The Nearby Milky Way in Cold Dust
21.03.2010

What shapes the remarkable dust tapestry of the nearby Milky Way Galaxy? No one knows for sure. The intricate structures, shown above, were resolved in new detail recently in a wide region of the sky imaged in far infrared light by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.

APOD: 2024 April 21 Б Perijove 16: Passing Jupiter
20.04.2024

Watch Juno zoom past Jupiter. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its now month-long, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured video is from perijove 16, the sixteenth time that Juno passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016.

X-rays From The Cat's Eye
10.01.2001

Haunting patterns within planetary nebula NGC 6543 readily suggest its popular moniker -- the Cat's Eye nebula. In 1995, a stunning false-color optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope detailed the swirls of this glowing nebula, known to be the gaseous shroud expelled from a dying sun-like star about 3,000 light-years from Earth.

Comet Hyakutake's Closest Approach
23.03.1996

The above true color image of Comet Hyakutake was taken the night of March 21/22. Tonight, Comet Hyakutake will make its nearest approach to Earth, closing to a mere 10 million miles as it passes over the planet's Northern Hemisphere.

Fast Gas Bullet from Cosmic Blast N49
30.06.2010

What is that strange blue blob on the far right? No one is sure, but it might be a speeding remnant of a powerful supernova that was unexpectedly lopsided. Scattered debris from supernova explosion N49 lights up the sky in this gorgeous composited image based on data from the Chandra and Hubble Space Telescopes.

GW170817: A Spectacular Multiradiation Merger Event Detected
15.10.2017

Both gravitational and electromagnetic radiations have been detected in rapid succession for an explosive merging event for the first time. Data from the outburst fit well with a spectacular binary neutron-star death-spiral. The explosive episode was seen on August 17 in nearby NGC 4993, an elliptical galaxy only 130 million light years distant.

M51: Tidal Streams and H-alpha Ciffs
12.12.2024

An intriguing pair of interacting galaxies, M51 is the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with whirlpool-like spiral structure seen nearly face-on is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes sweep in front of its smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195.

38 Hours in the M81 Group
9.04.2025

From a garden on planet Earth, 38 hours of exposure with a camera and small telescope produced this cosmic photo of the M81 galaxy group. In fact, the group's dominant galaxy M81 is near the center of the frame sporting grand spiral arms and a bright yellow core.

Unexpected X Rays from Perseus Galaxy Cluster
1.01.2018

Why does the Perseus galaxy cluster shine so strangely in one specific color of X-rays? No one is sure, but a much-debated hypothesis holds that these X-rays are a clue to the long-sought identity of dark matter.

The Densest Galaxy
4.10.2013

The bright core and outer reaches of giant elliptical galaxy M60 (NGC 4649) loom large at the upper left of this sharp close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some 54 million light-years away and 120,000 light-years across, M60 is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster.