Top 100 Images

Ranking
Date

1. Under the Sea

The jellyfish galaxy JO206 trails across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showcasing a colourful star-forming disc surrounded by a pale, luminous cloud of dust. A handful of bright stars with criss-cross diffraction spikes stand out against an inky black backdrop at the bottom of the image. JO206 lies over 700 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, and this image of the galaxy is the sixth and final instalment in a series of observations of jellyfish galaxies. Some of Hubble's other observations of these peculiar galaxies — which range from grandiose to ghostly — are available …

2. Hubble explores explosive aftermath in NGC 298

The spiral galaxy NGC 298 basks in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 298 lies around 89 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, and appears isolated in this image — only a handful of distant galaxies and foreground stars accompany the lonely galaxy. While NGC 298 seems peaceful, in 1986 it was host to one of astronomy's most extreme events: a catastrophic stellar explosion known as a Type II supernova.
Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys captured NGC 298 as part of an investigation into the origins of Type II supernovae. All Type II supernovae are produced …

3. A jellyfish galaxy adrift

The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, and is one of several jellyfish galaxies that Hubble has been studying over the past two years.
Despite this jellyfish galaxy’s serene appearance, it is adrift in a ferociously hostile environment; a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbours, which can twist galaxies into a variety of weird and wonderful shapes. If that was not enough, the …

4. Scrutinising a star-studded cluster

The densely packed globular cluster NGC 6325 glistens in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This concentrated group of stars lies around 26 000 light years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus.
Globular clusters like NGC 6325 are tightly bound collections of stars with anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of members. They can be found in all types of galaxies, and act as natural laboratories for astronomers studying star formation. This is because the constituent stars of globular clusters tend to form at roughly the same time and with similar initial composition, meaning that astronomers can use …

5. Cosmic leviathan

A vast galaxy cluster lurks in the centre of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Like a submerged sea monster causing waves on the surface, this cosmic leviathan can be identified by the distortions in spacetime around it. The mass of the cluster has caused the images of background galaxies to be gravitationally lensed; the galaxy cluster has caused a sufficient curvature of spacetime to bend the path of light and cause background galaxies to appear distorted into streaks and arcs of light. A host of other galaxies can be seen surrounding the cluster, and a handful of …

6. Hubble images TW Hydrae Disc Shadows (annotated)

Comparison images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, taken several years apart, have uncovered two eerie shadows moving counterclockwise across a disc of gas and dust encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The discs are tilted face-on as seen from Earth and so give astronomers a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening around the star. The left image, taken in 2016, shows just one shadow [A] at the 11 o’clock position. This shadow is cast by an inner disc that is slightly inclined to the outer disc and so blocks starlight. The picture on the left shows a second shadow that …

7. Concentric gas and dust discs around the star TW Hydrae

This illustration is based on NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images of a gas and dust discs encircling the young star TW Hydrae. Hubble photos show shadows sweeping across the discs encircling the system. The interpretation is that these shadows are from slightly inclined inner discs that block starlight from reaching the outer disc, and therefore cast a shadow. The discs are slightly inclined to each other because of the gravitational pull of unseen planets warping the disc structure.
[Image description: This illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope images of gas and dust discs encircling the young star TW Hydrae. We …

8. Hubble images TW Hydrae Disc Shadows (clean)

Comparison images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, taken several years apart, have uncovered two eerie shadows moving counterclockwise across a disc of gas and dust disc encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The discs are tilted face-on as seen from Earth and so give astronomers a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening around the star. The left image, taken in 2016, shows just one shadow at the 11 o’clock position. This shadow is cast by an inner disc that is slightly inclined to the outer disc and so blocks starlight. The picture on the left shows a second shadow that …

9. A Spiral Amongst Thousands

A crowded field of galaxies throngs this ESA/Webb Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, along with bright stars crowned with Webb’s signature six-pointed diffraction spikes. The large spiral galaxy at the base of this image is accompanied by a profusion of smaller, more distant galaxies which range from fully-fledged spirals to mere bright smudges. Named LEDA 2046648, it is situated a little over a billion light-years from Earth, in the constellation Hercules. One of Webb’s principle science goals is to observe distant galaxies in the early universe to understand the details of their formation, evolution, …

10. Ghostly galactic jellyfish

The jellyfish galaxy JO175 appears to hang suspended in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 650 million light-years from Earth in the appropriately-named constellation Telescopium, and was captured in crystal-clear detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. A handful of more distant galaxies are lurking throughout the scene, and a bright four-pointed star lies to the lower right side.
Jellyfish galaxies get their unusual name from the tendrils of star-forming gas and dust that trail behind them, just like the tentacles of a jellyfish. These bright tendrils contain clumps of star formation and give jellyfish …

11. Webb’s View of the Molecular Cloud Chameleon I

This image by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) features the central region of the Chameleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light years away. The cold, wispy cloud material (blue, centre) is illuminated in the infrared by the glow of the young, outflowing protostar Ced 110 IRS 4 (orange, upper left). The light from numerous background stars, seen as orange dots behind the cloud, can be used to detect ices in the cloud, which absorb the starlight passing through them. An international team of astronomers has reported the discovery of diverse ices in the darkest, …

12. The cluster that almost got away

A menagerie of interesting astronomical finds fill this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. As well as several large elliptical galaxies, a ring-shaped galaxy is lurking on the right of this image. A pair of bright stars are also visible at the left of this image, notable for their colourful criss-crossing diffraction spikes. This collection of astronomical curiosities is the galaxy cluster ACO S520 in the constellation Pictor, which was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
This is one of a series of Hubble observations searching for massive, luminous galaxy clusters that had not been captured by earlier surveys. …

