The Hubble Space Telescope captured a spectacular frontal image of the grand spiral galaxy NGC 3631, located about 53 million light-years away.
This collection of 37 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, taken between 2003 and 2021, includes galaxies that all host both Cepheid variables and supernovae. They serve as cosmic instruments to measure astronomical distances and to refine the expansion rate of the universe.
This is the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope project.
Two galaxies, NGC 1512 and NGC 1510, appear to be dancing in this Dark Energy Camera image. The galaxies have been merging for 400 million years, igniting waves of star formation and distorting both galaxies.
This image shows exocomets orbiting the nearby star Beta Pictoris. Astronomers have detected at least 30 exocomets in the system, which is also home to two exoplanets.
This artist’s impression shows a two-star system, with a white dwarf (foreground) and a companion star (background), where a micronova explosion could take place. Although these stellar explosions are smaller than supernovae, they can be intensely powerful.
This series of images shows how the solid core (or “dirty snowball heart”) of comet C/2014 UN271 was isolated from a huge shell of dust and gas for measurement. Scientists believe the core could be 85 miles in diameter.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the most distant star yet, Earendel, located nearly 13 billion light-years away.
Astronomers have imaged a space phenomenon called odd radio circles using the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope. These space rings are so massive that they are about a million light-years across — 16 times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy.
This illustration shows what happens when two large celestial bodies collide in space, creating a cloud of debris. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope spotted a cloud of debris blocking the light from the star HD 166191.
About 4.4 million space objects billions of light-years away have been mapped by astronomers, including 1 million previously unseen space objects. The observations were made by the sensitive Low Frequency Array telescope known as LOFAR.
An unusual triangular shape, formed by two galaxies colliding in a cosmic tug-of-war, has been captured in a new image taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The head-on collision between the two galaxies sparked a star-forming frenzy, creating “the strange triangle of newly minted stars.”
This image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A combines some of the first X-ray data collected by NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, shown in magenta, with high-energy X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in blue.
This image shows the Milky Way as seen from Earth. The star icon shows the position of a mysterious repeating transient. The orbiting space object emitted radiation three times an hour, becoming the brightest source of radio waves visible from Earth, acting like a celestial lighthouse.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10, which is filled with young stars. The bright center, surrounded by pink clouds, indicates the location of the black hole and the regions where the star was born.
This image shows the Flame Nebula and its surroundings captured in radio waves.
This artist’s impression shows a red supergiant star emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas in the last year of its life, undergoing significant internal changes before exploding in a supernova.