The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-coloured elephants' trunks of the nebula's famous pillars.
If placed in the middle of our solar system, the star VY Canis Majoris would engulf all the planets out to Saturn's orbit. This monster, appropriately called a red hypergiant, is as bright as 300,000 Suns
This image shows the dust torus around a super-massive black hole. Black holes lurk at the centres of active galaxies in environments not unlike those found in violent tornadoes on Earth. Just as in a tornado, where debris is often found spinning about the vortex, so in a black hole, a dust torus surrounds its waist. In some cases astronomers can look along the axis of the dust torus from above or from below and have a clear view of the black hole. Technically these objects are then called type 1 sources. Type 2 sources lie with the dust torus edge-on as viewed from Earth so our view of the black hole is totally blocked by the dust over a range of wavelengths from the near-infrared to soft X-rays.
The Hubble Space Telescope's latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.