Resembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea, this celestial object is actually just a pillar of gas and dust. Called the Cone Nebula (in NGC 2264) - so named because in ground-based images it has a conical shape - this monstrous pillar resides in a turbulent star-forming region.
This image, not unlike a pointillist painting, shows the star-studded centre of the Milky Way towards the constellation of Sagittarius
The picture shows Abell 2218, a rich galaxy cluster composed of thousands of individual galaxies. It sits about 2
This image shows a gas giant planet circling the two red dwarf stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8 000 light-years away. The planet - with a mass similar to Saturn - orbits the two stars at a distance of roughly 480 million kilometres. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 11 million kilometres apart