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Observed Sky: These first 3 images are maps of the full sky as seen in infrared light. They illustrate the steps scientists used to find the cosmic background, which is a radiative fossil containing cumulative starlight which now appears in the infrared due to the cosmic redshift and by absorption and re-emission by dust in the universe since the Big Bang. — More....
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Zodiacal Light Removed: This pic represents a view of the sky after the foreground glow of the solar system dust has been extracted. The telltale infrared radiation puts a limit on the total amount of energy released by all the stars in the universe. Astronomers say this will improve development of models explaining how stars and galaxies were born and evolved. — More....
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Extragalactic Background: The top picture represents the brightness of the full sky as seen in infrared light. The middle picture is a view of the sky after the foreground glow of the solar system dust has been extracted. After the infrared light from our solar system and galaxy has been removed, what remains is a uniform, cosmic, infrared background as seen in this third image. — More....
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Age of the Universe: In Feb. 2003, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center posted new revelations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Launched on June 30, 2001, WMAP maintains an orbit a million miles from Earth. During a sweeping 12-month observation of the entire sky, WMAP captured the infant Universe in sharp focus. — Continued....
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Stuff of Stars: Massive clouds of gas, discovered long ago but only recently identified as being within the margins of the Milky Way, play a key role in the ability of the galaxy to churn out new stars by raining gas onto the plane of the galaxy. Discovered 35 years ago, the clouds were an enigma because they behave differently than most galactic objects. — More....
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Size of Stars: How big can stars get? The jury is still out, but astronomers have come a long way toward providing an answer. We know our sun is small but we also know that there are some very large stars in our neighborhood.
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3C 668, host galaxy not visible: This is a ten thousand light-year long jet of plasma which has been ejected from the core of a galaxy 270 million light-years away. Observations reveal that the jet has an unusual braided structure, like a twisted pair of wires that are separated by about 500 light-years. This is the first time that such a structure has been seen in an optical jet. — More....
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Abell 1689: A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. — More....
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 | Abell 2218: A massive cluster of galaxies which act like giant zoom lens in space. The gravitational field of the cluster magnifies the light of more distant galaxies far behind it, providing a deep probe of the very distant universe. The image provides astronomers with a new view of the early universe. Abell 2218 is in constellation Draco, 2 billion light-years from Earth. — More…
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Abell 2218 Lens: (Cont.) The lensed galaxies are all stretched along the cluster's center and some of them are multiply imaged. Those multiple images usually appear as a pair of images with a third — generally fainter — counter image, as is the case for the very distant object. The lensed galaxies are particularly numerous, — More…
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AM 0644-741, Ring Galaxy: The sparkling blue ring is 150,000 light-years in diameter, making it larger than our entire home galaxy, the Milky Way. It lies 300 million light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Volans. Anyone living on planets embedded in the ring would be treated to brilliant blue stars arching across the heavens. — More…
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ARP 220: Astronomers have never before seen such a "starburst galaxy" so close-up. The core promises to be a unique laboratory for studying the evolution of massive stars. HST reveals a new complex structure within one arc-second of the nucleus and also reveals a new class of object: gigantic young star clusters which are ten times larger than clusters previously observed. — More....
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 | ARP 220, a more distant view: A collision between two spiral galaxies is the heart of the peculiar galaxy. The wreck provided the spark for a burst of star formation with bright knots of stars forming in the heart. The bright, crescent, moon-shaped object is a remnant core of one of the colliding galaxies. The core is a cluster of 1 billion stars. — More....
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Betelgeuse, or Alpha Orionis, is the first direct image by HST of a star other than our own Sun. It is a red super giant, nearing the end of its life. This picture reveals a huge ultraviolet atmosphere with a mysterious hot spot on the stellar behemoth's surface. Alpha Orionis is so huge that, if it replaced the Sun in our Solar System, its outer edge would extend to Jupiter. — More....
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Binary Stars: HST photographed a mysterious object, called TMR-1C, at first thought to be a planet. The picture shows it as a bright dot at the end of a long streamer of reflective dust stretching 135 billion miles from the binary star located 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus the Bull. Astronomers now believe it may be a background star. — More....
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Black Hole / Microquasar, GRO J1655-40, artist rendition: GRO J1655-40 is the second so-called 'microquasar' discovered in our Galaxy. Microquasars are black holes of about the same mass as a star. They behave as scaled-down versions of much more massive black holes that are at the cores of extremely active galaxies, called quasars. — More....
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Black Hole / NGC 7052: Like a giant hubcap, a 3,700-light-year-wide dust disk encircles a 300-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of an elliptical galaxy. The disk, possibly a remnant of an ancient galaxy collision, will be swallowed up by the black hole in several billion years. NGC 7052 is located in the constellation Vulpecula, 191 million light-years from Earth. — More....
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Black Hole, PKS 0521-36: The energy source needed to create and maintain this galactic jet is generated deep within the core of the galaxy, and is far too small to be resolved with current technology. The favored mechanism behind these cosmic fireworks is a spinning, massive black hole. The hole is fueled by a continual in-fall of nearby gas and stars. — More....
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The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302: The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. The fiery, dying star at its center is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones. This NASA Hubble Wide Field Plantery Camera 2 image shows impressive walls of compressed gas, laced with trailing strands and bubbling outflows. More....
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Centaurus A: NASA's HST offers a stunning unprecedented close-up view of a turbulent firestorm of starbirth along a nearly edge-on dust disk girdling Centaurus A, the nearest active galaxy to Earth. A ground-view shows that the dust lane girdles the entire elliptical galaxy. This lane has long been considered the dust remnant of a smaller spiral galaxy ... — More....
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Circinus galaxy: Resembling a swirling witch's cauldron of glowing vapors, the black hole-powered core of a nearby active galaxy appears in this colorful NASA HST image. The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Circinus. This galaxy is designated a type 2 Seyfert, a class of mostly spiral galaxies that have compact centers with black holes. — More....
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Crab Nebula: On July 4, 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers were startled by the appearance of a new star, so bright that it was visible in broad daylight for several weeks. Today, the Crab Nebula (left) is visible at the site of that "Guest Star." Located about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the Crab is the remnant of a star that began its life with about 10 times the mass of our own Sun, and ended as a supernova. The following three images are related. — More....
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Crab Nebula, a "close-up" view: Images were obtained in 1995 using five different color filters and have been combined to construct this new false-color picture resembling an abstract painting by Jackson Pollack. The combination of infrared, visible, and ethereal, shows ragged shreds of gas that are expanding away from the explosion site at over 3 million miles per hour. — More....
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Crab Nebula: This is an HST composite of the inner parts of the Crab. The pulsar itself is visible as the left of the pair of stars near the center of the frame. Surrounding the pulsar is a complex of sharp knots and wisp-like features. The Crab literally "changes it stripes" every few days as these wisps stream away from the pulsar at half the speed of light. — More....
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Crab Nebula, Chandra X-Ray Composite: X-ray (blue) and optical (red) images superimposed. X-ray image is smaller because the higher energy X-ray emitting electrons radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower energy optically emitting electrons as they move. || X-ray Image: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al. || Optical Image: NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al.
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Crab, Southern, He2-104: A relationship between an unlikely pair of stars may have created an oddly shaped nebula that resembles an hourglass within an hourglass. Images with Earth-based telescopes have shown the larger, hourglass-shaped nebula. But this HST picture reveals a small, bright nebula embedded in the center of the larger one. — More....
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