This Hubble Picture of the Week includes the pithily-named galaxy SDSS J103512.07+461412.2, visible in the centre of this image as a dispersed sweep of dust and stars with a denser, brighter core. SDSS J103512.07+461412.2 is located 23 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa...
Far, far away in the constellation Phoenix, two interacting galaxies meet in an epic battle spanning a hundred thousand light-years, captured here with the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. Collectively known as NGC...
This Hubble Picture of the Week — taken using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) — shows Arp 107, a celestial object that comprises a pair of galaxies in the midst of a collision. The larger galaxy (on the left of this image) is an extremely energetic galaxy...
There are several galaxies in this Picture of the Week, but the most fascinating is probably the one surrounded by four light-blue dots, resembling a flower with blue petals. But, are these dots real? Yes and no… Taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), this image shows a so-called Einstein...
This dream-like Picture of the Week features the galaxy known as NGC 3156. It is a lenticular galaxy, meaning that it falls somewhere between an elliptical and a spiral galaxy. It lies about 73 million light-years from Earth, in the minor equatorial constellation Sextans. Sextans is a small...
The glittering globular cluster Terzan 12 — a vast, tightly bound collection of stars — fills the frame of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This star-studded stellar census comes from a string of observations that aim to systematically explore globular clusters located...
This image shows the orientation of the magnetic field in the distant 9io9 galaxy, seen here when the Universe was only 20% of its current age — the furthest ever detection of a galaxy’s magnetic field. The observations were done with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in...
This infrared image shows the distant galaxy 9io9, seen here as a reddish arc curved around a bright nearby galaxy. This nearby galaxy acts as a gravitational lens: its mass curves spacetime around it, bending lightrays coming from 9io9 in the background, hence its distorted shape. This colour...