ray or radio observations, but it doesn’t show up at the visible wavelengths imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, O. Graur; CC BY 4.0 - Acknowledgement: L. Shatz

Europe’s next step towards exploring Mars hand-in-hand with NASA took place this week with a drop of a first sample tube, imaged above.

The Mars Perseverance Rover deposited the chalk-size core of igneous rock, taken from a region of Mars’ Jezero Crater in January 2022, that could be considered for a trip to Earth as part of the joint ESA-NASA Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign.

The MSR campaign is made of several missions to return the first scientifically selected samples from the surface of another planet to Earth.

The plan is this: NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which has scouted 13 kilometres of the martian surface and acquired 17 rock and regolith samples and one atmospheric sample since its arrival in 2021, will deliver samples to the NASA Sample Retrieval lander (SRL). The SRL is quipped with an ESA 2.5 m Sample Transfer Arm and a rocket for launching the sample container into martian orbit. Once there, an ESA spacecraft will capture the container and bring it safely to Earth.

The backup plan is to create a depot of samples by early 2023, should the rover be unable to deliver the samples itself to lander in 2030. This reconfiguration of the campaign now includes two recovery helicopters that will be deployed from the lander to fetch the tubes.

The first of the 10 tubes that will make up the backup depot was deposited at a designated site called ‘Three Forks,” a carefully selected patch of the martian surface. Dropping the sample is a well orchestrated process whereby Perseverance retrieves the sample from its belly, inspects it with an internal camera, and finally drops it from roughly 90 centimeters onto the designated site. The process took the rover an hour.

Mission engineers not only needed to confirm the drop but also inspect the position of the tube using the camera on the rover’s robotic arm to ensure the tube landed on its side rather than its end and that it hadn’t rolled into the path of a rover wheel.

“Choosing the first depot on Mars makes this exploration campaign very real and tangible. Now we have a place to revisit with samples waiting for us there,” says David Parker, ESA’s director of Human and Robotic Exploration.

For all of the samples acquired so far, Perseverance always obtained two samples from each Mars rock – one sample to be left on the surface in the backup depot, and a second sample that is held within the belly of the rover to be directly transferred to NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander.

“The first depot of Mars samples can be considered as a major risk mitigation step for the Mars Sample Return campaign,” points out David.

Watch a short animation featuring key moments of the Mars Sample Return campaign: from landing on Mars and securing the sample tubes to launching them off the surface and ferrying them back to Earth.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

This image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 3254, observed using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). WFC3 has the capacity to observe ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light, and this image is a composite of observations taken in the visible and infrared. In this image, NGC 3254 looks like a typical spiral galaxy, viewed side-on. However, NGC 3254 has a fascinating secret that it is hiding in plain sight — it is a Seyfert galaxy, meaning that it has an extraordinarily active core, known as an active galactic nucleus, which releases as much energy as the rest of the galaxy put together.

Seyfert galaxies are not rare — about 10% of all galaxies are thought to be Seyfert galaxies. They belong to the class of “active galaxies” — galaxies that have supermassive black holes at their centres that are actively accreting material, which releases vast amounts of radiation as it is accreted. There is a second, far more active, type of active galaxy that is known as a quasar. The active cores of Seyfert galaxies, such as NGC 3254, are brightest when observed in light outside the visible spectrum. At other wavelengths, this image would look very different, with the galaxy’s core shining extremely brightly.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0

The Ariane 5 launch vehicle liftoff for flight VA261 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 5 July at 23:00 BST (6 July at 00:00 CEST). Flight VA261 carried two payloads into space – the German space agency DLR’s experimental communications satellite Heinrich Hertz and the French communications satellite Syracuse 4b. The flight is the 117th and final mission for Ariane 5, a series which began in 1996.

Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured this view of New York City on 4 February 2021. While making for a dreamy postcard, the recent snow storm was classified as 'major', disrupting public transport and schools.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The magnificent central bar of NGC 2217 (also known as AM 0619-271) shines bright in the constellation of Canis Major (The Greater Dog), in this new image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Roughly 65 million light-years from Earth, this barred spiral galaxy is a similar size to our Milky Way at 100 thousand light-years across. Many stars are concentrated in its central region forming the luminous bar, surrounded by a set of tightly wound spiral arms.

The central bar in these types of galaxies plays an important role in their evolution, helping to funnel gas from the disc into the middle of the galaxy. The transported gas and dust are then either formed into new stars or fed to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's centre. Weighing from a few hundred to over a billion times the mass of our Sun, supermassive black holes are present in almost all large galaxies.

This image was colourised with data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0

– Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features NGC4826 — a spiral galaxy located 17 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair). This galaxy is often referred to as the “Black Eye”, or “Evil Eye”, galaxy because of the dark band of dust that sweeps across one side of its bright nucleus.

NGC4826 is known by astronomers for its strange internal motion. The gas in the outer regions of this galaxy and the gas in its inner regions are rotating in opposite directions, which might be related to a recent merger. New stars are forming in the region where the counter rotating gases collide.

This galaxy was first discovered in 1779 by the English astronomer Edward Pigott.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team; CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

The galaxy JW100 features prominently in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with streams of star-forming gas dripping from the disc of the galaxy like streaks of fresh paint. These tendrils of bright gas are formed by a process called ram pressure stripping, and their resemblance to dangling tentacles has led astronomers to refer to JW100 as a ‘jellyfish’ galaxy. It is located in the constellation Pegasus, over 800 million light-years away.

Ram pressure stripping occurs when galaxies encounter the diffuse gas that pervades galaxy clusters. As galaxies plough through this tenuous gas it acts like a headwind, stripping gas and dust from the galaxy and creating the trailing streamers that prominently adorn JW100. The bright elliptical patches in the image are other galaxies in the cluster that hosts JW100.