13. Hubble celebrates its 33rd anniversary with NGC 1333 (annotated)

Astronomers are celebrating the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 33rd launch anniversary with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and is located approximately 960 light-years away.
Hubble’s colourful view, showcasing its unique capability to obtain images in light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, unveils an effervescent cauldron of glowing gases and pitch-black dust stirred up and blown around by several hundred newly forming stars embedded within the dark cloud. Even then, Hubble just scratches the surface; most of the star-birthing firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust — essentially soot …

14. Hubble celebrates its 33rd anniversary with NGC 1333

Astronomers are celebrating the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 33rd launch anniversary with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and is located approximately 960 light-years away.
Hubble’s colourful view, showcasing its unique capability to obtain images in light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, unveils an effervescent cauldron of glowing gases and pitch-black dust stirred up and blown around by several hundred newly forming stars embedded within the dark cloud. Even then, Hubble just scratches the surface; most of the star-birthing firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust — essentially soot …

15. Hubble spotlights a swirling spiral

The barred spiral galaxy UGC 678 takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The spectacular galaxy lies around 260 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces and is almost face on, allowing its lazily winding spiral arms to stretch across this image. In the foreground, a smaller edge-on galaxy seems to bisect the upper portion of UGC 678.
Just like humans, stars have a natural lifecycle; they are born, grow up, and eventually grow old and die. Studying this stellar life cycle — usually referred to as stellar evolution — is an important topic for …

16. The Hubble and Keck Telescopes assemble a 3D view of a giant galaxy

A photo of the huge elliptical galaxy M87 [left] is compared to its three-dimensional shape as gleaned from meticulous observations made with the Hubble and Keck telescopes [right]. Because the galaxy is too far away for astronomers to employ stereoscopic vision, they instead followed the motion of stars around the center of M87, like bees around a hive. This created a three-dimensional view of how stars are distributed within the galaxy.
Astronomers picked one of the nearest ellipticals to Earth, M87, located 54 million light-years away in the heart of the vast Virgo cluster of galaxies. By following the motion of …

17. A jellyfish and the ram

Here we see JO204, a ‘jellyfish galaxy’ so named for the bright tendrils of gas that appear in this image to be drifting lazily below JO204’s bright central bulk. The galaxy lies almost 600 million light-years away in the constellation Sextans. This image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and it is the third of a series of Pictures of the Week featuring jellyfish galaxies. This series of images is possible thanks to a survey in which observations were made of six of these fascinating galaxies, including JO204. This survey was performed with the intention of better understanding …

18. Hubble photographs stellar trail of runaway black hole

This archival image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a curious linear feature that is so unusual it was first dismissed as an imaging artifact from Hubble’s cameras. But follow-up spectroscopic observations reveal it is a 200 000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars. A supermassive black hole lies at the tip of the bridge at lower left. The black hole was ejected from the galaxy at upper right. It compressed gas in its wake to leave a long trail of young blue stars. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the Universe. This unusual event happened when …

19. Hubble unexpectedly finds double quasar in distant Universe

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a pair of quasars (known as J0749+2255) that existed when the Universe was just 3 billion years old. They are embedded inside a pair of colliding galaxies. The quasars are separated by less than the size of a single galaxy. Quasars are powered by voracious, supermassive black holes blasting out ferocious fountains of energy as they engorge themselves on gas, dust, and anything else within their gravitational grasp. The black holes will eventually merge.
This discovery required the combined power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatories in …

20. Aftermath of a cosmic explosion

The somewhat amorphous spiral galaxy UGC 2890 appears side-on in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with bright foreground stars studding the image. This galaxy lies around 30 million light-years away in the constellation Camelopardalis. In 2009 astronomers spotted a catastrophically powerful supernova explosion in UGC 2890. While the supernova itself has long since faded from view, Hubble recently took a break from its regular observing schedule to inspect the aftermath of this explosive event.
A Type II supernova is a spectacularly energetic explosion that marks the violent death of a massive star. As it runs out of the …

21. Hubble finds Saturn's rings heating its atmosphere

The planet Saturn is easily recognizable for its opulent ring system that can easily be seen through a small telescope. Astronomers have now found that the rings are not as placid as they look: a rain of icy particles is affecting the giant planet's weather. It took observations of Saturn from the ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope and the retired NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini probe, in addition to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and the retired International Ultraviolet Explorer mission, to pull it all together.
The telltale evidence is an excess of ultraviolet radiation, seen as a spectral line of hot hydrogen in …

22. Everything, in one place, all at once

This luminous Picture of the Week shows Z 229-15 — imaged here in beautiful detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — a celestial object that lies about 390 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Z 229-15 is one of those interesting celestial objects that, should you choose to research it, you will find defined as several different things: sometimes as an active galactic nucleus (an AGN); sometimes as a quasar; and sometimes as a Seyfert galaxy. Which of these is Z 229-15 really? The answer is that it is all of these things all at once, because …

23. Jupiter (November 2022 and January 2023) compass image

[LEFT] - The forecast for Jupiter is for stormy weather at low northern latitudes. A prominent string of alternating storms is visible, forming a ‘vortex street’ as some planetary astronomers call it. This is a wave pattern of nested cyclones and anticyclones, locked together like the alternating gears of a machine moving clockwise and counterclockwise. If the storms get close enough to each other and merge together, they could build an even larger storm, potentially rivalling the current size of the Great Red Spot. The staggered pattern of cyclones and anticyclones prevents individual storms from merging. Activity is also seen …

