HH-47 is a Herbig-Haro Object, a young star that is ejecting material at mind-bogglingly high speed (up to a million km/h) into its surroundings. The material glows as it impacts the surrounding gas, and the streamer from HH-47 is around five trillion km long. The star is about 1,400 light-years away.
Image Credit: NASA
NGC 474 is an elliptical galaxy about 100 million light years away in the constellation Pisces. This galaxy has tidal shells and tidal tails, shells and tails of gas that have been pulled away from the main galaxy most often because of an interaction with another galaxy.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Terzan 9 is a particularly dense globular star cluster. It’s also kinda pretty.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
On 11 June, I posted a link to a YouTube video about how microlensing was used to find a black hole drifting through our galaxy. This animation was made from set of Hubble Space Telescope photos that capture the gravitational effects the black hole. It’s warping of the fabric of space can be measured by the way it warps the light of a background star, an effect called gravitational microlensing. As seen by Hubble, the background star momentarily brightened, then faded back to normal brightness, as the foreground black hole drifted by.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
This is a Hubble image of the two bright stars in Alpha Centuari, the nearest star system to the Solar System. The system has a third member, a dim red dwarf not shown in this picture.
Alpha Centauri A and B are Sun-like stars. A (on the left) has 1.1 times the mass and 1.5 times the luminosity of the Sun. B is smaller and cooler, with 0.9 times the Sun’s mass and less than 0.5 times its luminosity. Alpha Centuari C, the red dwarf is the closest member of the system to us. It’s often called Proxima Centuari.
Image Credit: NASA
This 10.5-billion-year-old globular cluster known as NGC 6496 is home to heavy-metal stars. Many of the stars in this spherical cluster are enriched with much higher than usual proportions of metals—all the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are known as metals in astronomy, even the one chemically classified as non-metal—than stars found in similar clusters.
Image Credit: NASA
The Earth is blue because of its oceans. Uranus and Neptune are blue because of their similar atmospheres, but they’re not the same shade of blue.
Video Credit: ESA
The Hubble Space Telescope took a look down a barrel of gas cast off by a dying star thousands of years ago. The resulting photo reveals elongated dark clumps of material embedded in the gas at the edge of the nebula and the dying central star floating in a blue haze of hot gas. This ring nebula (aka Messier 57) is about a light-year in diameter and around 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The colors shown in this image are roughly true colors. The image was assembled from three black-and-white photos taken through different color filters. Blue emissions come from very hot helium mostly located near the hot central star. Green is from ionized oxygen found farther out. Red comes from ionized nitrogen farthest from the star. The gases glow because it is excited ultraviolet radiation from the star whose surface temperature is estimated to be over 100,000 °C.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
The densest galaxy in the nearby Universe may be this galaxy known as M60-UCD1. It is located near a massive elliptical galaxy called M60, about 54 million light years from Earth. Packed with an extraordinary number of stars, M60-UCD1 is an “ultra-compact dwarf galaxy”. It was discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope and follow-up observations were done with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. It is the most luminous known galaxy of its type and one of the most massive, weighing 200 million times more than our Sun.
This composite image shows the region near M60. Data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are pink and data from the Hubble Space Telescope are red, green and blue. The Chandra image shows hot gas and double stars containing black holes and neutron stars and the Hubble image reveals stars in M60 at the right edge of the frame.
Image Credit: NASA
These 36 galaxies are some of the 40+ that have been observed by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope because they contain both Cepheid variable stars and supernovae. These stars are used measure the distance and refine the measurement of the rate of the expansion of the universe. Pictured above (from left to right and top to bottom) are NGC 7541, NGC 3021, NGC 5643, NGC 3254, NGC 3147, NGC 105, NGC 2608, NGC 3583, NGC 3147, Mrk 1337, NGC 5861, NGC 2525, NGC 1015, UGC 9391, NGC 691, NGC 7678, NGC 2442, NGC 5468, NGC 5917, NGC 4639, NGC 3972, The Antennae Galaxies, NGC 5584, M106, NGC 7250, NGC 3370, NGC 5728, NGC 4424, NGC 1559, NGC 3982, NGC 1448, NGC 4680, M101, NGC 1365, NGC 7329, and NGC 3447.
Image Credits: NASA / ESA / STScI
UGC 10143 is a giant elliptical galaxy that is the largest and brightest member of the Abell 2147 galaxy cluster around 480 million light-years away in the constellation Serpens. Abell 2147, in turn, is a part of the Hercules Supercluster of galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: NASA
These Hubble images of galaxy NGC 3287 show supernova 2013ge fading over time, revealing the steady source of ultraviolet light astronomers have identified as its binary companion star.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI
Video Credi: NASA
NGC 1512 is a barred spiral galaxy around 38 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Horologium. It has a double ring structure with a so-called nuclear ring around the galactic nucleus and a second ring further out in the main disk. When viewed in UV light, the galaxy shows at least 200 clusters recent star formation activity.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI
This is a false color image from Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 of NGC 1501, a complex planetary nebula located in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). NGC 1501 is a planetary nebula that is just under 5,000 light-years away from us. It has a central star shining brightly from within the nebula’s cloud. This bright pearl embedded in its glowing shell gives rise to the nebula’s popular nickname—the Oyster Nebula.
While NGC 1501’s central star blasted off its outer shell long ago, it still remains very hot and luminous, but it can be difficult to spot through modest telescopes. The star seems to be pulsating, varying quite significantly in brightness over a timescale of just half an hour. While variable stars are not unusual, it is unusual to find one at the heart of a planetary nebula.
Image Credit: ESA / NASA
content/uploads/2015/04/i_zwicky_18.jpg”>
I Zwicky 18 is a dwarf irregular galaxy located about 59 million light years away. Spectroscopic observations with ground-based telescopes showed that I Zwicky 18 to be almost completely made up of hydrogen and helium, the main ingredients created in the Big Bang, and galaxies with I Zwicky 18’s youthful appearance are typically found only in the early universe. Initial observations with the Hubble Space Telescope suggested an age of 500 million years, but later Hubble observations found faint, older stars in the galaxy, suggesting its star formation started at least one billion years ago and possibly as much as ten billion years ago. It’s possible that the galaxy may have formed around the same time as most other galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
Video Credit: NASA
The Hubble Space Telescope made the above photograph of the iconic Horsehead Nebula in infrared light.. While it’s shadowy in visible light (at left), it appears transparent and ethereal when photographed at infrared wavelengths as it pops out against a backdrop of stars and distant galaxies visible in infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA
The speckling of stares in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope image seems to show an array of different cosmic objects, actually forms a single body—the nearby dwarf galaxy known as Leo A. Its few million stars are so sparsely distributed that distant galaxies in the background can be seen behind it. Leo A is about 2.5 million light-years from Earth and is a member of the Local Group of galaxies, a group that includes the Milky Way.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
GNz7q is a candidate proto-supermassive black hole estimated to have existed only 750 million years after the Big Bang.
Video Credit: ESA
Video Credit: NASA