As well as JW100’s bright tendrils, this image also contains a remarkably bright area of diffuse light towards the top of this image which contains two bright blotches at its core. This is the core of IC 5338, the brightest galaxy in the galaxy cluster, known as a cD galaxy. It’s not unusual for cD galaxies to exhibit multiple nuclei, as they are thought to grow by consuming smaller galaxies, the nuclei of which can take a long time to be absorbed. The bright points of light studding its outer fringes are a rich population of globular clusters.

This observation took advantage of the capabilities of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, and is part of a sequence of observations designed to explore star formation in the tendrils of jellyfish galaxies. These tendrils represent star formation under extreme conditions, and could help astronomers understand the process of star formation elsewhere in the universe.

[Image description: A thin spiral galaxy is seen edge-on in the lower right. Its bulge and arms are very bright, mixing reddish and bluish light. Patchy blue trails extend below it, resembling tentacles, made from star-forming regions. Six small, reddish elliptical galaxies are scattered around. A very large elliptical galaxy with two cores sits by the top of the frame.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team; CC BY 4.0

A fortnight after the 21 June winter solstice in Antarctica, the crew at Concordia Research Station are slowly welcoming the return of sunlight. This photo was taken by ESA-sponsored medical doctor Nick Smith on 1 July at noon.

The 12-member crew at Concordia, located at the mountain plateau called Dome C, have spent the last few months in complete darkness: the sun disappeared in May and will not be fully visible again until mid-August. This image of high noon signals the beginning of the end of winter on the remote continent.

Confined in extreme conditions, the crew at Concordia – one of three Antarctic stations inhabited all year long – find solace in traditions. Midwinter often includes well wishes from other Antarctic and sub-Antarctic stations as well as communal projects. The crew this year brewed their own beer to mark the occasion.

As well as offering around nine months of complete isolation, Concordia’s location at 3233 m altitude means the crew experience chronic hypobaric hypoxia – lack of oxygen in the brain. Temperatures can drop to –80°C in the winter, with a yearly average of –50°C. The temperature at the time of this image was –65°C, with wind chill at about –80°C.

As a station set in Earth’s harshest space, Concordia is an ideal stand-in for studying the human psychological and physiological effects of extreme cold, isolation and darkness.

Nick is working on seven experiments, looking in general at the effects of isolated, confinement and extreme environment, analogous to a lunar or martian station, on mindfulness, cognition, risk taking, decision making, immune systems, stress, eye health, sexual security, and social dynamics. He has collected many samples and questionnaires over the past nine months.

The crew are headed for the home stretch of their Antarctic residency which will bring not only sunlight but also fresh crew. Researchers arriving for the summer campaign means a lot of preparatory work for the current crew.

In the next few weeks, they will need to plough the skiway, remove snow around the station, deep clean, and in the case of Nick, prepare his samples for return to Europe.

Follow the adventures at Concordia on the Chronicles from Concordia blog.

Credits: ESA/IPEV/PNRA–N. Smith

The first-of-its-kind complement of instruments dubbed the ‘space storm hunter’ hangs out in its new location outside the International Space Station in this image taken by on of the Station’s external cameras.

The Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor, or ASIM for short, measures electric events in Earth’s upper atmosphere with cameras, photometers and X- and gamma-ray detectors.

Last week ASIM was switched off and moved by robotic arm to another spot outside the Columbus module to make room for an American payload. Now in its new location, the instrument is being activated and so far things are going well.

From its new vantage point, just next to its current one, ASIM is pointing in a different direction, slightly more towards the horizon instead of straight down. This will help researchers work out how much the atmosphere at different altitudes influences the processes of electrical discharges. It’s like viewing a firework display: one can enjoy the shapes more from the side than if one is just below the display!

Though designed to look for electrical discharges born in stormy weather conditions in Earth’s upper atmosphere, ASIM recently detected a unique gamma-ray burst from outer space.

The spurt turned out to be from an explosive giant flare from a magnetar located 10 million light-years away in a distant galaxy. Magnetars are a special type of neutron star – the collapsed core of what was once a supergiant star. This fortuitous observation was published in the December issue of Nature magazine.

ASIM was built by Danish company Terma, the Danish Technical University, the University of Bergen in Norway and the University of Valencia in Spain for the European Space Agency.

Credits: ESA/NASA

This spectacular image features the spiral galaxy IC 5332, taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

The image shows the spiral galaxy in unprecedented detail thanks to observations from its Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). IC 5332 lies over 29 million light-years from Earth, and has a diameter of roughly 66 000 light-years, making it a little larger than the Milky Way. It is notable for being almost perfectly face-on with respect to Earth, allowing us to admire the symmetrical sweep of its spiral arms.

MIRI is the only Webb instrument that is sensitive to the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum (specifically in the 5 µm – 28 µm wavelength range); Webb’s other instruments all operate in the near-infrared. Contributed under both ESA and NASA leadership, MIRI is the first instrument that delivers mid-infrared images that are sharp enough to be easily matched to Hubble’s view at shorter wavelengths.

One of MIRI’s most remarkable features is that it operates 33 °C below the rest of the observatory at the frosty temperature of –266 °C. That means that MIRI operates in an environment only 7 °C warmer than absolute zero, which is the lowest possible temperature according to the laws of thermodynamics. MIRI requires this frigid environment in order for its highly specialised detectors to function correctly, and it has a dedicated active cooling system to ensure that its detectors are kept at the correct temperature.

It is worth noting just how challenging it is to obtain observations in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The mid-infrared is incredibly difficult to observe from Earth as much of it is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, and heat from Earth’s atmosphere further complicates things. Hubble could not observe the mid-infrared region as its mirrors were not cool enough, meaning that infrared radiation from the mirrors themselves would have dominated any attempted observations. The extra effort made to ensure that MIRI’s detectors had the freezing environment necessary to operate properly is evident in this stunning image.