24. Jupiter (November 2022 and January 2023)

[LEFT] - The forecast for Jupiter is for stormy weather at low northern latitudes. A prominent string of alternating storms is visible, forming a ‘vortex street’ as some planetary astronomers call it. This is a wave pattern of nested cyclones and anticyclones, locked together like the alternating gears of a machine moving clockwise and counterclockwise. If the storms get close enough to each other and merge together, they could build an even larger storm, potentially rivalling the current size of the Great Red Spot. The staggered pattern of cyclones and anticyclones prevents individual storms from merging. Activity is also seen …

25. Uranus (November 2014)

This is a Hubble view of Uranus taken in 2014, seven years after the northern spring equinox when the Sun was shining directly over the planet’s equator, and shows one of the first images from the OPAL programme. Multiple storms with methane ice-crystal clouds appear at mid-northern latitudes above the planet’s cyan-tinted lower atmosphere. Hubble photographed the ring system edge-on in 2007, but the rings are seen starting to open up seven years later in this view. At this time, the planet had multiple small storms and even some faint cloud bands.
[Image description: Uranus is mainly colored cyan. The planet …

26. Jupiter (January 2023)

Jupiter’s legendary Great Red Spot takes centre stage in this view. Though this vortex is big enough to swallow Earth, it has actually shrunk to the smallest size it has ever been according to observation records dating back 150 years. Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede can be seen transiting the giant planet at lower right. Slightly larger than the planet Mercury, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System. It is a cratered world and has a mainly water-ice surface with apparent glacial flows driven by internal heat. This image was taken on 6 January 2023.
[Image description: Jupiter looms large …

27. Uranus (November 2022)

As seen in 2022, Uranus’s north pole shows a thickened photochemical haze that looks similar to the smog over cities. Several little storms can be seen near the edge of the polar haze boundary. Hubble has been tracking the size and brightness of the north polar cap and it continues to get brighter year after year. Astronomers are disentangling multiple effects — from atmospheric circulation, particle properties, and chemical processes — that control how the atmospheric polar cap changes with the seasons. At the Uranian equinox in 2007, neither pole was particularly bright. As the northern summer solstice approaches in …

28. Jupiter (November 2022)

The forecast for Jupiter is for stormy weather at low northern latitudes. A prominent string of alternating storms is visible, forming a ‘vortex street’ as some planetary astronomers call it. This is a wave pattern of nested cyclones and anticyclones, locked together like the alternating gears of a machine moving clockwise and counterclockwise. If the storms get close enough to each other and merge together, they could build an even larger storm, potentially rivalling the current size of the Great Red Spot. The staggered pattern of cyclones and anticyclones prevents individual storms from merging. Activity is also seen interior to …

29. Uranus (November 2014 and November 2022)

Planetary oddball Uranus rolls around the Sun on its side as it follows its 84-year orbit, rather than spinning in a more ’vertical’ position as Earth does. Its weirdly tilted ‘horizontal’ rotation axis is angled just eight degrees off the plane of the planet’s orbit. One recent theory proposes that Uranus once had a massive moon that gravitationally destabilised it and then crashed into it. Other possibilities include giant impacts during the formation of the planets, or even giant planets exerting resonant torques on each other over time. The consequences of Uranus’s tilt are that for stretches of time lasting …

30. Uranus (November 2014 and November 2022) compass image

Planetary oddball Uranus rolls around the Sun on its side as it follows its 84-year orbit, rather than spinning in a more ’vertical’ position as Earth does. Its weirdly tilted ‘horizontal’ rotation axis is angled just eight degrees off the plane of the planet’s orbit. One recent theory proposes that Uranus once had a massive moon that gravitationally destabilised it and then crashed into it. Other possibilities include giant impacts during the formation of the planets, or even giant planets exerting resonant torques on each other over time. The consequences of Uranus’s tilt are that for stretches of time lasting …

31. Hubble’s new views of Jupiter and Uranus

[Jupiter: left] - The forecast for Jupiter is for stormy weather at low northern latitudes. A prominent string of alternating storms is visible, forming a ‘vortex street’ as some planetary astronomers call it. This is a wave pattern of nested cyclones and anticyclones, locked together like the alternating gears of a machine moving clockwise and counterclockwise. If the storms get close enough to each other and merge together, they could build an even larger storm, potentially rivalling the current size of the Great Red Spot. The staggered pattern of cyclones and anticyclones prevents individual storms from merging. Activity is also …

32. Portrait of a galactic jellyfish

The galaxy JW100 features prominently in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with streams of star-forming gas dripping from the disc of the galaxy like streaks of fresh paint. These tendrils of bright gas are formed by a process called ram pressure stripping, and their resemblance to dangling tentacles has led astronomers to refer to JW100 as a ‘jellyfish’ galaxy. It is located in the constellation Pegasus, over 800 million light-years away.
Ram pressure stripping occurs when galaxies encounter the diffuse gas that pervades galaxy clusters. As galaxies plough through this tenuous gas it acts like a headwind, stripping …

