Pillars of Creation
These columns that resemble stalagmites protruding from the floor of a cavern columns are in fact cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that act as incubators for new stars. Inside them and on their surface astronomers have found knots or globules of denser gas. These are called EGGs (acronym...
The oldest cluster in its cloud
This image shows NGC 121, a globular cluster in the constellation of Tucana (The Toucan). Globular clusters are big balls of old stars that orbit the centres of their galaxies like satellites the Milky Way, for example, has around 150. NGC 121 belongs to one of our neighbouring galaxies, the...
Hubble's last look at Ccomet ISON before perihelion
As of mid-November, ISON is officially upon us. Hubble has taken its closest look yet at the innermost region of the comet, where geysers of sublimating ice are fueling a spectacular tail. Made from observations on 2 November 2013, the image combines pictures of ISON taken through blue and red...
Stellar fireworks are ablaze in galaxy NGC 4449
Hundreds of thousands of vibrant blue and red stars are visible in this new image of galaxy NGC 4449 taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hot bluish white clusters of massive stars are scattered throughout the galaxy, interspersed with numerous dustier reddish regions of current star...
A mysterious old spiral
This striking cosmic whirl is the centre of galaxy NGC 524, as seen with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy is located in the constellation of Pisces, some 90 million light-years from Earth. NGC 524 is a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies are believed to be an intermediate...
Arp 148
Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the centre and then caused it to propagate outwards in a...
A new view of the Helix Nebula
This composite image is a view of the colorful Helix Nebula taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Mosaic II Camera on the 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The object is so large that both telescopes were...
Nebula NGC 2080, nicknamed the 'Ghost Head Nebula'
The 'Ghost Head Nebula' is one of a chain of star-forming regions lying south of the 30 Doradus nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Two bright regions (the 'eyes of the ghost'), named A1 (left) and A2 (right), are very hot, glowing 'blobs' of hydrogen and oxygen. The bubble in A1 is produced...
Up and Over
Every now and then, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope glimpses a common object say, a spiral galaxy in an interesting or unusual way. A sharply angled perspective, such as the one shown in this Picture of the Week, can make it seem as if we, the viewers, are craning our necks to see over a...
The best Earth-based view of Mars ever
Frosty white water ice clouds and swirling orange dust storms above a vivid rusty landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic planet in this sharpest view ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope. The Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope snapped this picture on June 26, when Mars was approximately 43...
Hubble contributes to painting a picture of the evolving Universe
The Hubble Deep Field from 1995 allowed astronomers a first glimpse into the early Universe. This first picture was followed later by an even deeper observation, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 2004. Both images were observed in visible light, the same form of light human eyes can see. But...
Intracluster light in Abell S1063
Abell S1063, a galaxy cluster, was observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Frontier Fields programme. The huge mass of the cluster containing both baryonic matter and dark matter acts as cosmic magnification glass and deforms objects behind it. In the past astronomers...
Jets, bubbles and bursts of light in Taurus
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a striking view of a multiple star system called XZ Tauri, its neighbour HL Tauri and several nearby young stellar objects. XZ Tauri is blowing a hot bubble of gas into the surrounding space, which is filled with bright and beautiful clumps that...
All that glitters
This striking new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a glittering bauble named Messier 92. Located in the northern constellation of Hercules, this globular cluster a ball of stars that orbits a galactic core like a satellite was first discovered by astronomer Johann Elert Bode in...
Hubble views a supermassive black hole burping twice
Researchers using a suite of telescopes including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a supermassive black hole blowing huge bubbles of hot, bright gas one bubble is currently expanding outwards from the black hole, while another older bubble slowly fades away. This cosmic...
Festive nebulae
This glowing nebula, named NGC 248, is located within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and about 200 000 light-years from Earth. The nebula was observed with Hubbles Advanced Camera for Surveys in September 2015, as part of a survey called the Small Magellanic...
New Hubble view of the Lagoon Nebula
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the Lagoon Nebula, an object with a deceptively tranquil name. The region is filled with intense winds from hot stars, churning funnels of gas, and energetic star formation, all embedded within an intricate haze of gas and pitch-dark dust.
Spiral in Serpens
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a beautiful spiral galaxy known as PGC 54493, located in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent). This galaxy is part of a galaxy cluster that has been studied by astronomers exploring an intriguing phenomenon known as weak gravitational...
Light and dark
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a variety of intriguing cosmic phenomena. Surrounded by bright stars, towards the upper middle of the frame we see a small young stellar object (YSO) known as SSTC2D J033038.2+303212. Located in the constellation of Perseus, this star is in...
Jupiter's Great Red Spot and Ganymede's shadow colour
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a gorgeous close-up view of the planet Jupiter. Astronomers were using Hubble to monitor changes in Jupiter's immense Great Red Spot (GRS) storm. During the exposures, on 21 April 2014, the shadow of the Jovian moon Ganymede swept across the...
A stellar sneezing fit
Look at the bright star in the middle of this image. Achoo! It has just sneezed. This sight will only last for a few thousand years a blink of an eye in the young star's life. If you could carry on watching for a few years you would realise it's not just one sneeze, but a sneezing fit. This...
