The interacting triplet M81, M82, and NGC 3077- An ultra deep 219 hour collaboration detailing the nuanced interaction remnants and galactic cirrus.

This incredibly detailed image of the interacting triplet M81, M82, and NGC 3077 was created from more than 216 hours of exposure across three continents —  Europe, USA, and Oceania. We combined 4019 subframes and 12993 minutes of exposure to reveal faint details previously masked by lower amounts of data. The high exposure time also allowed us to sharpen fine features, giving the image more contrast and revealing more fine structures. On the top of the image lies NGC 3077, a small starburst dwarf galaxy with a […]

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Hypersonic superheated rainbow outflows from a dying star – NGC 6302 from Hubble

This image was featured as NASA’s astronomy picture of the day on 11/21/2022: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap221121.html The spectacular planetary nebula NGC 6302 lies roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. More popularly known as the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula, this celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But what resemble dainty wings are actually roiling regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to […]

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Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 from Hubble

The Hubble telescope captured a display of starlight, glowing gas, and silhouetted dark clouds of interstellar dust in this 4-foot-by-8-foot image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. NGC 1300 is considered to be prototypical of barred spiral galaxies. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center. At Hubble’s resolution, a myriad of […]

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Outflows and shockwaves in the the crab nebula – Hubble’s view over the course of 1260 days!

Normally, space is portrayed as static. With objects thousands of light years across, and tens of thousands of parsecs away, what change could we possibly see from earth? Yet in this video of the crab nebula, we see a dynamic object expanding, rife with shockwaves and speeding outflows. Over the course of 1260 days (3.5 years), we can see the gas in the nebula expand at a blistering pace by about 163,296,000,000 kilometers, or about 0.017 light years. So what’s causing these outflows? At the center of […]

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Hubble’s view of the dusty spiral galaxy M66

The big and beautiful spiral galaxy messier 66 is perhaps one of the most dusty and exciting galaxies to explore. With the recent PHANGS-HST proposal, this galaxy was observed in the ultraviolet, visable, and near-infrared wavelegnths in a way that makes this island universe much easier to understand. First, shining brightly in the infrared are the young star clusters, shown in the image below as blue. Then, in the visible light spectrum, the dust lanes cascading over the stars come into sharp relief. Finally, in the infrared, […]

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A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies – ARP 143 from Hubble

A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The interacting galaxy duo is collectively called Arp 143. The pair contains the glittery, distorted, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2445 at right, along with its less flashy companion, NGC 2444 at left. Astronomers suggest that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm in NGC 2445, where thousands of stars are bursting to life on the right-hand side of […]

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NGC 2276 from Hubble

The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left. In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy’s normal fried-egg appearance. […]

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Hickson Compact Group 40 from Hubble

NASA is celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called The Hickson Compact Group 40. This menagerie includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler. Caught in a leisurely gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter […]

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Hubble’s Ultra Deep field of Galaxies

Galaxies, galaxies everywhere – as far as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can see. This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a “deep” core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – […]

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The boomerang nebula from Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope has “caught” the Boomerang Nebula in these new images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys. This reflecting cloud of dust and gas has two nearly symmetric lobes (or cones) of matter that are being ejected from a central star. Over the last 1,500 years, nearly one and a half times the mass of our Sun has been lost by the central star of the Boomerang Nebula in an ejection process known as a bipolar outflow. The nebula’s name is derived from its […]

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