This extravagantly detailed mid-infrared image is juxtaposed here with a beautiful ultraviolet and visible-light image of the same galaxy, created using data collected by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Some differences are immediately obvious. The Hubble image shows dark regions that seem to separate the spiral arms, whereas the Webb image shows more of a continual tangle of structures that echo the spiral arms’ shape. This difference is due to the presence of dusty regions in the galaxy. Ultraviolet and visible light are far more prone to being scattered by interstellar dust than infrared light. Therefore dusty regions can be identified easily in the Hubble image as the darker regions that much of the galaxy’s ultraviolet and visible light has not been able to travel through. Those same dusty regions are no longer dark in the Webb image, however, as the mid-infrared light from the galaxy has been able to pass through them. Different stars are visible in the two images, which can be explained because certain stars shine brighter in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared regimes respectively. The images complement one another in a remarkable way, each telling us more about IC 5332’s structure and composition.

MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST and PHANGS-HST Teams; CC BY 4.0

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other.

Astronomers investigated NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. They scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging.

Hubble’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths — particularly with Wide Field Camera 3— have made it an indispensable tool for understanding starbirth and the origin of exoplanetary systems. In particular, Hubble was crucial to investigations of the proplyds around newly born stars in the Orion Nebula. The new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s unprecedented observational capabilities at infrared wavelengths will complement Hubble observations by allowing astronomers to peer through the dusty envelopes around newly born stars and investigate the faintest, earliest stages of starbirth.

[Image description: Clouds of gas cover the entire view, in a variety of bold colours. In the centre the gas is brighter and very textured, resembling dense smoke. Around the edges it is more sparse and faint. Several small, bright blue stars are scattered over the nebula.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO, O. De Marco; CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

This image taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows one of a total of 19 galaxies targeted for study by the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) collaboration. Nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 1433 takes on a completely new look when observed by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

NGC 1433’s spiral arms are littered with evidence of extremely young stars releasing energy and, in some cases, blowing out the gas and dust of the interstellar medium they plough into. Areas that once appeared dark and dim in optical imaging light up under Webb’s infrared eye, as clumps of dust and gas in the interstellar medium absorb the light from forming stars and emit it back out in the infrared.

Webb’s image of NGC1433 is a dramatic display of the role that dynamic processes within the forming stars, dust, and gas play in the larger structure of an entire galaxy.

At the centre of the galaxy, a tight, bright core featuring a unique double ring structure shines in exquisite detail, revealed by Webb’s extreme resolution. In this case, that double ring is actually tightly wrapped spiral arms that wind into an oval shape along the galaxy’s bar axis.

NGC 1433 is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, a galaxy relatively close to Earth that has a bright, active core. The brightness and lack of dust in the MIRI image of NGC 1433 could hint at a recent merger or even collision with another galaxy.

In the image of NGC 1433, blue, green, and red were assigned to Webb’s MIRI data at 7.7, 10 and 11.3, and 21 microns (the F770W, F1000W and F1130W, and F2100W filters, respectively).

MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in partnership with the University of Arizona.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Lee (NOIRLab), A. Pagan (STScI)

This astronomical portrait from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showcases an edge-on view of the majestic spiral galaxy UGC 11537. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 has captured the tightly wound spiral arms swirling around the heart of UGC 11537 at infrared and visible wavelengths, showing both the bright bands of stars and the dark clouds of dust threading throughout the galaxy.

UGC 11537 is 230 million light-years away in the constellation Aquila, and lies close to the plane of the Milky Way. Being so close to the starry band of the Milky Way means that foreground stars from our own galaxy have crept into the image — the two prominent stars in front of UGC 11537 are interlopers from within the Milky Way. These bright foreground stars are surrounded by diffraction spikes — imaging artifacts caused by starlight interacting with Hubble’s inner structure.

This image came from a set of observations designed to help astronomers weigh supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. The combination of Hubble’s sharp-eyed observations and data from ground-based telescopes allowed astronomers to make detailed models of the mass of stars in these galaxies, which in turn helps constrain the mass of supermassive black holes.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Seth; CC BY 4.0

This unusual lenticular galaxy, known as NGC 1947, has lost almost all the gas and dust from its signature spiral arms, which used to orbit around its centre. Discovered almost 200 years ago by James Dunlop, a Scottish-born astronomer who later studied the sky from Australia, NGC 1947 can only be seen from the southern hemisphere, in the constellation Dorado (The Dolphinfish).

Residing around 40 million light-years away from Earth, this galaxy shows off its structure by backlighting its remaining faint gas and dust disc with millions of stars. In this picture, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the faint remnants of the galaxy’s spiral arms can still be made out in the stretched thin threads of dark gas encircling it. Without most of its star-forming material, it is unlikely that many new stars will be born within NGC 1947, leaving this galaxy to continue fading with time.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Rosario; CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: L. Shatz

First discovered in 1798 by German-English astronomer William Hershel, NGC 613 is a galaxy which lies in the southern constellation of Sculptor 67 million light-years away.

Featured here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 613 is a lovely example of a barred spiral galaxy. It is easily distinguishable as such because of its well defined central bar and long arms, which spiral loosely around its nucleus. As revealed by surveys, about two thirds of spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy, contain a bar.

Recent studies have shown that bars are more common in galaxies now than they were in the past, which gives us important clues about galaxy formation and evolution.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, G. Folatelli; CC BY 4.0

This Picture of the Week showcases the emission nebula NGC 2313. The bright star V565 — surrounded by four prominent diffraction spikes — illuminates a silvery, fan-shaped veil of gas and dust, while the right half of this image is obscured by a dense cloud of dust. Nebulae with similar shapes — a star accompanied by a bright fan of gas — were once referred to as cometary nebulae, though the name is no longer used.

The language that astronomers use changes as we become better acquainted with the Universe, and astronomical history is littered with now-obsolete phrases to describe objects in the night sky, such as “spiral nebulae” for spiral galaxies or “inferior planets” for Mercury and Venus.

While modern astronomical terminology has become steadily more precise, the nature of objects in astronomical exposures can still occasionally puzzle astronomers. For example, if you look very closely, you can see a faint bluish streak across the centre of this image to the bottom right of the blue region. This could be an asteroid, but seems to be travelling far too quickly for such an object — making this one of the remaining mysteries of the night sky.

Credits: ESA/Hubble, R. Sahai; CC BY 4.0

The James Webb Space Telescope is aligned across all four of its science instruments, as seen in a previous engineering image showing the observatory’s full field of view. Now, we take a closer look at that same image, focusing on Webb’s coldest instrument: the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI.

The MIRI test image (at 7.7 microns) shows part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way provided a dense star field to test Webb’s performance.

Here, a close-up of the MIRI image is compared to a past image of the same target taken with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera (at 8.0 microns). The retired Spitzer was the first observatory to provide high-resolution images of the near- and mid-infrared Universe. Webb, by virtue of its significantly larger primary mirror and improved detectors, will allow us to see the infrared sky with improved clarity, enabling even more discoveries.

For example, Webb’s MIRI image shows the interstellar gas in unprecedented detail. Here, you can see the emission from ‘polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons’ – molecules of carbon and hydrogen that play an important role in the thermal balance and chemistry of interstellar gas. When Webb is ready to begin science observations, studies such as these with MIRI will help give astronomers new insights into the birth of stars and protoplanetary systems.

In the meantime, the Webb team has begun the process of setting up and testing Webb’s instruments to begin science observations this summer. Today at 17:00 CEST, Webb experts will preview these next two months of instrument preparations in a teleconference for media. Listen to the audio stream live at nasa.gov/live.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and CSA. MIRI is part of Europe’s contribution to the Webb mission. It is a partnership between Europe and the USA; the main partners are ESA, a consortium of nationally funded European institutes, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech and NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

Saturn is famous for its bright, glorious rings but in this picture, taken during Saturn's 2009 equinox, the rings are cast in a different light as sunlight hits the rings edge-on.

The equinox is a point in a planet's orbit where the Sun shines directly overhead at the equator. It occurs twice per orbit and on Earth it happens in March and September. At the equinox, day and night are almost equal and the Sun rises due east and sets due west. This year, for northern hemisphere dwellers, the spring equinox occurs on 20 March.

Further afield, the international Cassini mission captured a Saturnian equinox for the first time on 12 August 2009. Saturn's equinoxes occur approximately every 15 Earth years and the next one will take place on 6 May 2025.

When Saturn's equinox is viewed from Earth, the rings are seen edge-on and appear as a thin line – sometimes giving the illusion they’ve disappeared. In this image however, Cassini had a vantage point of 20 degrees above the ring plane, and viewed the planet from a distance of 847,000 kilometres. Its wide angle camera took 75 exposures over eight hours, which were then aligned and combined to create this mosaic.

As the Sun is striking the rings straight on, rather than illuminating them from above or below, the shadows cast by the rings onto the planet are compressed into a single narrow band on the planet.

The rings also appear darker than usual. This can cause out-of-plane structures to look brighter than normal and then cast shadows across the rings. These Saturnian shadow puppets only appear a few months before and after the equinox. The shadows that Cassini saw revealed new ‘mountains’ in the rings, and also discovered previously hidden moonlets. Radial markings known as spokes are also visible on the B ring on the right side of the image.

Several moons are also visible in the mosaic: Janus (lower left), Epimetheus (middle bottom), Pandora (just outside the rings on the right), and Atlas (inside the thin F ring on the right).

Cassini explored the Saturn system for 13 years. It is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency. This image was first published in September 2009; read the full caption for more information and imaging details.

Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This unusual view of the Moon was captured during Friday’s total lunar eclipse from ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid in Spain, at 23:03 CEST.

The unprocessed image was taken with a Canon EOS 550D attached to a 20 cm aperture Celestron Newtonian CG8, with an exposure time of one second (ISO 1600).

During a lunar eclipse the Earth moves between the Sun and the Moon, blocking the light that would usually illuminate our orbiting neighbour’s surface. Instead, the reddish-orange-brown hue arises from refracted sunlight passing through the Earth’s atmosphere.

It is the same mechanism responsible for sunrises and sunsets. In fact, the red hue during a total lunar eclipse arises from the refracted light from all the sunrises and sunsets taking place at the same time around the world along the day-night boundary at that moment on Earth, projected on to the Moon’s surface.

If you were lucky enough to see the event from a vantage point on the Moon’s surface, you’d see a red ring around Earth, glowing with the light of our planet’s sunrises and sunsets – quite a sight in store for future lunar explorers, although they would have to face the rapid change in temperature as Earth’s shadow races across the surface!

The conditions in Earth’s atmosphere at the time of the eclipse – dust particles and clouds for example – can have an effect on the shade of red. Although not a scientific term, the term ‘blood moon’ is commonly used to describe the totally eclipsed red-coloured Moon.

Friday’s event was the longest eclipse of the 21st century, with totality – the time in which the Earth’s shadow completely engulfs the Moon’s surface – lasting for 103 minutes.

Missed this event? Lunar eclipses can occur up to five times a year, so there will be plenty more opportunities in the future. Furthermore, a solar eclipse always occurs about two weeks before or after a lunar eclipse. To see if you can view the partial solar eclipse coming up on 11 August, check Time Date website, which provides useful information on astronomical phenomena like this.

For more images of the recent total lunar eclipse from ESA’s astronomers in Spain, visit the CESAR (Cooperation through Education in Science and Astronomy Research) website.

Credits: ESA/CESAR–M.Castillo

On 21 January, a foreign body crashed to Earth causing a cascade of bright light to trail through the sky.

The fleeting flash was a fireball, defined as a meteor brighter than the planet Venus. Such bright meteors are caused as small asteroids strike the atmosphere, entirely or almost entirely burning up due to friction, sometimes suddenly exploding.

Every day, roughly 54 tonnes of extra-terrestrial material reaches Earth, including interplanetary dust, meteoroids and asteroids. Fireballs like this one are estimated to strike Earth hundreds of times every year, however not all are caught on camera or shine so brightly.

From the brightness of this fireball, around the time of a full moon, experts have deduced that the original object could have ranged from tens of centimetres to a metre in size, depending on its entry speed, composition and other characteristics.

This impressive shot was captured by photographer Chris Small at the seaside resort town of Bude, northeast Cornwall, England, at 23:24 UTC.

"I see a lot of meteors due to spending so long shooting the night sky, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that before!" says Chris.

"It was incredible, and lit up the entire coast almost as bright as daytime for a few seconds. There were beautiful green and blue colours."

While the foreground is filled with lobster pots used by local fishermen, the background is lit up with this green-blue tinge, revealing the presence of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. As the air surrounding the burning ball heats up, atoms become ‘excited’, with oxygen emitting light at a frequency of about 558 nm – in the blue-green part of the visible spectrum.

This colourful effect is also the reason for the beautiful aurorae at Earth’s poles, caused as charged particles from the Sun strike and excite atoms in the upper atmosphere.

The fireball in this image was spotted by at least five observers across the UK, who reported it to the International Meteor Organization – an organisation set up to collect meteor observations from around the world.

A new ESA warning system called NEMO (NEar-real time MOnitor) also picked up the event shortly after it happened. The NEMO system tracks social media activity to build a near real-time picture of fireball events around the globe, and is part of the Agency's Planetary Defence Office.

Find more of Chris' photography on his website, Ocean And Earth Photography.

Credits: Chris Small

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 appearing as an island of tranquillity in this image, UGC 12295 played host to a catastrophically violent explosion — a supernova — that was first detected in 2015. This supernova prompted two different teams of astronomers to propose Hubble observations of UGC 12295 that would sift through the wreckage of this vast stellar explosion.

Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars, and are responsible for forging many of the elements found here on Earth. The first team of astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to examine the detritus left behind by the supernova in order to better understand the evolution of matter in our Universe.

The second team of astronomers also used WFC3 to explore the aftermath of UGC 12295’s supernova, but their investigation focused on returning to the sites of some of the best-studied nearby supernovae. Hubble’s keen vision can reveal lingering traces of these energetic events, shedding light on the nature of the systems that host supernovae.

[Image Description: A broad spiral galaxy seen directly face-on. It has two bright spiral arms that extend from a bar, which shines from the very centre. Additional fainter arms branch off from these, studded with bright blue patches of star formation. Small, distant galaxies are dotted around it, on a dark background.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko, J. Lyman; CC BY 4.0

The jellyfish galaxy JO206 trails across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showcasing a colourful star-forming disc surrounded by a pale, luminous cloud of dust. A handful of bright stars with criss-cross diffraction spikes stand out against an inky black backdrop at the bottom of the image. JO206 lies over 700 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, and this image of the galaxy is the sixth and final instalment in a series of observations of jellyfish galaxies. Some of Hubble's other observations of these peculiar galaxies — which range from grandiose to ghostly — are available here.

Jellyfish galaxies are so-called because of their resemblance to their aquatic namesakes. In this image, the disc of JO206 is trailed by long tendrils of bright star formation that stretch towards the bottom right of this image, just as jellyfish trail tentacles behind them. The tendrils of jellyfish galaxies are formed by the interaction between galaxies and the intra-cluster medium, a tenuous superheated plasma that pervades galaxy clusters. As galaxies move through galaxy clusters they ram into the intracluster medium, which strips gas from the galaxies and draws it into the long tendrils of star formation.

The tentacles of jellyfish galaxies give astronomers a unique opportunity to study star formation under extreme conditions, far from the influence of the main disc of the galaxy. Surprisingly, Hubble revealed that there are no striking differences between star formation in the discs of jellyfish galaxies and star formation in their tentacles, which suggests the environment of newly-formed stars has only a minor influence on their formation.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy that is tilted partially toward us. Its inner disc is bright and colourful, with bluish and reddish spots of star formation throughout the arms. An outer disc of pale, dim dust surrounds it. It has many arms, which are being pulled away from the disc, down and to the right. They stretch into long, faint trails that cross the image. The background is dark and mostly empty, with three bright stars.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team; CC BY 4.0

Space Science Image of the Week:

New stars are the lifeblood of our Galaxy, and there is enough material revealed by this Herschel Herschel infrared image to build stars for millions of years to come.

Situated 8000 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula – latin for little fox – the region in the image is known as Vulpecula OB1. It is a ‘stellar association’ in which a batch of truly giant ‘OB’ stars is being born.

The vast quantities of ultraviolet and other radiation emitted by these stars is compressing the surrounding cloud, causing nearby regions of dust and gas to begin the collapse into more new stars. In time, this process will ‘eat’ its way through the cloud, transforming some of the raw material into shining new stars.

The image was obtained as part of Herschel’s Hi-GAL key-project. This used the infrared space observatory’s instruments to image the entire galactic plane in five different infrared wavelengths.

These wavelengths reveal cold material, most of it between -220ºC and -260ºC. None of it can be seen at ordinary optical wavelengths, but this infrared view shows astronomers a surprising amount of structure in the cloud’s interior.

The surprise is that the Hi-GAL survey has revealed a spider’s web of filaments that stretches across the star-forming regions of our Galaxy. Part of this vast network can be seen in this image as a filigree of red and orange threads.

At visual wavelengths, the OB association is linked to a star cluster catalogued as NGC 6823. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1785 and contains 50–100 stars. A nebula emitting visible light, catalogued as NGC 6820, is also part of this multi-faceted star-forming region.

The giant stars at the heart of Vulpecula OB1 are some of the biggest in the Galaxy. Containing dozens of times the mass of the Sun, they have short lives, astronomically speaking, because they burn their fuel so quickly.

