Fomalhaut's Dusty Debris Disk
10.05.2023

Fomalhaut is a bright star, a 25 light-year voyage from planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Astronomers first noticed Fomalhaut's excess infrared emission in the 1980s. Space and ground-based...

Young Stars, Stellar Jets
27.07.2023

High-speed outflows of molecular gas from a pair of actively forming young stars shine in infrared light, revealing themselves in this NIRcam image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Cataloged as HH (Herbig-Haro) 46/47, the young stars are lodged within a dark nebula that is largely opaque when viewed in visible light.

The Giants of Omega Centauri
1.05.2008

Globular star cluster Omega Centauri is some 15,000 light-years away and 150 light-years in diameter. Packed with about 10 million stars, Omega Cen is the largest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy.

Light from the First Stars
1.01.2007

What were the first stars like? No one is yet sure. Our Sun is not a first-generation star. It is not even second generation. The first stars to appear in the universe likely came and went about 13 billion years ago.

Pick a Galaxy Any Galaxy
16.01.2002

Pick a galaxy, any galaxy. In the top panel you can choose from a myriad of distant galaxies revealed in a deep Hubble Space Telescope image of a narrow slice of the cosmos toward the constellation Hercules.

The Protostar within L1527
17.11.2022

The protostar within dark cloud L1527 is a mere 100,000 years old, still embedded in the cloud of gas and dust that feeds its growth. In this NIRCam image from the James Webb...

The Water Vapor Channel
9.05.1998

What alien planet's bizarre landscape lurks below these fiery-looking clouds? It's only Planet Earth, of course ... as seen on the Water Vapor Channel. Hourly, images like this one (an infrared image shown in false color) are brought to you by the orbiting Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites' (GOES) multi-channel imagers.

Galactic Centre Starscape
29.06.2000

Thirty thousand light-years distant, beyond the majestic dust clouds of the constellation Sagittarius, lies the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy. Hidden from optical view by the dust, the Galactic Centre region is a relatively unexplored starscape.

The Surface of Titan
4.08.1999

If sailing the hydrocarbon seas of Titan, beware of gasoline rain. Such might be a travel advisory issued next millennium for adventurers visiting Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Images of Titan's surface were released last week from the Keck 10-meter telescope featuring the finest details yet resolved.

Uranus' Ring System
30.04.1996

The rings of Uranus are thin, narrow, and dark compared to other planetary ring systems. Brightened artificially by computer, the ring particles reflect as little light as charcoal, although they are really made of ice chucks darkened by rock.