KACEY. 21. HE/HIM.

Signatures of the Earliest Galaxies

The three panels show different components of near-infrared background light detected by the Hubble Space Telescope in deep-sky surveys. The one on the left is a mosaic of images taken over a 10-year period. When all the stars and galaxies are masked, the background signals can be isolated, as seen in the second and third panels. The middle panel reveals "intra-halo light" from rogue stars torn from their host galaxies, and the panel on the right captures the signature of the first galaxies formed in the universe.

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Hubble view of green filament in galaxy NGC 5972

Twisting in the darkness like a disturbed double helix, NGC 5972 exhibits a remarkable structure of ionised gas, which appears to be reeling in space as a result of a huge disturbance of some kind, possibly a merger with another galaxy.

The sweeping trails of gas — both H-alpha and doubly ionised Oxygen, which would both usually be expected in areas of star creation and destruction — reach out into space far beyond the stars that comprise the main body of the galaxy — so far, in fact, that when the Hubble Space Telescope applied the filter necessary to view the gas, it was unable to fit the entire extent of the clouds within its field of view, as seen in this original image.

Aside from its intriguing tendrils, NGC 5972 also plays host to an active galactic nucleus. This means a supermassive black hole resides at the centre of the galaxy, and the accretion disc around this monster’s genocidal jaws is rotated with such ferocity that twin beams of plasma are ejected in opposite directions out into the depths of space at close to the speed of light. Because of the vast sums of energy involved, this process can be imaged most effectively in the radio wavelengths, and doing so produces images of structures that are of indescribable magnitudes. Cygnus A provides perhaps the best illustration of this, as seen in this image taken by the NRAO Very Large Array, where the nucleus of the host galaxy appears as nothing more than an insignificant mote of dust, dwarfed by the jets and lobes of highly charged particles protruding outwards with spectacular flamboyance.

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Full Trifid Nebula (Rubin Image with Hubble Close-up)

At left is a complete view of the Trifid Nebula (Messier 20 or M20) captured by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. A white box in the lower-left portion of the pink region shows the area the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope targeted, and Hubble’s new image is featured at right.

Rubin’s field of view is approximately 56 light-years across, while Hubble’s is about four light-years across.

The colour assignments in the images vary based on the filters in the telescopes’ cameras. Rubin takes broadband images, which capture the full visible spectrum to show natural colours in red, green, and blue. For this image, Hubble captured narrowband images of specific chemical elements. Sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen were mapped to red, green, and blue, respectively, to make this composite image.

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Light Echo around SN 2014J in M82

Light from a supernova explosion in the nearby starburst galaxy Messier 82 is reverberating off a huge dust cloud in interstellar space. The supernova, called SN 2014J, occurred at the upper right of Messier 82, and is marked by an “X.” The supernova was discovered on 21 January 2014.

SN 2014J is classified as a Type Ia supernova and is the closest such blast in at least four decades. A Type Ia supernova occurs in a binary star system consisting of a burned-out white dwarf and a companion star. The white dwarf explodes after the companion dumps too much material onto it.

Located about 11 million light-years away, Messier 82 appears high in the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the “Cigar Galaxy” because of the elliptical shape produced by the oblique tilt of its starry disk relative to our line of sight.

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NASA, ESA, Y. Yang, Texas A&M University and Weizmann Institute of Science

R Aquarii

This image features R Aquarii, a symbiotic binary star that lies only roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. This is a type of binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and a red giant that is surrounded by a large, dynamic nebula.

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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 are emitting strong winds and jets. These objects illuminate the region, creating a truly dramatic scene.

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Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA

Hubble image of variable star RS Puppis

This Hubble image shows RS Puppis, a type of variable star known as a Cepheid variable. As variable stars go, Cepheids have comparatively long periods — RS Puppis, for example, varies in brightness by almost a factor of five every 40 or so days.

RS Puppis is unusual; this variable star is shrouded by thick, dark clouds of dust enabling a phenomenon known as a light echo to be shown with stunning clarity.

These Hubble observations show the ethereal object embedded in its dusty environment, set against a dark sky filled with background galaxies.

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NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-Hubble/Europe Collaboration

Wide-field image showing the region of WR 25 and Tr16-244

WR 25 and Tr16-244, at the bottom of the image, are located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina, the Keel. At the top of the image, a peculiar nebula with the shape of a "defiant" finger points towards WR25 and Tr16-244.

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Hubble Celebrates its 31st anniversary with a magnificent view of AG Carinae

In celebration of the 31st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers aimed the celebrated observatory at one of the brightest stars seen in our galaxy to capture its beauty.

The giant star featured in this latest Hubble Space Telescope anniversary image is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The star, called AG Carinae, is surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust. The nebula is about five light-years wide, which equals the distance from here to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

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The Hubble Deep Field

Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this 'deepest-ever' view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colours that are important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.

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Studied lensed quasars of H0LiCOW collaboration

This montage shows the five lensed quasars and the foreground galaxies studied by the H0LICOW collaboration. Using these objects astronomers were able to make an independent measurement of the Hubble constant. They calculated that the Universe is actually expanding faster than expected on the basis of our cosmological model.

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Collage of six cluster collisions, with dark-matter maps and x-ray data

This collage shows images of six different galaxy clusters taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The clusters were observed in a study of how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. Seventy-two large cluster collisions were studied in total.

Using visible-light images from Hubble, the team was able to map the post-collision distribution of stars and also of the dark matter (coloured in blue), which was traced through its gravitational lensing effects on background light. Chandra was used to see the X-ray emission from impacted gas (pink).

The team determined that dark matter interacts with itself and everything else even less than previously thought.

The clusters shown here are, from left to right and top to bottom: MACS J0416.1-2403, MACS J0152.5-2852, MACS J0717.5+3745, Abell 370, Abell 2744, and ZwCl 1358+62.

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