At an estimated age of two million years, they are already well through their lifespans. When their fuel runs out, they will collapse and explode as supernovas. The shock this will send through the surrounding cloud will trigger the birth of even more stars, and the cycle will begin again.

Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project

Europe has kicked off the new year with an intense winter heatwave. The warm temperatures and lack of snowfall in the Alps and the Pyrenees has left several ski resorts with little or no snow.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, a high-pressure zone over the Mediterranean region and an Atlantic low-pressure system induced a strong southwest flux that brought warm air from northwest Africa to the middle latitudes. The air was further warmed when passing the North Atlantic owing to higher-than-normal sea surface temperatures.

All this caused record-breaking heat on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day with temperatures above 20°C observed in many European countries. The unexpectedly warm weather comes after excruciatingly hot weather in 2022 which saw the hottest summer on record for Europe, according to the latest Copernicus Climate Change Report published a few days ago.

In the satellite image, snow is more likely to be found on the peaks above 2000 m, while the ski slopes under this altitude have had to rely on artificial snow this season. Artificial ski slopes can be seen as thin, white strips in the bottom of the image.

Copernicus Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission. Each satellite carries a high-resolution camera that images Earth’s surface in 13 spectral bands. Together they cover all Earth’s land surfaces, large islands, inland and coastal waters every five days at the equator.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Tendrils of dark dust can be seen threading across the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 7172 in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy lies approximately 110 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. The lane of dust threading its way across NGC 7172 — which is viewed side-on in this image — is obscuring the luminous heart of the galaxy, making NGC 7172 appear to be nothing more than a normal edge-on spiral galaxy.

When astronomers inspected NGC 7172 across the electromagnetic spectrum they quickly discovered that there was more to it than meets the eye: NGC 7172 is a Seyfert galaxy — a type of galaxy with an intensely luminous active galactic nucleus powered by matter accreting onto a supermassive black hole.

This image combines data from two sets of Hubble observations, both of which were proposed to study nearby active galactic nuclei. The image also combines data from two instruments — Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFCS).

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. J. Rosario, A. Barth; CC BY 4.0

Acknowledgement: L. Shatz

A bright foreground star isn’t enough to distract from the grandeur of the galaxy UGC 3885, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While this foreground star is incredibly bright to Hubble’s eye, it does not outshine the details of the background galaxy.

Many young blue stars are sprinkled throughout the circular patterns of UGC 3885’s arms, contrasted and complemented by dark lanes of dust also following the spiral structure. A glancing look at UGC 3885 may only leave you with an impression of the galaxy, but spare a moment longer and the intricacies of the galaxy begin to emerge. Located in the constellation of Lynx, UGC 3885 is a cosmic beauty to behold.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Walsh; CC BY 4.0

There’s more to this image of Mars than first meets the eye: nestled in the detail of the cliff face that cuts through this scene are signs of geology in motion. Zooming in reveals several boulders that have fallen from the cliff edge, leaving small dimples in the soft material as they tumbled down-slope.

The image was taken by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on 3 August 2020, and captures a slice through the maze-like system of the aptly named Noctis Labyrinthus. The cliff-like feature running through the central portion of the image is part of a horst-graben system, which comprises raised ridges and plateaus (horst) either side of sunken valleys (graben) created as a result of tectonic processes that pulled the planet’s surface apart. The entire network of plateaus and trenches making up Noctis Labyrinthus spans some 1200 km, with individual cliffs reaching 5 km above the surface below.

Elsewhere in this image and in particular towards the right-hand side are patches of linear ripples that have been shaped by the wind. A few small impact craters also pockmark the scene.

The image was taken over the easternmost part of Noctis Labyrinthus at 265.8°E/8.70°S in the Phoenicis Lacus Quadrangle, near the intersection with Lus Chasma of Valles Marineris – the ‘grand canyon’ of Mars.

TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet’s atmospheric gases, and mapping the planet’s surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.

Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

NGC 2336 is the quintessential galaxy — big, beautiful and blue — and it is captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The barred spiral galaxy stretches an immense 200 000 light-years across and is located approximately 100 million light years away in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe).

Its spiral arms are glittered with young stars, visible in their bright blue light. In contrast, the redder central part of the galaxy is dominated by older stars.

NGC 2336 was discovered in 1876 by German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel, using a 28-centimetre telescope. This Hubble image is so much better than the view Tempel would have had — Hubble’s main mirror is 2.4 metres across, nearly ten times the size of the telescope Tempel used. In 1987, NGC 2336 experienced a Type-Ia supernova, the only observed supernova in the galaxy since its discovery 111 years earlier.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, V. Antoniou; CC BY 4.0 – Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

The James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, at 13:20 CET on 25 December on its exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

Read more

Credits: ESA/CNES/Arianespace/Optique Vidéo du CSG - JM Guillon

NGC 1614, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is an eccentrically-shaped galaxy ablaze with activity. The galaxy resides about 200 million light-years from Earth and is nestled in the southern constellation of Eridanus (The River).

NGC 1614 is the result of a past galactic merger which created its peculiar appearance. The cosmic collision also drove a turbulent flow of interstellar gas from the smaller of the two galaxies involved into the nucleus of the larger one, resulting in a burst of star formation which started in the core and slowly spread outwards through the galaxy.

Owing to its turbulent past and its current appearance, astronomers classify NGC 1614 as a peculiar galaxy, a starburst galaxy, and a luminous infrared galaxy. Luminous infrared galaxies are among the most luminous objects in the local Universe — and NGC 1614 is, in fact, the second most luminous galaxy within 250 million light-years.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Adamo; CC BY 4.0

The luminous heart of the galaxy M61 dominates this image, framed by its winding spiral arms threaded with dark tendrils of dust. As well as the usual bright bands of stars, the spiral arms of M61 are studded with ruby-red patches of light. Tell-tale signs of recent star formation, these glowing regions lead to M61’s classification as a starburst galaxy.