33. Hubble’s neighbourhood watch

UGCA 307 hangs against an irregular backdrop of distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The small galaxy consists of a diffuse band of stars containing red bubbles of gas that mark regions of recent star formation, and lies roughly 26 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus. Appearing as just a small patch of stars, UGCA 307 is a diminutive dwarf galaxy without a defined structure — resembling nothing more than a hazy patch of passing cloud.
This image is part of a Hubble project to explore every known nearby galaxy, giving astronomers insights …

34. Hubble spies a meandering spiral

The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The tenuous disc of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core. While this particular galaxy has indistinct, meandering spiral arms it lies close to the much larger Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the best known examples of ‘grand design’ spiral galaxies with prominent and well-defined spiral arms. In 2006 Hubble captured an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy which was — at the …

35. Hubble spies a meandering spiral (wide field)

This image shows a wider view of the dim, distant galaxies around the irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486. The tenuous disc of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core. While this particular galaxy has indistinct, meandering spiral arms it lies close to the much larger Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the best known examples of ‘grand design’ spiral galaxies with prominent and well-defined spiral arms. In 2006 Hubble captured an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy which was — at the time — the largest and …

36. Hubble captures DART asteroid impact debris (clean)

These three panels capture the breakup of the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by NASA’s 545-kilogram Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope had a ringside view of the space demolition derby. The top panel, taken 2 hours after impact, shows an ejecta cone of an estimated 900,000 kilograms of dust.
The centre frame shows the dynamic interaction within the asteroid’s binary system that starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern about 17 hours after the impact. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel …

37. Hubble captures DART asteroid impact debris (annotated 2)

These three panels capture the breakup of the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by NASA’s 545-kilogram Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope had a ringside view of the space demolition derby. The top panel, taken 2 hours after impact, shows an ejecta cone of an estimated 900,000 kilograms of dust.
The centre frame shows the dynamic interaction within the asteroid’s binary system that starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern about 17 hours after the impact. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel …

38. Hubble captures DART asteroid impact debris (annotated 1)

These three panels capture the breakup of the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by NASA’s 545-kilogram Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope had a ringside view of the space demolition derby. The top panel, taken 2 hours after impact, shows an ejecta cone amounting to an estimated 900 000 kilograms of dust.
The centre frame shows the dynamic interaction within the asteroid’s binary system that starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern about 17 hours after the impact. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. …

39. Galactic Seascape

A jellyfish galaxy with trailing tentacles of stars hangs in inky blackness in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. As Jellyfish galaxies move through intergalactic space they are slowly stripped of gas, which trails behind the galaxy in tendrils illuminated by clumps of star formation. These blue tendrils are visible drifting below the core of this galaxy, and give it its jellyfish-like appearance. This particular jellyfish galaxy — known as JO201 — lies in the constellation Cetus, which is named after a sea monster from ancient Greek mythology. This sea-monster-themed constellation adds to the nautical theme of this …

40. Cosmic Contortions

A massive galaxy cluster in the constellation Cetus dominates the centre of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This image is populated with a serene collection of elliptical and spiral galaxies, but galaxies surrounding the central cluster — which is named SPT-CL J0019-2026 — appear stretched into bright arcs, as if distorted by a gargantuan magnifying glass. This cosmic contortion is called gravitational lensing, and it occurs when a massive object like a galaxy cluster has a sufficiently powerful gravitational field to distort and magnify the light from background objects. Gravitational lenses magnify light from objects that would …

41. Galactic Crash Course

A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float serenely alongside the collision, and the smudged shapes of much more distant galaxies are visible in the background.
This colliding trio — known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189 — is a relatively rare combination of three large star-forming galaxies lying within only …

42. Spokes Spotted In Saturn's Rings

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has observation time devoted to Saturn each year, thanks to the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, and the dynamic gas giant planet always shows us something new. This latest image heralds the start of Saturn's "spoke season" with the appearance of two smudgy spokes in the B ring, on the left in the image.
The spokes are enigmatic features which appear across Saturn’s rings. Their presence and appearance varies with the seasons — like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons. With Saturn's much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately …

43. Can You Spot It?

Right in the middle of this image, nestled amongst a smattering of distant stars and even more distant galaxies, lies the newly discovered dwarf galaxy known as Donatiello II. If you cannot quite distinguish the clump of faint stars that is all we can see of Donatiello II in this image, then you are in good company. Donatiello II is one of three newly discovered galaxies that were so difficult to spot that they were all missed by an algorithm designed to search astronomical data for potential galaxy candidates. Even the best algorithms have their limitations when it comes to …

Hubble has used microlensing to measure the mass of a white dwarf star.
The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the centre of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Though its nuclear fusion furnace has shut down, trapped heat is sizzling on the surface at roughly 100 000 degrees Celsius, causing the stellar remnant to glow fiercely.
The white dwarf has a ‘spike’ because it is so bright that the light ‘bled’ into the Hubble camera’s CCD detector. This interfered with one of the observing dates for measuring that background star’s position on the sky.
[Image Description: A single bright …

45. Hubble Uses Microlensing To Measure the Mass of a White Dwarf

This graphic shows how microlensing was used to measure the mass of a white dwarf star.
The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the centre of this Hubble Space Telescope image. Though its nuclear fusion furnace has shut down, trapped heat is sizzling on the surface at roughly 100 000 degrees Celsius, causing the stellar remnant to glow fiercely.
The inset box plots how the dwarf passed in front of a background star in 2019. The wavy blue line traces the dwarf’s apparent motion across the sky as seen from Earth. Though the dwarf is following a straight trajectory, …

