A Close Encounter of the Stellar Kind
26.06.1997

The unassuming star centered in this sky view will one day be our next door stellar neighbor. The faint 9th magnitude red dwarf currently 63 light-years away in the constellation Ophiucus was recently discovered to be on a course toward our Solar System.

NGC 6188 and NGC 6164
28.07.2011

Fantastic shapes lurk in clouds of glowing hydrogen gas in NGC 6188. The emission nebula is found near the edge of a large molecular cloud, unseen at visible wavelengths, in the southern constellation Ara, about 4,000 light-years away.

In the Arms of M83
11.11.2011

Big, bright, and beautiful, spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. This cosmic close-up, a mosaic based on data from...

Horsehead: A Wider View
3.05.2013

Combined image data from the massive, ground-based VISTA telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope was used to create this wide perspective of the interstellar landscape surrounding the famous Horsehead Nebula. Captured at near-infrared wavelengths...

2012 VP113: A New Furthest Known Object in Solar System
31.03.2014

What is the furthest known object in our Solar System? The new answer is 2012 VP113, an object currently over twice the distance of Pluto from the Sun. Pictured above is a series...

Dwarf Planet, Bright Spot
14.05.2015

Now at Ceres, Dawn's camera recorded this closer view of the dwarf planet's northern hemisphere and one of its mysterious bright spots on May 4. A sunlit portrait of a small, dark...

Tychos Supernova Remnant Expands
1.06.2016

What star created this huge expanding puffball? Featured here is the first expansion movie ever created for Tycho's supernova remnant, the result of a stellar explosion first recorded over 400 years ago by the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe.

APOD: 2020 July 26 Б A Flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
26.07.2020

What would it look like to fly through the distant universe? To find out, a team of astronomers estimated the relative distances to over 5,000 galaxies in one of the most distant fields of galaxies ever imaged: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF).

Sharpless 308: The Dolphin Head Nebula
7.06.2024

Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,000 light-years away toward the well-trained constellation Canis Major and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance.

IC443's Neutron Star
15.12.2000

Using x-ray data from the orbiting Chandra Observatory along with radio data from the Very Large Array, a team of researchers has discovered evidence for a new example of one of the most bizarre objects known to modern astrophysics -- a neutron star.