Tag: astro photo

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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A luminous M101 with outer spiral arms

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse’s large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. M101 shares this modern telescopic field of view with more distant background galaxies, foreground stars within the Milky Way, and a companion dwarf galaxy NGC […]

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The Christmas Tree Nebula

Interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas and dust abound in this gorgeous skyscape. The 3 degree wide field of view stretches through the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264 is centered, a complex jumble of cosmic gas, dust and stars about 2,700 light-years distant. It mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark dust clouds. Where the otherwise obscuring dust clouds lie close to hot, young stars they also reflect starlight, forming blue reflection […]

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The dim and detailed jellyfish: A 112-hour collaboration from three continents!

The jellyfish nebula is a notoriously dim object in the night sky. As a result, most images of this nebula are highly denoised, leading to a loss of detail. But by combining nearly 1000 exposures and 6740 minutes of exposure from collaborators across three continents for a total integration time of 112.4 hours, we were able to reveal structures and detail previously not displayed by previous images.  In this image, channels are mapped in the classic Hubble palette, where ionized sulfur is represented by red, ionized hydrogen […]

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