46. Hubble Measures Deflection of Starlight by a Foreground Object

This illustration shows how the gravity of a foreground white dwarf star warps space and bends the light from a distant star behind it. Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated star other than our Sun — thanks to this optical trick of nature. The target was a white dwarf — the surviving core of a burned-out Sun-like star. The greater the temporary, infinitesimal deflection of the background star’s image, the more massive the foreground star is. Researchers found that the dwarf is 56 percent the mass …

47. Hubble Uses Microlensing To Measure the Mass of a White Dwarf (Clean)

This graphic shows how microlensing was used to measure the mass of a white dwarf star.
The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the centre of this Hubble Space Telescope image. Though its nuclear fusion furnace has shut down, trapped heat is sizzling on the surface at roughly 100 000 degrees Celsius, causing the stellar remnant to glow fiercely.
The inset boxes at right plot how the dwarf passed in front of a background star in 2019. The wavy blue line traces the dwarf’s apparent motion across the sky as seen from Earth. Though the dwarf is following a …

48. Hubble Uses Microlensing To Measure the Mass of a White Dwarf (Annotated)

This graphic shows how microlensing was used to measure the mass of a white dwarf star.
The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the centre of this Hubble Space Telescope image. Though its nuclear fusion furnace has shut down, trapped heat is sizzling on the surface at roughly 100 000 degrees Celsius, causing the stellar remnant to glow fiercely.
The inset boxes at right plot how the dwarf passed in front of a background star in 2019. The wavy blue line traces the dwarf’s apparent motion across the sky as seen from Earth. Though the dwarf is following a …

49. Exploring a Turbulent Tarantula

A snapshot of the Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus) is the most recent Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Tarantula Nebula is a large star-forming region of ionised hydrogen gas that lies 161 000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and its turbulent clouds of gas and dust can be seen swirling between the region’s bright, newly-formed stars.
The Tarantula Nebula is a familiar site for Hubble. It is the brightest star-forming region in our galactic neighbourhood and home to the hottest, most massive stars known. This makes it a perfect …

50. Tempestuous Young Stars in Orion

The bright variable star V 372 Orionis takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has also captured a smaller companion star in the upper left of this image. Both stars lie in the Orion Nebula, a colossal region of star formation roughly 1450 light years from Earth.
V 372 Orionis is a particular type of variable star known as an Orion Variable. These young stars experience some tempestuous moods and growing pains, which are visible to astronomers as irregular variations in luminosity. Orion Variables are often associated with diffuse nebulae, and V 372 Orionis is …

51. Visitor to a Galaxy

A host of astronomical objects throng this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Background galaxies ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals are strewn across the image, and bright foreground stars much closer to home are also present, surrounded by diffraction spikes. In the centre of the image, the vague shape of the small galaxy UGC 7983 appears as a hazy cloud of light. UGC 7983 is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, and is a dwarf irregular galaxy — a type thought to be similar to the very earliest galaxies in the Universe.
This image …

52. Hubble Finds Hungry Black Hole Twisting Captured Star Into Donut Shape

This sequence of artist illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star:

A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy.
The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field.
The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart.
The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have recorded a star’s final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black …

53. Calling on a Galactic Neighbour

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy LEDA 48062 in the constellation Canes Venatici. LEDA 48062 is the faint, sparse, amorphous galaxy on the right side of this image, and it is accompanied by a more sharply defined neighbour on the left, the large, disc-like lenticular galaxy UGC 8603. A smattering of more distant galaxies also litter the background, and a handful of foreground stars are also visible throughout the image.
Have you ever wondered why the stars in Hubble images are surrounded by four sharp points? These are called diffraction spikes, and are created when starlight …

54. Hubble Finds That Ghost Light Among Galaxies Stretches Far Back In Time

In giant clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, innumerable stars wander among the galaxies like lost souls, emitting a ghostly haze of light. These stars are not gravitationally tied to any one galaxy in a cluster. How did the stars get so scattered throughout the cluster in the first place? Several competing theories include the possibility that the stars were stripped out of a cluster's galaxies, or they were tossed around after mergers of galaxies, or they were present early in a cluster's formative years many billions of years ago. A recent infrared survey from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space …

55. Stargazing in NGC 6355

The scattered stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355 are strewn across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This globular cluster lies less than 50,000 light-years from Earth in the Ophiuchus constellation. NGC 6355 is a galactic globular cluster that resides in our Milky Way galaxy's inner regions.
Globular clusters are stable, tightly bound clusters of tens of thousands to millions of stars, and can be found in all types of galaxies. Their dense populations of stars and mutual gravitational attraction give these clusters a roughly spherical shape, with a bright concentration of stars surrounded by an increasingly sparse …

56. Hubble Spies a Long-Armed Galaxy

The peculiar spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which lies around 450 million light-years away, stretches lazily across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While the centre of this object resembles a regular spiral galaxy, long streams of stars stretch out from the galactic core like bizarrely elongated spiral arms. These are tidal streams caused by some chance interaction in the galaxy’s past, and give ESO 415-19 a distinctly peculiar appearance.
ESO 415-19’s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing campaign to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of some of …

57. Cover Page of the 2023 ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb Calendar

This is the cover page for the 2023 ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb Calendar, featuring images released in 2022.
The electronic version of the calendar is available in digital (low and high resolution) and print-ready versions for everyone to share and enjoy.