Hubble snaps NGC 5189
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope celebrates the holiday season with a striking image of the planetary nebula NGC 5189. The intricate structure of the stellar eruption looks like a giant and brightly coloured ribbon in space.
A bizarre cosmic rarity: NGC 660
This new Hubble image shows a peculiar galaxy known as NGC 660, located around 45 million light-years away from us. NGC 660 is classified as a "polar ring galaxy", meaning that it has a belt of gas and stars around its centre that it ripped from a near neighbour during a clash about one billion...
Hubble view of NGC 922
An almost complete circle of bright pink nebulae skirts around a spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 922. The ring structure and the galaxys distorted spiral shape result from a smaller galaxy scoring a cosmic bullseye, hitting the centre of NGC 922 some 330...
Hubble snaps image of space oddity
In this image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, an unusual, ghostly green blob of gas appears to float near a normal-looking spiral galaxy. The bizarre object, dubbed Hannys Voorwerp (Hannys Object in Dutch), is the only visible part of a streamer of gas stretching 300000 light-years...
Hubble spots a celestial bauble
This delicate shell, photographed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, appears to float serenely in the depths of space, but this apparent calm hides an inner turmoil. The gaseous envelope formed as the expanding blast wave and ejected material from a supernova tore through the nearby...
Hubble views NGC 4402
The image of NGC 4402 highlights some telltale signs of ram pressure stripping such as the curved, or convex, appearance of the disc of gas and dust, a result of the forces exerted by the heated gas. Light being emitted by the disc backlights the swirling dust that is being swept out by the...
The gargantuan galaxy NGC 1132
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of the galaxy NGC 1132 which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil - the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant but fuzzy giant elliptical galaxy far...
IC beauty
The Hubble telescope reveals a rainbow of colours in this dying star, called IC 4406. Like many other so-called planetary nebulae, IC 4406 exhibits a high degree of symmetry. The nebula's left and right halves are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a spaceship,...
An explosive galaxy
When massive stars die at the end of their short lives, they light up the cosmos with bright, explosive bursts of light and material known as supernovae. A supernova event is incredibly energetic and intensely luminous so much so that it forms what looks like an especially bright new star that...
Dark Matter in the Belly of the Whale
This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, focuses on an object named UGC 695, which is located 30 million light-years away within the constellation Cetus (The Sea Monster), also known as The Whale. UGC 695 is a low-surface-brightness (LSB) galaxy. These galaxies are so faint...
NGC 2346
NGC 2346 is a so-called "planetary nebula," which is ejected from Sun-like stars which are near the ends of their lives. NGC 2346 is remarkable because its central star is known to be actually a very close pair of stars, orbiting each other every 16 days. It is believed that the binary star was...
Trillions of stars
This Hubble Picture of the Week shows the spiral galaxy Messier 98, which is located about 45 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair). It was discovered in 1781 by the French astronomer Pierre Mchain, a colleague of Charles Messier, and is one of the...
Nebulous, but no nebula
This Hubble Picture of the Week shows Messier 28, a globular cluster in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), in jewel-bright detail. It is about 18 000 light-years away from Earth. As its name suggests, this cluster belongs to the Messier catalogue of objects however, when astronomer...
The largest of its kind
Star clusters are commonly featured in cosmic photoshoots, and are also well-loved by the keen eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These large gatherings of celestial gems are striking sights and the subject of this Picture of the Week, Messier 2, is certainly no exception. Messier 2...
Northern part of Abell 1758
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the northern part of the galaxy cluster Abell 1758, A1758N. The cluster is approximately 3.2 billion light-years from Earth and is part of a larger structure containing two cluster sitting some 2.4 million light-years apart. But A1758N...
The glowing spiral arms of NGC 6744
This image shows the galaxy NGC 6744, about 30 million light-years away. It is one of 50 galaxies observed as part of the Hubble Space Telescopes Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS), the sharpest, most comprehensive ultraviolet-light survey of star-forming galaxies in the nearby Universe,...
Messier Monday
This huge ball of stars around 100 billion in total is an elliptical galaxy located some 55 million light-years away from us. Known as Messier 89, this galaxy appears to be perfectly spherical; this is unusual for elliptical galaxies, which tend to be elongated ellipsoids. The apparently...
Hubble opens its eye again
For three weeks in October, Hubbles eyes on the Universe closed. On the evening of Friday 5 October, the orbiting observatory put itself into safe mode after one of its gyroscopes failed. The telescope stopped making science observations, oriented its solar panels toward the Sun, and waited for...
Probing the distant past
Obtained for a research programme on star formation in old and distant galaxies, this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image obtained with its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) demonstrates the immense effects of gravity; more specifically, it shows the effects of gravitational lensing caused by an...
A cosmic lightsabre
The two lightsabre-like streams crossing the image are jets of energised gas, ejected from the poles of a young star. If the jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust they can clear vast spaces, and create curved shock waves, seen as knotted clumps called Herbig-Haro objects.
