Can You Spot It?
Right in the middle of this image, nestled amongst a smattering of distant stars and even more distant galaxies, lies the newly discovered dwarf galaxy known as Donatiello II. If you cannot quite distinguish the clump of faint stars that is all we can see of Donatiello II in this image, then...
NGC 4303
A hypnotising galaxy
Fall deeper into the entrancing NGC 4303, a spiral galaxy located approximately 55 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This image combines data taken at radio and visible wavelengths, and is helping astronomers understand how stars form in galaxies. The hypnotising golden...
LAWD 37
LAWD 37
Hubble has used microlensing to measure the mass of a white dwarf star. The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the centre of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Though its nuclear fusion furnace has shut down, trapped heat is sizzling on the surface at roughly 100 000...
Tarantula Nebula
Exploring a Turbulent Tarantula
A snapshot of the Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus) is the most recent Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Tarantula Nebula is a large star-forming region of ionised hydrogen gas that lies 161 000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and...
V 372 Orionis
Tempestuous Young Stars in Orion
The bright variable star V 372 Orionis takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has also captured a smaller companion star in the upper left of this image. Both stars lie in the Orion Nebula, a colossal region of star formation roughly 1450 light years...
Visitor to a Galaxy
A host of astronomical objects throng this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Background galaxies ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals are strewn across the image, and bright foreground stars much closer to home are also present, surrounded by diffraction spikes. In...
NGC 346
NGC 346 (NIRCam)
NGC 346, shown here in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a dynamic star cluster that lies within a nebula 200,000 light years away. Webb reveals the presence of many more building blocks than previously expected, not only for stars, but also...
AU Mic
AU Mic (NIRCam)
These two images are of the dusty debris disk around AU Mic, a red dwarf star located 32 light-years away in the southern constellation Microscopium. The team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to study AU Mic. NIRCam’s coronagraph, which blocked the intense light of the central star,...
UGC 4211
Closest pair of supermassive black holes as seen by MUSE
In this Picture of the Week we peer closer into the galaxy UGC 4211, where astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes on the verge of merging, separated by just 750 lightyears — the closest to have been found to date and less than half of the previous record. They used ESO’s Very...
UGC 4211
Closest pair of supermassive black holes as seen by MUSE
In this Picture of the Week we peer closer into the galaxy UGC 4211, where astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes on the verge of merging, separated by just 750 lightyears — the closest to have been found to date and less than half of the previous record. They used ESO’s Very...
LEDA 48062
Calling on a Galactic Neighbour
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy LEDA 48062 in the constellation Canes Venatici. LEDA 48062 is the faint, sparse, amorphous galaxy on the right side of this image, and it is accompanied by a more sharply defined neighbour on the left, the large, disc-like...
Sh2-54
The Sh2-54 nebula in the infrared with VISTA
This image of the spectacular Sh2-54 nebula was taken in infrared light using ESO’s VISTA telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile. The clouds of dust and gas that are normally obvious in visible light are less evident here, and in this light we can see the light of the stars behind the...
Pulled from the Archive
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Content Providers & Partners
- NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory
- European Southern Observatory (ESO)
- NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX)
- ESA's Herschel Space Observatory via NASA Herschel Science Center
- Multi-Mission Archive for Space Telescopes via STScI
- NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope via ESA/Hubble
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
- NSF's NOIRLab (Gemini Observatory, KPNO, CTIO, Rubin Observatory)
- NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)
- ESA's Planck Satellite via Planck U.S. Data Center
- NASA's SPHEREx
- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope
- NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
- Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)
- WorldWide Telescope
