Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 660
7.11.2014

NGC 660 is featured in this cosmic snapshot, a sharp composite of broad and narrow band filter image data from the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea. Over 20 million light-years away and swimming within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, NGC 660's peculiar appearance marks it as a polar ring galaxy.

M83: A Barred Spiral Galaxy
26.09.1999

M83 is a bright spiral galaxy that can be found with a small telescope in the constellation of Hydra. It takes light about 15 million years to reach us from M83. M83 is quite a typical spiral - much like our own Milky Way Galaxy.

NGC 4414: A Flocculent Spiral Galaxy
20.11.2016

How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The featured true color image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. The featured image was augmented with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Simulating the Universe
8.11.1995

The above cube represents a chunk of our universe as simulated by the Grand Challenge Cosmology Consortium (GC3). The cube is huge - it would take light 500 million years to cross it. Low density gas is shown as blue, and high density gas as red.

Spiral Galaxies Spinning Super Fast
5.11.2019

Why are these galaxies spinning so fast? If you estimated each spiral's mass by how much light it emits, their fast rotations should break them apart. The leading hypothesis as to why these galaxies don't break apart is dark matter -- mass so dark we can't see it.

Shell Galaxy NGC 7600
23.12.2011

Similar in size to the Milky Way, elliptical galaxy NGC 7600 is about 150 thousand light-years distant. In this deep image, spanning about 1/2 degree on the sky toward the constellation Aquarius, NGC 7600 sports a remarkable outer halo of nested shells and broad circumgalactic structures.

NGC 4414: A Flocculent Spiral Galaxy
3.04.2002

How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The above true color image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. Flocculent spirals -- galaxies without well defined spiral arms -- are a quite common form of galaxy, and NGC 4414 is one of the closest.

The Matter of Galaxy Clusters
24.10.2001

Situated over 2,000,000,000 (two billion) light-years from Earth, galaxies in cluster Abell 2390 (top) and MS2137.3-2353 (bottom) are seen in the right hand panels above, false-color images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Corresponding panels on the left reveal each cluster's x-ray appearance in images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Galaxy Cluster Magnifies Distant Supernova
5.05.2014

How do you calibrate a huge gravitational lens? In this case the lens is the galaxy cluster Abell 383, a massive conglomeration of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter that lies about 2.5 billion light years away (redshift z=0.187).

Huge Void Implicated in Distant Universe
27.08.2007

What has created this huge empty area in the universe? No one is yet sure, and even the extent of the estimated billion-light year void is being researched. The void is not a hole...