A home for old stars
This image, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the globular cluster Terzan 1. Lying around 20 000 light-years from us in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), it is one of about 150 globular clusters belonging to our galaxy,...
An interacting colossus
This picture, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescopes Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), shows a galaxy known as NGC 6872 in the constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). Its unusual shape is caused by its interactions with the smaller galaxy that can be seen just above NGC 6872, called IC...
A galactic sunflower
The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the centre of a sunflower. So the nickname for this cosmic object the Sunflower Galaxy is no coincidence. Discovered by Pierre Mechain in 1779,...
Snapshot of a shedding star
In this new Hubble image, the strikingly luminous star AG Carinae otherwise known as HD 94910 takes centre stage. Found within the constellation of Carina in the southern sky, AG Carinae lies 20 000 light-years away, nestled in the Milky Way. AG Carinae is classified as a Luminous Blue...
Droplets of star formation and two merging galaxies in SDSS J1531+3414
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows two galaxies from the cluster SDSS J1531+3414. The two galaxies have been found to be merging into one and a "chain" of young stellar superclusters are seen winding around the galaxies nuclei. The galaxies are surrounded by an egg-shaped blue...
A galaxy with a glowing heart
This view, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a nearby spiral galaxy known as NGC 1433. At about 32 million light-years from Earth, it is a type of very active galaxy known as a Seyfert galaxy a classification that accounts for 10% of all galaxies. They have very bright,...
A curious supernova in NGC 2441
This bright spiral galaxy is known as NGC 2441, located in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). However, NGC 2441 is not the only subject of this new Hubble image; the galaxy contains an intriguing supernova named SN1995E, visible as a small dot at the approximate centre...
A dwarf galaxy ravaged by grand design
The subject of this new Hubble image is NGC 5474, a dwarf galaxy located 21 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). This beautiful image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The term "dwarf galaxy" may sound diminutive, but don't let...
Golden rings of star formation
Taking centre stage in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a galaxy known as NGC 3081, set against an assortment of glittering galaxies in the distance. Located in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Serpent), NGC 3081 is located over 86 million light-years from us. It is known as...
Hubbles colourful view of the Universe
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured the most comprehensive picture ever assembled of the evolving Universe and one of the most colourful. The study is called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UVUDF) project.
Starbursts in the wake of a fleeting romance
This image shows galaxy NGC 4485 in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). The galaxy is irregular in shape, but it hasnt always been so. Part of NGC 4485 has been dragged towards a second galaxy, named NGC 4490 which lies out of frame to the bottom right of this image....
Hubble close-up on the Coma Cluster
In this new image Hubble peeks into the Coma Cluster, a massive gathering of galaxies located towards the constellation of Coma Berenices. This large cluster is around 350 million light-years away from us and contains over 1000 identified galaxies, the majority of which are elliptical. The...
Hubble sees a cosmic caterpillar
This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust resembles a caterpillar on its way to a feast. But the meat of the story is not only what this cosmic caterpillar eats for lunch, but also what's eating it. Harsh winds from extremely bright stars are blasting ultraviolet radiation at this...
Galactic fireflies
Luminous galaxies glow like fireflies on a dark night in this image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The central galaxy in this image is a gigantic elliptical galaxy designated 4C 73.08. A prominent spiral galaxy seen from "above" shines in the lower part of the image, while...
Glowing gas and dark dust in a side-on spiral
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a sharp image of NGC 4634, a spiral galaxy seen exactly side-on. Its disc is slightly warped by ongoing interactions with a nearby galaxy, and it is crisscrossed by clearly defined dust lanes and bright nebulae. NGC 4634, which lies around 70...
Hubble image of Herbig-Haro object HH 110
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of Herbig-Haro 110, a geyser of hot gas flowing from a newborn star. HH 110 appears different from most other Herbig-Haro objects: in particular, it appears on its own while they usually come in pairs. Astronomers think it may be a...
Orions lesser-known nebula takes centre stage
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a close-up view of an outer part of the Orion Nebulas little brother, Messier 43. This nebula, which is sometimes referred to as De Mairans Nebula after its discoverer, is separated from the famous Orion Nebula (Messier 42) by only a dark lane of...
Lensing cluster Abell 383
The giant galaxy cluster in the centre of this image contains so much dark matter mass that its gravity bends the light of more distant objects. This means that for very distant galaxies in the background, the clusters gravitational field acts as a sort of magnifying glass, bending and...
Barred spiral bares all
The galaxy captured in this image, called UGC 12158, certainly isnt camera-shy: this spiral stunner is posing face-on to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescopes Advanced Camera for Surveys, revealing its structure in fine detail. UGC 12158 is an excellent example of a barred spiral galaxy in the...
Providers | Sign In
NASA’s Universe of Learning materials are based upon work supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AC65A to the Space Telescope Science Institute, working in partnership with Caltech/IPAC, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The award is part of NASA’s Science Activation program, which strives to further enable NASA science experts and content into the learning environment more effectively and efficiently with learners of all ages.