Astrophysics Science Division (660) Image Archive

Showing 1 to 25 of 62.

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Swift Catches an Anti-glitch from a Neutron Star

05.29.2013
A neutron star is the densest object astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times Earth's mass into a sphere about 12 miles across, or similar in size to Manhattan Island.

The Ring Nebula’s true shape

05.31.2013
New observations of the Ring Nebula – the glowing gas shroud around an old, dying, sun-like star – reveal a new twist.

NASA Launching Experiment to Examine the Beginnings of the Universe

06.03.2013
When did the first stars and galaxies form? How brightly did they burn? Scientists hope to answer to these questions with the Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRIment (CIBER).

Hubble Sees the Remains of a Star Gone Supernova

05.08.2013
These thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago.

Horsehead Nebula

04.19.2013
Hubble's 23rd anniversary Horsehead Nebula release. Hubble sees a horsehead of a different color.

Kepler Supernaova: a post-mortem

04.08.2013
This composite of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the remnant of Kepler's supernova in low (red), intermediate (green) and high-energy (blue) X-rays.

Celestial Spirograph

04.11.2013
A Fermi scientist has transformed LAT data of a famous pulsar into a mesmerizing movie that visually encapsulates the spacecraft's complex motion.

Largest Known Spiral Galaxy

02.14.2013
The giant barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 is 522,000 light-years across from the tip of one outstretched arm to the tip of the other, making it about 5 times the size of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Hot Spot

03.04.2013

Slowly Turning

12.31.2012
Most neutron stars rotate rapidly, some spinning hundreds of times per second. Scientists have found an unusual, young neutron star with an extremely slow spin - just one turn every 17.7 minutes.

The Birth and Death of Stars

12.31.2012
Stars form in great dark clouds of cold gas and dust. Stars eventually die, some of them exploding in the very same place they were born.

A Cosmic Holiday Ornament, Hubble-Style

12.27.2012
'Tis the season for holiday decorating and tree-trimming. Not to be left out, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have photographed a festive-looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189.

A Multi-Wavelength View of Radio Galaxy Hercules A

12.13.2012
These spectacular jets are powered by the gravitational energy of a super massive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A.

A Peculiar Compact Blue Dwarf Galaxy

12.10.2012
NGC 5253 is located about 12 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus. These types of galaxies harbor very active star-forming regions, giving rise to their blue color.

Galaxy in a Spin

11.01.2012
NGC 3344 is a glorious spiral galaxy around half the size of the Milky Way. The galaxy features an outer ring swirling around an inner ring with a subtle bar structure in the center.

Helix Nebula - Unraveling at the Seams

11.01.2012
A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum. In death, the star's dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core.

Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest-Ever View of the Universe

09.26.2012
Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.

Hubble Catches Glowing Gas and Dark Dust in a Side-On Spiral

09.24.2012
NGC 4634 is a spiral galaxy seen exactly side-on. Its disk is slightly warped by ongoing interactions with a nearby galaxy, and it is crisscrossed by clearly defined dust lanes and bright nebulae.

A New Dawn

08.15.2012
The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are destined to collide. See how it will all unfold.

Crash and Burst

08.13.2012
Imagine a dead star the size of a city and with more mass than our sun. Now imagine two of them smashing into each other, generating a blast bright enough to outshine an entire galaxy.

Starry, starry night

06.28.2012
Messier 10 is a ball of stars that lies about 15,000 light-years from Earth. About 80 light-years across, it should appear about two thirds the size of the moon. Find out why it doesn't...

Filigree and Shadow

04.13.2012
Wispy tendrils of hot dust and gas glow brightly in this ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop Nebula, a supernova remnant, taken by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

Galactic Haze and Bubbles

03.16.2012
This all-sky image shows the distribution of galactic haze seen by ESA's Planck mission at microwave frequencies superimposed on the high-energy sky, seen by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

Preview of a Forthcoming Supernova

02.24.2012
Eta Carinae is one of the closest stars that is likely to explode in a supernova in the relatively near future (though in astronomical timescales, that could still be a million years from now).

Eagle Nebula: a new view of an icon

01.30.2012
This image of a portion of the Eagle Nebula is a composite of infrared and X-ray observations.
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