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NGC 6723
Starry chandelier
The subject of today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month is an ancient inhabitant of our galaxy. This sparkling scene is of a globular cluster: a collection of tens of thousands to millions of stars, all tightly bound together under the influence of gravity. Astronomers know of more than 150...
NGC 4594
Sombrero Galaxy: The Universe’s Dusty Brimmed Hat
Messier 104, nicknamed the Sombrero galaxy, is a popular target for amateur observing and astronomical research. Its recognizable extended halo and dust-filled disk are captured in this image from the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the U.S. National...
Gum 10
Celebrating the birth of new stars... and the VST!
Imagine for a moment you are lying back, gazing up at the red-orange celestial clouds in today’s Picture of the Week. What shapes do you see? A chicken pecking seeds on the ground, the head of a dragon, or something else entirely? These pareidolia-inducing clouds are a pair of nebulae —...
NGC 4594
Close-up of the central parts of the Sombrero Galaxy
Messier 104, nicknamed the Sombrero galaxy, is a popular target for amateur observing and astronomical research. Its recognizable extended halo and dust-filled disk are captured in this image from the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the U.S. National...
NGC 1514: The Crystal Ball Nebula
The 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope, located on the summit of Maunakea in Hawai‘i, has captured NGC 1514, nicknamed the Crystal Ball Nebula, in awe-inspiring detail. This nebula, with its mesmerizing glow of gas, harbors hints of a past stellar death, and its asymmetrical shell is now being...
Gemini North image of the field around "Shadow Blaster"
This image shows the field around the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed "Shadow Blaster." This galaxy lies 11 billion light-years away and sits just behind the bright red galaxy at the center of this image. The red foreground galaxy acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, enlarging and...
Gemini North and ALMA image of "Shadow Blaster"
This image shows the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed "Shadow Blaster," which astronomers have identified as the likely source of the high-energy neutrino event IC 210922A, detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in 2021. Gravitational lensing occurs when a very massive foreground...
ALMA image of "Shadow Blaster"
This image shows a close-up of the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed "Shadow Blaster," which astronomers have identified as the likely source of the high-energy neutrino event IC 210922A, detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in 2021. Gravitational lensing occurs when a very...
Milky Way
Euclid’s galactic bulge survey
This six-gigapixel view of the galactic bulge is the largest high-resolution photo ever made of our Milky Way galaxy’s centre in visible light. It was taken on 23 March 2025 by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope.
Galaxy field of MXDFz4.4 (Hubble and Webb clean image)
This galaxy field contains the oddball galaxy MXDFz4.4 that existed only 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was still a “swirl” of opaque and clear gas as the Era of Reionisation was ending. Detailed visible-light images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope revealed...
AB Aurigae
VLT image of the protoplanetary disc around AB Aurigae (annotated)
This image, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows a disc of material around the young star AB Aurigae, where planets might be forming. Similar observations taken over the course of four years show the disc rotating around the star. The image to the right has...
AB Aurigae
VLT image of the protoplanetary disc around AB Aurigae
This image, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows a disc of material around the young star AB Aurigae, where planets might be forming. Similar observations taken over the course of four years show the disc rotating around the star. The image to the right has...
Featured from the Archive
Dust Disk Around a Black Hole in Galaxy NGC 4261
NGC 4261
This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of an 800-light-year-wide spiral-shaped disk of dust fueling a massive black hole in the center of galaxy, NGC 4261, located 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Virgo. By measuring the speed of gas swirling around the black...