58. Festive and Free-Floating

Just in time for the festive season, this new Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features a glistening scene in holiday red. This image shows a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper centre-left. This buoyant-looking bubble is lumbered with two rather uninspiring names — [KAG2008] globule 13 and J025838.6+604259.
FrEGGs are a …

59. Artist’s Illustration Of Kepler 138 Planetary System

In this illustration the super-Earth, Kepler-138d is in the foreground. To the left, the planet Kepler-138c, and in the background the planet Kepler 138b, seen in silhouette transiting its central star. Kepler 138 is a red dwarf star located 218 light-years away. The low density of Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d — which are nearly identical in size — means that they must be composed largely of water. They are both twice Earth’s mass but have roughly half of Earth’s density, and therefore cannot be solid rock. This is based on measurements of their mass vs. physical diameter. They are considered a …

60. Cosmic Smokescreen

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other.Astronomers investigated NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys …

61. Hubble Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar System

A survey of the residual light in the night sky has uncovered an eerie, omnipresent glow spread throughout the Solar System, thought to be caused by sunlight reflected from cometary dust.
Over its thirty-plus years of operations, astronomers have become accustomed to subtracting the background light from the Solar System from Hubble’s images. They are interested in the faint, discrete objects that are other stars and galaxies. But the SKYSURF team realised that Hubble’s images would be an excellent set of survey data to measure the Solar System’s background light.
The SKYSURF programme used 200,000 images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope …

62. Tiny, Hidden Galaxy Provides A Peek Into The Past

Tiny galaxy HIPASS J1131–31 peeks out from behind the glare of star TYC 7215-199-1, a Milky Way star positioned between Hubble and the galaxy. One hundred years ago, this fast-moving foreground star would have appeared directly in the line of sight, and the "Peekaboo" galaxy would not have been detectable at all.
With the resolution and sensitivity of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers resolved 60 stars in the galaxy and were struck by the fact that they all appear to be relatively young—a few billion years old or younger. This is very unusual in the nearby universe, which has had …

63. Head in the Clouds

A small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is pictured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The SMC is a dwarf galaxy and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbours, lying only about 200 000 light-years from Earth. It makes a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, and both objects can be seen from the southern hemisphere, as well as from some northern latitudes.
The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total …

64. eHST User Interface

This is a screenshot from eHST showing the integration of ESASky with Hubble data footprints and files for a target of interest; the subset panel is the image visualisation tool for one of the selected files.

65. eHST User Interface

This is a screenshot from eHST showing publications related to a target of interest, with links to the datafiles from a given programme (in subset panel).

66. eHST User Interface

This is a screenshot of the new eHST home user interface.

67. Pillars of Creation (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image)

By combining images of the iconic Pillars of Creation from two cameras aboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, the Universe has been framed in its infrared glory. Webb’s near-infrared image was fused with its mid-infrared image, setting this star-forming region ablaze with new details.
Myriad stars are spread throughout the scene. The stars primarily show up in near-infrared light, marking a contribution of Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Near-infrared light also reveals thousands of newly formed stars – look for bright orange spheres that lie just outside the dusty pillars.
In mid-infrared light, the dust is on full display. The contributions from …

68. Galactic Get-Together

A merging galaxy pair cavort in this image captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This pair of galaxies, known to astronomers as II ZW 96, is roughly 500 million light-years from Earth and lies in the constellation Delphinus, close to the celestial equator. As well as the wild swirl of the merging galaxies, a menagerie of background galaxies are dotted throughout the image.The two galaxies are in the process of merging and as a result have a chaotic, disturbed shape. The bright cores of the two galaxies are connected by bright tendrils of star-forming regions, and the spiral …

69. Revisiting a Celestial Fireworks Display

Shreds of the luridly coloured supernova remnant DEM L 190 seem to billow across the screen in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The delicate sheets and intricate filaments are debris from the cataclysmic death of a massive star that once lived in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. DEM L 190 — also known as LMC N49 — is the brightest supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud and lies approximately 160 000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Dorado.This striking image was created with data from two different astronomical …

70. Hubble Hunts an Unusual Galaxy

The galaxy merger Arp-Madore 417-391 steals the spotlight in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Arp-Madore catalogue is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies have been distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving the cores of the two galaxies nestled side by side.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for …

71. Clouded Vision

A small, dense cloud of gas and dust called CB 130-3 blots out the centre of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. CB 130-3 is an object known as a dense core, a compact agglomeration of gas and dust. This particular dense core is in the constellation Serpens, and seems to billow across a field of background stars.
Dense cores like CB 130-3 are the birthplaces of stars, and as such are of particular interest to astronomers. During the collapse of these cores enough mass can accumulate in one place to reach the temperatures and densities required to ignite …

72. Multiple Light Paths of Single, Lensed Supernova

Through the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured three different moments in the explosion of a very far-off supernova—all in one picture! In this case, the immense gravity of the galaxy cluster Abell 370 acted as a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying the light from the more distant supernova located behind the cluster. The warping also produced multiple images of the explosion over different time periods that all arrived at Hubble simultaneously.
The top box shows a portion of Abell 370. The box-within-the-box marks the area where the distant supernova was multiply lensed. The bottom image is …

73. Three Faces of Evolving Supernova (Clean)

As a result of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, three different moments in a far-off supernova explosion were captured in a single snapshot by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The light from the supernova, which was located behind the galaxy cluster Abell 370, was multiply lensed by the cluster’s immense gravity. This light took three different paths through the cosmic lens of the massive cluster. The three paths were three different lengths, so when the light arrived at Hubble (on the same day in December 2010), the supernova appeared at three different stages of evolution.
The left panel shows the portion …