Though the gleaming spiral of this galaxy makes for a spectacular sight, one of the most interesting features of M61 lurks unseen at the centre of this image. As well as widespread pockets of star formation, M61 hosts a supermassive black hole more than 5 million times as massive as the Sun.

M61 appears almost face-on, making it a popular subject for astronomical images, even though the galaxy lies more than 52 million light-years from Earth. This particular astronomical image incorporates data from not only Hubble, but also the FORS camera at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, together revealing M61 in unprecedented detail. This striking image is one of many examples of telescope teamwork — astronomers frequently combine data from ground-based and space-based telescopes to learn more about the Universe.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, ESO, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team; CC BY 4.0

This image features the southeast wall of a small crater located a few hundred kilometres to the north of the giant Hellas impact basin on Mars. The complete crater itself is about 12 km in diameter; this image shows a 5 x 10 km area.

The Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter took the image on 19 October 2020.

When viewed with CaSSIS’ colour filters, the image shows exceptional diversity in colour. This diversity is related to the presence of various minerals that reflect light differently at different wavelengths. The light-toned deposits highlight the bedrock exposures of the area, which probably contain ancient clay-rich minerals that would have formed in the presence of water. Also visible are wind-blown sandy deposits that form ripples on the floor of the crater. Their distinctive tan colour implies that they contain iron-oxide minerals.

The ExoMars programme is a joint endeavour between ESA and Roscosmos.

The image was featured by Science Advances online in February 2021.

Credits: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

This incredible image of the hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula was taken to mark the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 29th anniversary in space. The nebula, created by a binary star system, is one of the many objects that Hubble has demystified throughout its productive life. This new image adds to our understanding of the nebula and demonstrates the telescope’s continued capabilities.

Read more: Hubble celebrates its 29th birthday with unrivaled view of the southern crab nebula

Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI

For the first time in over a decade, the European Space Agency is seeking new astronauts. The last selection took place in 2008-09, and resulted in these familiar faces being welcomed into the ESA Astronaut Corps: (from left) Luca Parmitano, Thomas Pesquet, Alexander Gerst, Andreas Mogesen, Tim Peake, Samantha Cristoforetti.

This class was selected following a year-long Europe-wide recruitment process that attracted 8413 valid applications. Following thorough psychological, medical and professional screening ESA’s astronaut class of 2009 became the first new recruits to join the European Astronaut Corps since 1992.

Not pictured here is ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, who was one of 10 applicants who made it to the final round of ESA astronaut selection in 2008. After narrowly missing out on astronaut candidacy at that stage, Matthias went on to work for ESA in a variety of roles including crew support and Eurocom (European spacecraft communicator) before officially joining the ESA astronaut corps in 2015. He is currently training for his first mission to the International Space Station.

ESA’s next astronaut selection campaign kicks off with a series of press briefings today outlining the selection criteria and desirable traits for astronauts. ESA’s astronauts and experts will also provide further detail around the Parastronaut Feasibility Project, as well as ESA’s vision for the next 10 years of human and robotic exploration that aims to bring the first European woman and man to the Moon.

A new website has launched and is the hub of information relating to ESA’s 2021–22 astronaut selection and will be constantly updated with information for applicants and media.

The application period runs from 31 March to 28 May 2021. ESA will only consider applications submitted via the ESA Careers website within those eight weeks. After that, a six-stage selection process will start. This is expected to be completed in October 2022.

Credits: ESA

The lazily winding spiral arms of the spectacular galaxy NGC 976 fill the frame of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This spiral galaxy lies around 150 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation Aries. Despite its tranquil appearance, NGC 976 has played host to one of the most violent astronomical phenomena known — a supernova explosion. These cataclysmicly violent events take place at the end of the lives of massive stars, and can outshine entire galaxies for a short period. While supernovae mark the deaths of massive stars, they are also responsible for the creation of heavy elements that are incorporated into later generations of stars and planets.

Supernovae are also a useful aid for astronomers who measure the distances to faraway galaxies. The amount of energy thrown out into space by supernova explosions is very uniform, allowing astronomers to estimate their distances from how bright they appear to be when viewed from Earth. This image — which was created using data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 — comes from a large collection of Hubble observations of nearby galaxies which host supernovae as well as a pulsating class of stars known as Cepheid variables. Both Cepheids and supernovae are used to measure astronomical distances, and galaxies containing both objects provide useful natural laboratories where the two methods can be calibrated against one another.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Jones, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Mrk 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 snapped Mrk 1337 at a wide range of ultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengths, producing this richly detailed image. Mrk 1337 is a weakly barred spiral galaxy, which as the name suggests means that the spiral arms radiate from a central bar of gas and stars. Bars occur in roughly half of spiral galaxies, including our own galaxy the Milky Way.

These observations are part of a campaign to improve our knowledge of how fast the universe is expanding. They were proposed by Adam Riess, who was awarded a Nobel Laureate in physics 2011 for his contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe, alongside Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts NGC 6302, commonly known as the Butterfly Nebula. NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3800 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius. The glowing gas was once the star's outer layers, but has been expelled over about 2200 years. The butterfly shape stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

New observations of the object have found unprecedented levels of complexity and rapid changes in the jets and gas bubbles blasting off of the star at the centre of the nebula.

Learn more/a>.

Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Kastner (RIT); CC BY 4.0

The barred spiral galaxy UGC 678 takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The spectacular galaxy lies around 260 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces and is almost face on, allowing its lazily winding spiral arms to stretch across this image. In the foreground, a smaller edge-on galaxy seems to bisect the upper portion of UGC 678.

Just like humans, stars have a natural lifecycle; they are born, grow up, and eventually grow old and die. Studying this stellar life cycle — usually referred to as stellar evolution — is an important topic for astronomers. The ends of star lives can be marked by truly spectacular events, including titanic supernova explosions, the creation of unimaginably dense neutron stars, and even the birth of black holes. UGC 678 was recently found to be host to one of these events; in 2020 a robotic telescope scanning the night sky in search of dangerous asteroids discovered evidence of an enormous supernova explosion in the galaxy.

