Astronomy pictures

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This colorful image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction. At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core. The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall. Herschel 36’s violent activity has blasted holes in the bubble-shaped cloud, allowing astronomers to study this action-packed stellar breeding ground. The hefty star is 32 times more massive and eight times hotter than our Sun. It is nearly nine times our Sun’s diameter. Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by a star’s standards, only 1 million years old. Based on its mass, it will live for another 5 million years. In comparison, our smaller Sun is 5 billion years old and will live another 5 billion years. This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction. The clouds may look majestic and peaceful, but they are in a constant state of flux from the star’s torrent of searing radiation and high-speed particles from stellar winds. As the monster star throws off its natal cocoon of material with its powerful energy, it is suppressing star formation around it. However, at the dark edges of this …
Located around 5000 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), Abell 78 is an unusual type of planetary nebula. After exhausting the nuclear fuel in their cores, stars with a mass of around 0.8 to 8 times the mass of our Sun collapse to form dense and hot white dwarf stars. As this process occurs, the dying star will throw off its outer layers of material, forming an elaborate cloud of gas and dust known as a planetary nebula. This phenomenon is not uncommon, and planetary nebulae are a popular focus for astrophotographers because of their often beautiful and complex shapes. However, a few like Abell 78 are the result of a so-called “born again” star. Although the core of the star has stopped burning hydrogen and helium, a thermonuclear runaway at its surface ejects material at high speeds. This ejecta shocks and sweeps up the material of the old nebula, producing the filaments and irregular shell around the central star seen in this Picture of the Week, which features data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and PANSTARSS. Credit:ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Guerrero Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a spiral galaxy located 31 million light-years away. Also known as M51, it highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters. Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
An incredible image of Mars has been released that captures the relentless activity of dust devils, swirling across the planet’s surface. These Martian whirlwinds form, move across the surface and dissipate before others take their place. The image was taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in September 2022 and shows part of the Haldane Crater, where dust devils have left their mark on the landscape. Scientists study the image tracks and the rate at which dust accumulates on Mars, helping them better understand the planet’s atmospheric processes.
📷 Lacey young
Its glowing hydrogen gas and dark molecular clouds are sculpted by intense stellar winds from newly formed massive stars. This nebula is home to over 2,200 young stars, many hidden within its dense dust clouds. It provides crucial insights into the birth and early evolution of stars.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have helped settle a mystery that has puzzled scientists concerning the exact distance to the famous nearby star cluster known as the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters. The Pleiades cluster, named by the ancient Greeks, is easily seen as a small grouping of stars lying near the shoulder of Taurus, the Bull, in the winter sky. Although it might be expected that the distance to this well-studied cluster would be well established, there has been an ongoing controversy among astronomers about its distance for the past seven years.
The bright light at the end of this country road is a close conjunction of two Venus and Jupiter from August 27, 2016. This vertical panorama shows the central Milky Way near zenith, posed on top of a pillar of zodiacal light along the ecliptic plane. Credit: Copyright Josh Calcino
What do the following things have in common: a cone, the fur of a fox, and a Christmas tree? Answer: they all occur in the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros). Considered as a star forming region and cataloged as NGC 2264, the complex jumble of cosmic gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant and mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark interstellar dust clouds. The featured image spans an angle larger than a full moon, covering over 50 light-years at the distance of NGC 2264. Its cast of cosmic characters includes the Fox Fur Nebula, whose convoluted pelt lies just to the left of the image center, bright variable star S Mon visible just to the right of the Fox Fur, and the Cone Nebula near the image top. With the Cone Nebula at the peak, the shape of the general glow of the region give it the nickname of the Christmas Tree Cluster, where stars are tree ornaments. Image Credit & Copyright: Tim White
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Image Description: This image showcases the spiral galaxy M74 (The Phantom Galaxy) with its stunning, well-defined structure. The central core glows a bright blue, surrounded by sprawling, delicate spiral arms. These arms are filled with intricate webs of gas and dust, which are highlighted in shades of dark brown and gray. Numerous bright pink and red regions are scattered throughout the spiral arms, indicating areas of active star formation. The overall appearance of the galaxy looks detailed and ethereal, as it appears against the deep, dark backdrop of space. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The nebula around the hot double star BAT99-49 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), obtained in January 2002 with the FORS1 multi-mode instrument at the 8.2-m VLT MELIPAL telescope at the Paranal Observatory (Chile). It is based on three exposures through narrow-band optical (interference) filters that isolate the light from specific atoms and ions. In this rendering, the blue colour represents the light from singly ionized Helium (He II; wavelength 468.6 nm; exposure time 45 min), green corresponds to doubly ionized oxygen ([O III]; 495.7 + 500.7 nm; 5 min) and red to hydrogen atoms (H; H-alpha line at 656.2 nm; 5 min). Of these three ions, He II is the tracer of high excitation, i.e. the bluest areas of the nebula are the hottest. The sky field measures 400 x 400 square arcsec ; the original pixel size on the 2k x 2k CCD is 0.23 arcsec. North is up and east to the left. Crédit: ESO
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission captured this mosaic of the Heart and Soul nebulae. Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the nebulae form a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. The nebula to the right is the Heart, named after its resemblance to a human heart. To the left is the Soul nebula, also known as the Embryo nebula. WISE's infrared vision allows it to see into the cooler and dustier crevices of clouds like these, where gas and dust are just beginning to collect into new stars. These stars are less than a few million of years old – youngsters in comparison to our Sun, which is nearly 5 billion years old. Also visible near the bottom of this image are two galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. Both galaxies contain billions of stars and, at about 10 million light-years away, are well outside our Milky Way yet relatively close compared to most galaxies. Maffei 1 is the bluish elliptical object and Maffei 2 is the spiral galaxy. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Hubble peered through the far southwestern edge of open cluster Messier 44 with its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument to view this teeming collection of stars and background galaxies. Hubble was studying distant galaxies to explore the distribution of their surrounding magnetic fields, which may be elevated from the galaxies by outflowing galactic winds. NASA, ESA, and S. Lilly (Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule) and DECam/CTIO/NOIRLabProcessing/NSF/AURA; Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
NGC 604 is an enormous star-forming nebula in one of M33’s spiral arms. Spanning almost 1,500 light-years, NGC 604 is nearly 100 times larger than the Orion Nebula in our own galaxy and contains more than 200 hot, massive, young stars (versus the Orion Nebula’s four). This image of NGC 604 is constructed from observations taken with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in 1994, 1995 and 2001. Credits: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI); acknowledgment: D. Garnett (U. Arizona), J. Hester (ASU) and J. Westphal (Caltech
'Vulture and Hunter' This image captures Orion rising over one of Joshua Tree National Park's lesser-known rock arches. I used low-level lighting to illuminate the arch in a soft golden light that highlights the natural contours of the arch and surrounding boulders. Above, the night sky displays the Winter Milky Way in breathtaking detail, revealing intricate features such as glowing red emission nebulae (including Barnard's Loop and the Orion Nebula) that contrast against the deep, dark expanse of space. The sky is also textured with faint wisps of interstellar gas and dust, adding to the celestial drama. The green and yellow hues on the horizon are natural airglow, while the white light on the left edge of the frame is Zodiacal light,
This colour image of the region known as NGC 2264 — an area of sky that includes the sparkling blue baubles of the Christmas Tree star cluster and the Cone Nebula — was created from data taken through four different filters (B, V, R and H-alpha) with the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory, 2400 m high in the Atacama Desert of Chile in the foothills of the Andes. The image shows a region of space about 30 light-years across. This image is available as a mounted image in the ESOshop