An observation made by NASAs SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) shows a dusty infrared starfield in the Cygnus region of the sky.
An observation made by NASAs SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) shows the chemical signatures of water ice (shown in bright blue) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (orange) in Cygnus X, one of the most active and turbulent...
It might look like we started a space war, but we didn't. This isn't a scene from Star Wars either. What we're looking at is the Tarantula Nebula. And those beams come from the lasers installed on the telescopes that comprise ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The VLTI combines the...
This image shows stars in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, Pictor II. Pictor II is a satellite galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and is located in the constellation Pictor. The system is made up of several thousand stars and is more than ten...
Star PicII-503 in Pictor II ultra-faint dwarf galaxy
This image shows the star PicII-503, with the lowest iron content ever measured outside of the Milky Way. With less than 1/40,000th the amount of iron as the Sun, PicII-503 is the clearest example of a star within a primordial system that preserves the chemical enrichment of the Universe’s...
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the intricate detail of the Crab Nebula with its Wide Field Camera 3. The colours in the image trace Hubble’s detection of oxygen and sulfur gases in the nebula at varying densities and energies. The blue areas are the hottest and lowest density....
This newly processed image comes from data originally captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 and 2000. Updated image-processing technology allows for this archival image to be best compared with more recent data, including those captured by Hubble itself. Hubble received a new...
A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month image. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified...
IC 486 lies in the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral galaxy, it features a bright central bar-shaped structure from which its spiral arms unfurl, wrapping around the core in a smooth, almost ring-like pattern. This...
This is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble...
For this month’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month, we turn our gaze to one of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. This extraordinary planetary nebula lies roughly 4 400 light-years away in the constellation Draco, and has captivated...