Space Observatories
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In this image of NGC 3242 from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the extended region around the planetary nebula is shown in dramatic detail. The small circular white and blue area at the center of the image is the well-known portion of the famous planetary nebula. The precise origin and composition of the extended wispy white features is not known for certain. It is most likely material ejected during the star's red-giant phase before the white dwarf was exposed. However, it may be possible that the extended material is simply interstellar gas that, by coincidence, is located close enough to the white dwarf to be energized by it, and induced to glow with ultraviolet light. NGC 3242 is located 1,400 to 2,500 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 
 
The Extended Region Around the Planetary Nebula NGC 3242
One of our closest galactic neighbors shows its awesome beauty in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. M33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is a member of what's known as our Local Group of galaxies. Along with our own Milky Way, this group travels together in the universe, as they are gravitationally bound. In fact, M33 is one of the few galaxies that is moving toward the Milky Way despite the fact that space itself is expanding, causing most galaxies in the universe to grow farther and farther apart. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Ariz.
 
 
M33: A Close Neighbor Reveals its True Size and Splendor
A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. Astronomers think that B1509 is about 1700 years old and is located about 17,000 light years away. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/P.Slane, et al.
 
 
PSR B1509-58: A Young Pulsar Shows its Hand
On April 1-2, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed the winning target in the Space Telescope Science Institute's
 
 
Hubble Celebrates the International Year of Astronomy with the Galaxy Triplet Arp 274
On 24 February 2009, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a photo sequence of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. The moons, from far left to right, are the white icy moons Enceladus and Dione, the large orange moon Titan, and icy Mimas. Due to the angle of the Sun, they are each preceded by their own shadow. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
 
 
Four Saturn's moons parade by their parent
This image of a pair of colliding galaxies called NGC 6240 shows them in a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution just before they merge into a single, larger galaxy. The prolonged, violent collision has drastically altered the appearance of both galaxies and created huge amounts of heat -turning NGC 6240 into an
 
 
Tangled Galaxies
These four dwarf galaxies are part of a census of small galaxies in the tumultuous heart of the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster. The galaxies appear smooth and symmetrical, suggesting that they have not been tidally disrupted by the pull of gravity in the dense cluster environment. Larger galaxies around them, however, are being ripped apart by the gravitational tug of other galaxies. The images, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, are evidence that the undisturbed galaxies are enshrouded by a
 
 
Small Galaxies Yield Clues About Dark Matter
This composite image of the Medusa galaxy (also known as NGC 4194) shows X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue and optical light from the Hubble Space Telescope in orange. Located above the center of the galaxy and seen in the optical data, the
 
 
NGC 4194: A Black Hole in Medusa's Hair
The three pictured galaxies -- NGC 7173 (middle left), NCG 7174 (middle right) and NGC 7176 (lower right) -- are part of the Hickson Compact Group 90, named after astronomer Paul Hickson, who first catalogued these small clusters of galaxies in the 1980s. NGC 7173 and NGC 7176 appear to be smooth, normal elliptical galaxies without much gas and dust. In stark contrast, NGC 7174 is a mangled spiral galaxy, barely clinging to independent existence as it is ripped apart by its close neighbours. The strong tidal interaction surging through the galaxies has dragged a significant number of stars away from their home galaxies. These stars are now spread out, forming a tenuous luminous component in the galaxy group. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Sharples (University of Durham, U.K.)
 
 
Trio of galaxies mixes it up
This composite image of the Tycho supernova remnant combines X-ray and infrared observations obtained with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively, and the Calar Alto observatory, Spain. It shows the scene more than four centuries after the brilliant star explosion witnessed by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers of that era. The explosion has left a blazing hot cloud of expanding debris (green and yellow) visible in X-rays. The location of ultra-energetic electrons in the blast's outer shock wave can also be seen in X-rays (the circular blue line). Newly synthesized dust in the ejected material and heated pre-existing dust from the area around the supernova radiate at infrared wavelengths of 24 microns (red). Foreground and background stars in the image are white. Oliver Krause, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, recently studied reflected light from the supernova explosion seen by Brahe. Use of these
 
 
A new view of Tycho's supernova remnant
Very deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging of NGC 4921 with annotation to indictate the locations of some of the more interesting features of the galaxy and its surroundings. Credit: NASA, ESA and K. Cook (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)
 
 
Annotated View of NGC 4921
This very deep image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy NGC 4921 along with a spectacular backdrop of more distant galaxies. It was created from a total of 80 separate pictures through yellow and near-infrared filters. Credit: NASA, ESA and K. Cook (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)
 
 
Unusual Spiral NGC 4921 in the Coma Galaxy Cluster
This image of Centaurus A shows a spectacular new view of a supermassive black hole's power. Jets and lobes powered by the central black hole in this nearby galaxy are shown by submillimeter data (colored orange) from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile and X-ray data (colored blue) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Visible light data from the Wide Field Imager on the Max-Planck/ESO 2.2 m telescope, also located in Chile, shows the dust lane in the galaxy and background stars. The X-ray jet in the upper left extends for about 13,000 light years away from the black hole. The APEX data shows that material in the jet is travelling at about half the speed of light. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al.; Submillimeter: MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al.; Optical: ESO/WFI
 
 
Black Hole Outflows From Centaurus A
On the western (right) side of NGC 604, the amount of hot gas found in the bubbles corresponds to about 4300 times the mass of the sun. This value and the brightness of the gas in X-rays imply that the western part of NGC 604 is entirely powered by winds from the 200 hot massive stars. The implication is that in this area of NGC 604, none or very few of the massive stars must have exploded as supernovas. The situation is different on the eastern (left) side of NGC 604. On this side, the X-ray gas contains 1750 times the mass of the sun and winds from young stars cannot explain the brightness of the X-ray emission. The bubbles on this side of the cluster appear to be much older and were likely created and powered by young stars and supernovas in the past. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Tuellmann et al.; Optical: NASA/AURA/STScI
 
 
NGC 604: Wall Divides East and West Sides of Cosmic Metropolis
The unique planetary nebula NGC 2818 is nested inside the open star cluster NGC 2818A. Both the cluster and the nebula reside over 10,000 light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis (the Compass). This Hubble image was taken in November 2008 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The colors in the image represent a range of emissions coming from the clouds of the nebula: red represents nitrogen, green represents hydrogen, and blue represents oxygen. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
 
 
Hubble Snaps Images of a Nebula Within a Cluster
Resembling comets streaking across the sky, these four speedy stars are plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas and creating brilliant arrowhead structures and trailing tails of glowing gas. These bright arrowheads, or bow shocks, can be seen in these four images taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The bow shocks form when the stars' powerful stellar winds, streams of matter flowing from the stars, slam into surrounding dense gas. The phenomenon is similar to that seen when a speeding boat pushes through water on a lake. The stars in these images are among 14 runaway stars spotted by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The stars appear to be young, just millions of years old. Their ages are based on their colors and the presence of strong stellar winds, a signature of youthful stars. Depending on their distance from Earth, the bullet-nosed bow shocks could be 100 billion to a trillion miles wide (the equivalent of 17 to 170 solar system diameters, measured out to Neptune's orbit). The bow shocks indicate that the stars are moving fast, more than 112,000 miles an hour (more than 180,000 kilometers an hour) with respect to the dense gas they are plowing through. They are traveling roughly five times faster than typical young stars, relative to their surroundings. The high-speed stars have traveled far from their birth places. Assuming their youthful phase lasts only a million years and they are moving at roughly 112,000 miles an hour, the stars have journeyed 160 light-years. The Hubble observations were taken between October 2005 and July 2006. Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Sahai (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
 
 
Stellar Interlopers Caught Speeding Through Space
This pair of NASA Hubble Space Telescope pictures shows the appearance of a mysterious burst of light that was detected on February 21, 2006, brightened over 100 days, and then faded into oblivion after another 100 days. The source of the outburst remains unidentified. The event was detected serendipitously in a Hubble search for supernovae in a distant cluster of galaxies. The light-signature of this event does not match the behavior of a supernova or any previously observed astronomical transient phenomenon in the universe. Astronomers do not know the object's distance, so it can either be in our Milky Way galaxy or at a great astronomical distance. The optical spectrum of the object contains absorption features that have not yet been identified. This may represent a previously undetected class of transient phenomenon in the universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Barbary (University of California, Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Supernova Cosmology Project)
 
 
Optical Transient SCP 06F6
This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core. It offers a nearby laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often violent nuclear regions of other galaxies. This view combines the sharp imaging of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with color imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera (IRAC). The Galactic core is obscured in visible light by intervening dust clouds, but infrared light penetrates the dust. The spatial resolution of NICMOS corresponds to 0.025 light-years at the distance of the galactic core of 26,000 light-years. Hubble reveals details in objects as small as 20 times the size of our own solar system. The NICMOS images were taken between February 22 and June 5, 2008. Credit: Hubble image: NASA, ESA, and Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); Spitzer image: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)
 
 
Hubble-Spitzer Color Mosaic of the Galactic Center
Hubble Space Telescope has caught Jupiter's moon Ganymede playing a game of
 
 
Hubble Catches Jupiter's Largest Moon Going to the 'Dark Side'
This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the nasty effects of living near a group of massive stars: radiation and winds from the massive stars (white spot in center) are blasting planet-making material away from stars like our sun. The planetary material can be seen as comet-like tails behind three stars near the center of the picture. The tails are pointing away from the massive stellar furnaces that are blowing them outward. This image shows a portion of the W5 star-forming region, located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. It is a composite of infrared data from Spitzer's infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. Light with a wavelength of 3.5 microns is blue, while light from the dust of 24 microns is orange-red. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
 
 
Devastated Stellar Neighborhood
Found in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, 30 Doradus is one of the largest massive star forming regions close to the Milky Way. This latest X-ray image of 30 Doradus represents almost 114,000 seconds, or 31 hours, of Chandra observing time - three times longer than previously recorded. In this image, red represents the lower range of X-rays that Chandra detects, the medium range is green, while the highest-energy X-rays are blue. Credit: NASA/CXC/Penn State/L.Townsley, et al.
 
 
Drama In The Heart Of The Tarantula
Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a new, infrared view of the choppy star-making cloud called M17, also known as Omega Nebula or the Swan nebula. The cloud, located about 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, is dominated by a central group of massive stars -- the most massive stars in the region (see yellow circle). These central stars give off intense flows of expanding gas, which rush like rivers against dense piles of material, carving out the deep pocket at center of the picture. Winds from the region's other massive stars push back against these oncoming rivers, creating bow shocks like those that pile up in front of speeding boats. Three of these bow shocks are labeled in the magnified inset. They are composed of compressed gas in addition to dust that glows at infrared wavelengths Spitzer can see. The smiley-shaped bow shocks curve away from the stellar winds of the central massive stars. This picture was taken with Spitzer's infrared array camera. It is a four-color composite, in which light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is blue; 4.5-micron light is green; 5.8-micron light is orange; and 8-micron light is red. Dust is red, hot gas is green and white is where gas and dust intermingle. Foreground and background stars appear scattered through the image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.
 
 
Celestial Sea of Stars
Like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope catches an instantaneous glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest and best-known globular clusters in the northern sky. This glittering metropolis of stars is easily found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules. This image is a composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Observations from four separate science proposals taken in November 1999, April 2000, August 2005, and April 2006 were used. The image includes broadband filters that isolate light from the blue, visible, and infrared portions of the spectrum. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
 
 
A Celestial Snow Globe of Stars
This composite image of the Tycho supernova remnant combines infrared and X-ray observations obtained with NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space observatories, respectively, and the Calar Alto observatory, Spain. It shows the scene more than four centuries after the brilliant star explosion witnessed by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers of that era. The explosion has left a blazing hot cloud of expanding debris (green and yellow). The location of the blast's outer shock wave can be seen as a blue sphere of ultra-energetic electrons. Newly synthesized dust in the ejected material and heated pre-existing dust from the area around the supernova radiate at infrared wavelengths of 24 microns (red). Foreground and background stars in the image are white. Credit: MPIA/NASA
 
 
Vivid View of Tycho's Supernova Remnant
This Hubble image shows a pair of massive stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina, the Keel. WR 25 is the brightest, situated near the centre of the image. The neighbouring Tr16-244 is the third brightest, just to the upper left of WR 25. The second brightest, to the left of WR 25, is a low mass star located much closer to Earth than the Carina Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA and Jesus Maiz Apellaniz (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Spain).
 
 
Mammoth stars seen by Hubble
This image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope showcases the brilliant core of one of the most active galaxies in our local neighborhood. The entire core is 5,000 light-years wide. The galaxy, called NGC 1569, sparkles with the light from millions of newly formed young stars. NGC 1569 is pumping out stars at a rate that is 100 times faster than the rate observed in our Milky Way Galaxy. This frenzied pace has been almost continuous for the past 100 million years. The core's centerpiece is a grouping of three giant star clusters, each containing more than a million stars. (Two of the clusters are so close they appear as one grouping.) The clusters reside in a large, central cavity. The gas in the cavity has been blown out by the multitude of massive, young stars that already exploded as supernovae. These explosions also triggered a violent flow of gas and particles that is sculpting giant gaseous structures. The sculpted structure at lower right is about 3,700 light-years long. Huge bubbles of gas, such as the two at left, appear like floating islands. The largest bubble is about 378 light-years wide and the smallest 119 light-years wide. They are being illuminated by the radiation from the bright, young stars within them. Some of those stars are peaking through their gaseous cocoons. The biggest and brightest objects surrounding the core are stars scattered throughout our Milky Way Galaxy. In contrast, the thousands of tiny white dots in the image are stars in the halo of NGC 1569. The galaxy is 11 million light-years from Earth. A new analysis of NGC 1569 shows that it is one and a half times farther from Earth than astronomers previously thought. The extra distance places the galaxy in the middle of a group of about 10 galaxies centered on the spiral galaxy IC 342. Gravitational interactions among the group's galaxies may be compressing gas in NGC 1569 and igniting the star-birthing frenzy. Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and Advanced Camera for Surveys made the observations of NGC 1569 in September 1999, November 2006, and January 2007. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and A. Aloisi (STScI/ESA)
 
 
Starburst Galaxy NGC 1569
This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut. The small white box at lower right pinpoints the planet's location. Fomalhaut b has carved a path along the inner edge of a vast, dusty debris ring encircling Fomalhaut that is 34.5 billion kilometres across. Fomalhaut b lies three billion kilometres inside the ring's inner edge and orbits 17 billion kilometres from its star. The inset at bottom right is a composite image showing the planet's position during Hubble observations taken in 2004 and 2006. Astronomers have calculated that Fomalhaut b completes an orbit around its parent star every 872 years. The white dot in the centre of the image marks the star's location. The region around Fomalhaut's location is black because astronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the star's bright glare so that the dim planet could be seen. Fomalhaut b is 100 million times fainter than its star. The radial streaks are scattered starlight. The red dot at lower left is a background star. The Fomalhaut system is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. This false-colour image was taken in October 2004 and July 2006. Credit: NASA, ESA and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
 
 
HST Image of Fomalhaut and Fomalhaut b
The Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The two galaxies happen to be oriented so that they appear to mark the number 10. The left-most galaxy, or the
 
 
Hubble Scores a Perfect Ten
This painterly portrait of a star-forming cloud, called NGC 346, is a combination of multiwavelength light from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared), the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (visible), and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope (X-ray). The infrared observations highlight cold dust in red, visible data show glowing gas in green, and X-rays show very warm gas in blue. Ordinary stars appear as blue spots with white centers, while young stars enshrouded in dust appear as red spots with white centers. NGC 346 is the brightest star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, an irregular dwarf galaxy that orbits our Milky Way galaxy, 210,000 light-years away.
 
 
Stellar Work of Art
RCW 108 is a region where stars are actively forming within the Milky Way galaxy about 4,000 light years from Earth. This is a complicated region that contains young star clusters, including one that is deeply embedded in a cloud of molecular hydrogen. By using data from different telescopes, astronomers determined that star birth in this region is being triggered by the effect of nearby, massive young stars. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/S.Wolk et al; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
 
 
RCW 108: Massive Young Stars Trigger Stellar Birth
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