74. Investigating A Made-to-Measure Galaxy

The spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 7038 wind languidly across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 7038 lies around 220 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Indus. This image portrays an especially rich and detailed view of a spiral galaxy, and exposes a huge number of distant stars and galaxies around it. That’s because it’s made from a combined 15 hours worth of Hubble time focused on NGC 7038 and collecting light. So much data indicates that this is a valuable target, and indeed, NGC 7038 has been particularly helpful to astronomers measuring distances …

75. Three Faces of Evolving Supernova (Annotated)

As a result of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, three different moments in a far-off supernova explosion were captured in a single snapshot by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The light from the supernova, which was located behind the galaxy cluster Abell 370, was multiply lensed by the cluster’s immense gravity. This light took three different paths through the cosmic lens of the massive cluster. The three paths were of three different lengths, so when the light arrived at Hubble (on the same day in December 2010), the supernova appeared at three different stages of evolution.
The left panel shows the …

76. Hubble Inspects A Pair of Space Oddities

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 — also known as Wild's Triplet — which lies around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image — which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy — seem to be connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it was formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies.
This observation comes from a project which delves …

77. Wide-Field View Abell 611

This image shows a wide-field view of the galaxy cluster Abell 611.

78. A Cosmic Cobweb

In celebration of Halloween, Hubble brings you this inky image of the galaxy cluster Abell 611, located roughly 3.2 billion light years from Earth.
This object is a popular target for investigating dark matter, in part because of the numerous examples of strong gravitational lensing visible amongst the cluster’s intricate web of galaxies.
[Image Description: Hundreds of small galaxies appear across this view. Their colours vary. Some are shades of orange, while others are white. Most appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinct spiral arms. There are also many thin, long, orange arcs that curve around the centre of …

79. Cosmic Keyhole

This peculiar portrait from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showcases NGC 1999, a reflection nebula in the constellation Orion. NGC 1999 is around 1350 light-years from Earth and lies near to the Orion Nebula, the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. NGC 1999 itself is a relic of recent star formation — it is composed of detritus left over from the formation of a newborn star.
Just like fog curling around a street lamp, reflection nebulae like NGC 1999 only shine because of the light from an embedded source. In the case of NGC 1999, this source is the …

80. Twin Tail Revealed in New Hubble Image of Didymos-Dimorphos System Following DART Impact

Two tails of dust ejected from the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system are seen in new images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, documenting the lingering aftermath of the NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact on 27 September 2022 at 01:14 CEST. Current data show that DART shortened Dimorphos’ original 11 hour and 55 minute orbit around Didymos by about 32 minutes.
Repeated observations from Hubble over the last several weeks have allowed scientists to present a more complete picture of how the system’s debris cloud has evolved over time. The observations show that the ejected material, or “ejecta,” has expanded and …

81. Multiwavelength View of a Turbulent Stellar Nursery

The lives of newborn stars are tempestuous, as this image of the Herbig–Haro objects HH 1 and HH 2 from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts. Both objects are in the constellation Orion and lie around 1250 light-years from Earth. HH 1 is the luminous cloud above the bright star in the upper right of this image, and HH 2 is the cloud in the bottom left. While both Herbig–Haro objects are visible, the young star system responsible for their creation is lurking out of sight, swaddled in the thick clouds of dust at the centre of this image. However, …

82. Hubble Spots Ultra-Speedy Jet Blasting From Star Crash

This is an artist's impression of two neutron stars colliding. The smashup between two dense stellar remnants unleashes the energy of 1,000 standard stellar nova explosions. In the aftermath of the collision a blowtorch jet of radiation is ejected at nearly the speed of light. The jet is directed along a narrow beam confined by powerful magnetic fields. The roaring jet ploughed into and swept up material in the surrounding interstellar medium.
The explosive event, named GW170817, was observed in August 2017. The blast released the energy comparable to that of a supernova explosion. It was the first combined detection of …

83. Terzan 1, Take 2

Terzan 1 is a globular cluster that lies about 22,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. It is one of 11 globular clusters that were discovered by the Turkish-Armenian astronomer Agop Terzan between 1966 and 1971 when he was working in France, based mostly at Lyon Observatory.
Somewhat confusingly, the 11 Terzan globular clusters are numbered from Terzan 1 to Terzan 12. This is due to an error made by Terzan in 1971, when he rediscovered Terzan 5 — a cluster he had already discovered and reported back in 1968 — and named it Terzan 11. He published its discovery …

84. First Results from JWST Conference

The First Results from JWST Conference will be held on 12–14 December 2022 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

85. Example screenshot from eJWST and ESASky for the Cartwheel Galaxy

Example screenshot from eJWST and ESASky of the various JWST and HST instrument footprints for the observations of the Cartwheel Galaxy.

86. ESASky and ESA/Webb Collaboration

The ESA/Webb and ESASky teams have collaborated to feature the spectacular Webb images featured on the ESA/Webb website in the ESASky application.

87. ESA/Webb Image On the ESASky Platform

This is a screenshot of the ESASky portal, featuring the ESA/Webb image of the Tarantula Nebula.

