Space Universe🌌

The high-mass stars in NGC 281 have powerful winds flowing from their surfaces and intense radiation that heats surrounding gas, "boiling it away" into interstellar space. This process results in the formation of large columns of gas & dust — lively laboratories of star creation. This X-ray and infrared image of NGC 281 spans roughly 48 light years across.

Chandra is gazing at a star in Pegasus. Nearby in the sky 2 galaxies are tangled in a tournament of gravity — a sport that the smaller galaxy, NGC 7752, is sure to lose. Will the larger galaxy fling its little neighbor through space or swallow the galaxy whole? Time will tell.

Today Chandra is peering into #Scorpius.🦂 Nearby in the sky is reflection nebula DG 129, a cloud of gas & dust that reflects light from neighboring stars. The bright, hazy green object on the right is the triple-star system Pi Scorpii, and it's located roughly 500 light years from Earth.

⭐️ BP Psc is a star like our Sun that's further along in its evolution. It has spent its nuclear fuel and expanded into the "red giant" phase. The disk & jets are evidence for a recent, catastrophic interaction — the star's expansion likely consumed a nearby star or giant planet.

Подтвержденный Today Chandra is gazing at a cluster of galaxies in Virgo. Nearby in the sky is M90, one of the brightest and largest spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. Approximately 59 million light years from Earth, M90 contains about a trillion stars and a thousand globular clusters.

Today Chandra is peering into the Sagittarius constellation. Nearby in the sky is M20, also called the Trifid Nebula because of the dark dust bands that trisect its glowing center into 3 lobes. An uncommon combination of three types of nebulae — emission, reflection, and dark — this star factory is located about 5,500 light years from Earth.

✨Galactic Wings ✨ The Angel Wing — a nickname given to the two merging galaxies in the VV-689 system — is this week’s #HubbleFriday. The galactic interaction has left the VV-689 system almost completely symmetrical, giving the impression of a vast set of galactic wings. This angelic portrait comes from a set of Hubble observations that took a closer look at “Zoo Gems,” interesting galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project. Roughly 18,000 public votes selected these Gems for detailed follow-up observations with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Welcome to Arp 147, an interacting galaxy pair! The left-most galaxy in this #HubbleClassic image appears nearly edge-on to our line of sight and features a smooth ring of starlight. The right-most galaxy has a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.

About 160,000 years ago, a star exploded. 🌟 It left behind these spectacular remains, imaged here in multiple wavelengths by Hubble and other observatories. Once NASAWebb starts science operations, it will observe the iconic remnants of Supernova 1987A, too! With its powerful infrared vision, Webb will study SN1987A’s dust to find out more about its its composition, temperature, and density.

The ultra-diffuse galaxy GAMA 526784 shines in this week’s HubbleFriday! Residing in the constellation Hydra, this wispy object is located roughly four billion light-years from Earth. Ultra-diffuse galaxies have a plethora of peculiarities. They can have either very low or high amounts of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up the majority of matter in the universe. These galaxies also contain an abundance of bright globular star clusters, something not observed in other types of galaxies. Hubble captured GAMA 526784’s with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was installed in 2002 by astronauts during Hubble's Servicing Mission 3B. Since then, the instrument has played a pivotal role in some of Hubble’s most impressive scientific results, including capturing the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Black holes are often described as the monsters of the universe – tearing apart stars, consuming anything that comes too close, and holding light captive. But evidence from Hubble shows a black hole in a new light: fostering, rather than suppressing, star formation. Hubble observations of the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 clearly show a gas outflow stretching from the black hole to a bright starbirth region, kind of like an umbilical cord, triggering the already dense cloud into forming clusters of stars. The outflow was moving at about 1 million miles per hour, slamming into the dense gas like a garden hose hitting a pile of dirt and spreading out. Newborn star clusters dot the path of the outflow's spread, their ages also calculated by Hubble.