Hubble s Cosmic Reef
25.04.2020

These bright ridges of interstellar gas and dust are bathed in energetic starlight. With its sea of young stars, the massive star-forming region NGC 2014 has been dubbed the Cosmic Reef. Drifting just...

Stars Without Galaxies
19.01.2002

Galaxies are made up of stars, but are all stars found within galaxies? Using the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers exploring the Virgo Cluster of galaxies have found about 600 red giant stars adrift in intergalactic space. Above is an artist's vision of the sky from a hypothetical planet of such a lonely sun.

Orions Horsehead Nebula
29.01.2003

The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the red emission nebula seen above and to the right of center in the above photograph. The bright star on the left is located in the belt of the familiar constellation of Orion.

A Chicago Meteorite Fall
6.05.2003

If you wait long enough, a piece of outer space itself will come right to you. As Colby Navarro worked innocently on the computer, a rock from space crashed through the roof, struck the printer, banged off the wall, and came to rest near the filing cabinet.

Eclipsed Moon and Stars
23.05.2003

Half-shadowed by the Earth, the Moon takes on a remarkable appearance against a field of stars in this intriguing telephoto picture recorded during a partial phase of last week's lunar eclipse. The picture is not a composite, but it has been digitally enhanced to bring out features covering a large range in brightness.

A Wolf-Rayet Star Blows Bubbles
3.01.1997

Wolf-Rayet stars can blow bubbles. These unusual stars are much hotter and more luminous than our Sun. All extremely massive stars will eventually evolve though a Wolf-Rayet phase. Approximately 200 Wolf-Rayet stars are known in our Milky Way Galaxy. Wolf-Rayet stars generate bubbles because they continually eject their outer atmosphere as a stellar wind.

Sol 5 Postcard from Mars
9.01.2004

A martian Sol - the average martian solar day - is about 39 minutes longer than Earth's familiar 24 hour day. Operating on martian time, the Spirit rover recently sent back this color postcard image, recorded on Sol 5 of its stay on the martian surface.

Emission Nebula IC 1396
5.08.2004

Sprawling across hundreds of light-years, emission nebula IC 1396 mixes glowing cosmic gas and dark dust clouds. Stars are forming in this area, only about 3,000 light-years from Earth. This particularly colorful view of the region is a composite of digital images recorded through narrow band filters.

Saturns Iapetus: Moon with a Strange Surface
1.02.2005

What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? A strange ridge crosses the moon near the equator, visible near the bottom of the above image, making Iapetus appear similar to the pit of a peach. Half of Iapetus is so dark that it can nearly disappear when viewed from Earth.

The First Explorer
6.02.1999

The first US spacecraft was Explorer 1. The cylindrical 30 pound satellite was launched (above) as the fourth stage of a Jupiter-C rocket (a modified US Army Redstone ballistic missile) and achieved orbit on January 31, 1958.