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...
Sh2-54
The Sh2-54 nebula in visible light with the VST
A visible-light image of the Sh2-54 nebula, captured by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. At these wavelengths the structure of the nebula is clear and the clouds of dust and gas block the light of stars within and behind it.
NGC 6845
Galactic Quartet
A quartet of interacting galaxies is captured in this observation from Gemini South, which is one of the twin telescopes of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab. The four galaxies in this image are collectively known as NGC 6845, and lie roughly 270 million...
WR 140
WR 140 with JWST
The two stars in Wolf-Rayet 140, shown here, produce shells of dust every eight years that look like rings, as seen in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Each ring was created when the stars came close together and their stellar winds collided, compressing the gas and forming...
A Black Hole Destroys a Star
A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. The stream of gas stretching to the right is what remains of a star that was pulled apart by the black hole. A cloud of hot plasma (gas atoms with their electrons stripped away) above the black hole is known as a corona.
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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