Two separate Hubble observations turned to UGC 678 to scour the galaxy in search of the aftermath of its supernova explosion. One team of astronomers used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and the other the Wide Field Camera 3, but both aimed to explore UGC 678 in the hope of unearthing clues to the identity of the star that produced the 2020 supernova.

[Image Description: A large spiral galaxy. It has many narrow arms that are tightly-twisted in the centre, but at the ends they point out in different directions. The galaxy’s core glows brightly, while its disc is mostly faint, but with bright blue spots throughout the arms. A few smaller spiral galaxies at varying angles are visible in front, and it is surrounded by other tiny stars and galaxies, on a black background.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick, R. J. Foley; CC BY 4.0

The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The tenuous disc of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core. While this particular galaxy has indistinct, meandering spiral arms it lies close to the much larger Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the best known examples of ‘grand design’ spiral galaxies with prominent and well-defined spiral arms. In 2006 Hubble captured an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy which was — at the time — the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever taken with Hubble.

NGC 5486 lies 110 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. Constellations are not only patterns of bright stars, but also a system that astronomers use to divide the sky into regions. There are 88 of these regions, and each has an associated constellation depicting a mythological figure, an animal, or even an item of scientific equipment. This strange celestial menagerie contains everything from Ursa Major’s great bear to a toucan, a sea monster, a telescope, and even a painter's easel!

This observation comes from a selection of Hubble images exploring the detritus left behind by Type II supernovae. As massive stars reach the end of their lives they cast off huge amounts of gas and dust before ending their lives in titanic supernova explosions. NGC 5486 hosted a supernova in 2004, and astronomers used the keen vision of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to explore the aftermath in the hopes of learning more about these explosive events.

[Image description: A spiral galaxy. It is irregularly-shaped and its spiral arms are difficult to distinguish. The edges are faint and the core has a pale glow. It is dotted with small, wispy, pink regions where stars are forming. A few stars and small galaxies in warm colours are visible around it.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick; CC BY 4.0

The open star cluster NGC 1755 resembles a pinch of salt strewn on a jet-black tablecloth in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This collection of stars resides in one the Milky Way’s near neighbours — the Large Magellanic Cloud — and measures 120 light-years from side to side. Despite this impressive breadth, NGC 1755 is a member of the smaller class of star clusters. Star clusters are gravitationally bound collections of stars, and come in two main varieties — smaller open clusters like NGC 1755, which are hosts to younger stars, and gargantuan globular clusters, which can contain millions of older stars.

Hubble gazed into the heart of NGC 1755 in order to better understand how different populations of stars can co-exist in a single cluster. A population of stars is a group of stars with similar properties such as age or chemical composition, and these populations provide astronomers with valuable insights into the births, lives, and deaths of stars. Clusters in the Magellanic Clouds are particularly useful natural laboratories thanks to the Clouds’ proximity to the Milky Way. Hubbles’s eagle-eyed vision was a vital asset when observing NGC 1755 — with so many stars packed into a small area of sky, Hubble’s high-resolution Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 allowed individual stars in the cluster to be distinguished.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Milone, G. Gilmore CC BY 4.0

This image, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), features the spiral galaxy NGC 4680. At 2 o’clock and 7 o’clock two other galaxies can be seen flanking NGC 4680. NGC 4680 enjoyed a wave of attention in 1997, as it played host to a supernova explosion known as SN 1997bp. Amazingly, the supernova was identified by an Australian amateur astronomer named Robert Evans, who has identified an extraordinary 42 supernova explosions.

NGC 4680 is actually a rather tricky galaxy to classify. It is sometimes referred to as a spiral galaxy, but it is also sometimes classified as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies fall somewhere in between spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. Whilst NGC 4680 does have distinguishable spiral arms, they are not clearly defined, and the tip of one arm appears very diffuse. Galaxies are not static, and their morphologies (and therefore their classifications) vary throughout their lifetimes. Spiral galaxies are thought to evolve into elliptical galaxies, most likely by merging with one another, causing them to lose their distinctive spiral structures.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0

New images of the Phantom Galaxy, M74, showcase the power of space observatories working together in multiple wavelengths.

On the left, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s view of the galaxy ranges from the older, redder stars towards the centre, to younger and bluer stars in its spiral arms, to the most active stellar formation in the red bubbles of H II regions. On the right, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s image is strikingly different, instead highlighting the masses of gas and dust within the galaxy’s arms, and the dense cluster of stars at its core. The combined image in the centre merges these two for a truly unique look at this “grand design” spiral galaxy.

Scientists combine data from telescopes operating across the electromagnetic spectrum to truly understand astronomical objects. In this way, data from Hubble and Webb compliment each other to provide a comprehensive view of the spectacular M74 galaxy.

Click here

for a combined Hubble-Webb image

Click here

for the Webb image

Read more about the Phantom Galaxy here

Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team; ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

Nestled amongst the vast clouds of star-forming regions like this one lie potential clues about the formation of our own Solar System.

This week’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features AFGL 5180, a beautiful stellar nursery located in the constellation of Gemini (The Twins).

At the centre of the image, a massive star is forming and blasting cavities through the clouds with a pair of powerful jets, extending to the top right and bottom left of the image. Light from this star is mostly escaping and reaching us by illuminating these cavities, like a lighthouse piercing through the storm clouds.

Stars are born in dusty environments and although this dust makes for spectacular images, it can prevent astronomers from seeing stars embedded in it. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument is designed to capture detailed images in both visible and infrared light, meaning that the young stars hidden in vast star-forming regions like AFGL 5180 can be seen much more clearly.

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. C. Tan (Chalmers University & University of Virginia), R. Fedriani (Chalmers University); CC BY 4.0 Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt