We see the galaxies around us in various orientations. NGC 5468 is a spiral galaxy which we see with an almost dead-on top-down view. Over the last couple of decades, NGC 5468 has hosted a number of supernovae: SN 1999cp, SN 2002cr, SN2002ed, SN2005P and SN2018dfg. Despite being just over 130 million light-years away, the face-on orientation of the galaxy with respect to us makes it easier to spot such new “stars” as they appear.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
While most galaxies live their own separate, solitary lives, others stray a little too close to a near neighbor. These two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 6285 (left) and NGC 6286 (right)—and as Arp 293 (the pair), have done just that. They are interacting with their mutual gravitational attraction pulling wisps of gas and streams of dust from each other, distorting their shapes.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
This is NGC 6153. The faint blue haze is what remains of a star like the sun after it had depleted most of its fuel. When that happened, the outer layers of the star were ejected and then ionized by the ultraviolet light from hot core of the star, forming the nebula.
NGC 6153 is a planetary nebula which contains large amounts of neon, argon, oxygen, carbon and chlorine—up to three times more than can be found in our solar system. It contains five times more nitrogen than our sun! It could be that the star developed higher levels of these elements as it grew and evolved, but it is more likely that the star originally formed from a cloud of material that already contained an abundance of those elements.
Image Credit: ESA / NASA
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
Messier 100 (aka NGC 4321) is a grand design spiral galaxy located in the constellation Coma Berenices. It is one of the brightest and largest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, located approximately 55 million light-years from Earth and has a diameter of 107,000 light years.
Image Credit: NASA
This video pans over Arp-Madore 2026-424 (AM 2026-424, the collision of two galaxies of equal size around 700 million light-years away.
Video Credit: ESA
Video Credit: NASA
