APOD: 2024 February 20 Б AM1054: Stars Form as Galaxies Collide
19.02.2024

When galaxies collide, how many stars are born? For AM1054-325, featured here in a recently released image by the Hubble Space Telescope, the answer is millions. Instead of stars being destroyed as galaxy AM1054-325 and a nearby galaxy circle each other, their gravity and motion has ignited stellar creation.

NGC 5307: A Symmetric Planetary Nebula
30.12.1997

Some stellar nebulae are strangely symmetric. For example, every major blob of gas visible on the upper left of NGC 5307 appears to have a counterpart on the lower right. This picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope was released last week. NGC 5307 is an example of a planetary nebula with a spiral shape.

RBSP Night Launch
2.09.2012

This graceful arc traces a Delta rocket climbing through Thursday's early morning skies over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, USA. Snug inside the rocket's Centaur upper stage were NASA's twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), now in separate orbits within planet Earth's Van Allen radiation belts.

Shuttle Enterprise Over New York
9.05.2012

What's that in the background? Two famous New York City icons stand tall in the above photo taken last week. On the left looms the Statue of Liberty, a universal symbol of freedom, while on the right rises the Empire State Building, now the second largest building in the city.

Watch Galaxies Form
5.09.1996

Snips and snails and puppy dog tails, is that what galaxies were made of? In a report released yesterday and soon to be published in Nature, astronomers have imaged an interesting distant patch of sky with the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

Spiral Galaxy NGC 3310 in Ultraviolet
16.01.2001

Why is NGC 3310 bursting with young stars? The brightest of these new stars are so hot that they light up this spiral galaxy not only in blue light, but in light so blue humans can't see it: ultraviolet. The Hubble Space Telescope took the above photograph in different bands of ultraviolet light.

Young Star Clusters in an Old Galaxy
4.07.2002

Elliptical galaxy NGC 4365 is old, probably about 12 billion years old. Like most elliptical galaxies, this galaxy was thought to be full of old stars too, its burst of star forming activity having long since ended.

APOD: 2024 January 15 Б Star Cluster IC 348 from Webb
14.01.2024

Sometimes, it's the stars that are the hardest to see that are the most interesting. IC 348 is a young star cluster that illuminates surrounding filamentary dust. The stringy and winding dust appears pink in this recently released infrared image from the Webb Space Telescope.

Rampaging Fronts of the Veil Nebula
6.03.1996

A supernova explosion of a high-mass star results in fast moving blast waves. At the front of the waves shown above, ionized gas in the Veil Supernova Remnant rushes out from the explosion, sweeps up material, and breaks up many atoms into constituent ions and electrons.

Aurora In West Texas Skies
15.09.2000

The aurora borealis, or northern lights, are not a common sight in the southwestern United States. But a strong solar coronal mass ejection in early August triggered geomagnetic storms and aurora which were widely reported, even under west Texas skies.