What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to nearly 20 000 degrees Celsius. The gas is tearing across space at more than 950 000 kilometres per hour - fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!
A clash among members of a famous galaxy quintet reveals an assortment of stars across a wide colour range, from young, blue stars to aging, red stars.This portrait of Stephan's Quintet, also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92, was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Stephan's Quintet, as the name implies, is a group of five galaxies.
This is a unique NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight.Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo.
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ghostly green filaments, lying within the galaxy Teacup (also known as 2MASX J14302986+1339117). This filament was illuminated by a blast of radiation from a quasar — a very luminous and compact region that surrounds the supermassive black hole at the centre of its host galaxy.