88. Webb’s First Images

The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope’s first full-colour images and spectroscopic data, which uncover a spectacular collection of cosmic features that have remained elusive until now, were released on 12 July 2022. For a full array of Webb’s first images and spectra, including downloadable files, please visit: https://esawebb.org/initiatives/webbs-first-images/

89. A Snapshot of Interacting Galaxies

The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Though they appear serene and unperturbed, the two are subtly warping one another through a mutual gravitational interaction that is disrupting and distorting both galaxies. This drawn-out galactic interaction was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
The interacting galaxies in Arp-Madore 608-333 were captured as part of an effort to build up an archive of interesting targets for more detailed future study with Hubble, ground-based telescopes, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. …

90. Webb and Hubble Capture Detailed Views of DART Debris (27 September 2022)

For the first time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have taken simultaneous observations of the same target.
These images, Hubble on left and Webb on the right, show observations of Dimorphos several hours after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) intentionally impacted the moonlet asteroid. It was the world’s first test of the kinetic impact technique using a spacecraft to deflect an asteroid by modifying its orbit.
Both Webb and Hubble observed the asteroid before and after the collision took place.
Scientists will use the combined observations from Hubble and Webb to gain knowledge about the …

91. Webb Captures DART Debris (27 September 2022)

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument shows Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos, about 4 hours after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) made impact. A tight, compact core and plumes of material appearing as wisps streaming away from the centre of where the impact took place, are visible in the image. Those sharp points are Webb’s distinctive eight diffraction spikes, an artefact of the telescope’s structure.
These observations, when combined with data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, will allow scientists to gain knowledge about the nature of the …

92. Hubble Captures DART Debris (27 September 2022)

These images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, taken 22 minutes, 5 hours, and 8.2 hours after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) intentionally impacted Dimorphos, show expanding plumes of ejecta from the asteroid’s body. This event was the world’s first test of the kinetic impact technique using a spacecraft to deflect an asteroid by modifying its orbit.
The Hubble images show ejecta from the impact that appear as rays stretching out from the body of the asteroid. The bolder, fanned-out spike of ejecta to the left of the asteroid is in the general direction from which DART approached. In the …

93. Hubble Detects Protective Shield Defending a Pair of Dwarf Galaxies

Researchers have used spectroscopic observations of ultraviolet light from quasars to detect and map out the Magellanic Corona, a diffuse halo of hot, supercharged gas surrounding the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. Shown here in purple, the corona stretches more than 100,000 light-years from the main mass of stars, gas, and dust that make up the Magellanic Clouds, intermingling with the hotter and more extensive corona that surrounds the Milky Way.
The Magellanic Clouds, dwarf galaxies roughly 160,000 light-years from Earth, are the largest of the Milky Way’s satellites and are thought to be on their first in-falling passage around …

94. Hubble Spies a Stately Spiral Galaxy

The stately sweeping spiral arms of the spiral galaxy NGC 5495 are revealed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 in this image. NGC 5495, which lies around 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra, is a Seyfert galaxy, a type of galaxy with a particularly bright central region. These luminous cores — known to astronomers as active galactic nuclei — are dominated by the light emitted by dust and gas falling into a supermassive black hole.
This image is drawn from a series of observations captured by astronomers studying supermassive black holes lurking in the …

95. An Enigmatic Astronomical Explosion

A bright young star is surrounded by a shroud of thick gas and dust in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 inspected a young stellar object, over 9000 light years away in the constellation Taurus, to help astronomers understand the earliest stages in the lives of massive stars. This object — which is known to astronomers as IRAS 05506+2414 — is thought to be an example of an explosive event caused by the disruption of a massive young star system. If so, it would only be the second such example known.
Usually the swirling …

96. Starstruck in Terzan 4

A glittering multitude of stars in the globular cluster Terzan 4 fill this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are collections of stars bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction, and can contain millions of individual stars. As this image shows, the heart of a globular cluster such as Terzan 4 is a densely packed, crowded field of stars — which makes for spectacular images!
The launch of Hubble in 1990 revolutionised the study of globular clusters. The individual stars in these dense crowds are almost impossible to distinguish from one another with ground-based telescopes, but can be …

Astronomers have been bemused to find young stars spiralling into the centre of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer arm of the spiral in this huge, oddly shaped stellar nursery — called NGC 346 — may be feeding star formation in a river-like motion of gas and stars. This is an efficient way to fuel star birth, researchers say.

98. Spiralling Stars in NGC 346

Astronomers have been bemused to find young stars spiralling into the centre of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The outer arm of the spiral in this huge, oddly shaped stellar nursery — called NGC 346 — may be feeding star formation in a river-like motion of gas and stars.
The red spiral superimposed on NGC 346 traces the movement of stars and gas toward the center. Scientists say this spiraling motion is the most efficient way to feed star formation from the outside toward the center of the cluster.

99. Galactic Overlap

Two overlapping spiral galaxies are pictured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The two galaxies, which have the uninspiring names SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, lie more than a billion light-years from Earth. Despite appearing to collide in this image, the alignment of the two galaxies is likely just by chance — the two are not actually interacting. While these two galaxies might simply be ships that pass in the night, Hubble has captured a dazzling array of interacting galaxies in the past.
This image is one of many Hubble observations delving into highlights of the Galaxy Zoo …

100. Multi-Observatory Views of M74

New images of the Phantom Galaxy, M74, showcase the power of space observatories working together in multiple wavelengths. On the left, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s view of the galaxy ranges from the older, redder stars towards the centre, to younger and bluer stars in its spiral arms, to the most active stellar formation in the red bubbles of H II regions. On the right, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s image is strikingly different, instead highlighting the masses of gas and dust within the galaxy’s arms, and the dense cluster of stars at its core. The combined image in …

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