Space Station Threshold

This galaxy, Zw II 96 (about 500 million light-years away) resembles the Baby Boom galaxy which lies about 12.3 billion light-years away and appears in images as only a smudge. A group of telescopes got together recently to check out a little hanky-panky going on in the very remote universe. The Hubble and Spitzer [...]

Astronomers now know that essentially every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. When the black hole is actively feeding on material, the surrounding region can blaze brightly - this is a quasar, aka an active galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to image a set of exotic active galaxies, known [...]

It's time for another beautiful image from the Hubble Space Telescope. And this time, there's an added bonus… video. The latest images released by Hubble are based on research of the Antennae Galaxies, known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039. Astronomers used to think that they were 65 million light-years away, but the new research [...]

One of the breakthroughs in modern astronomy is the use of gravitational lenses, where a closer galaxy or star focuses the light from a more distant object. The more astronomers look, the more they find these helpful objects, allowing them to peer at objects much further away. The number of known gravitationally-lensed galaxies jumped up [...]

By boosting the abilities of Hubble with a gravitational lens telescope provided by nature, astronomers have been able to peer back to the earliest times in the Universe; to see a galaxy just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

As galaxies come together through successive mergers they take on the splendid spiral shape like our own Milky Way. Keep merging those larger galaxies, though, and you'll eventually get an elliptical galaxy - a gigantic diffuse cloud of ancient stars with little structure. Such a galaxy, NGC 1132, was recently photographed by the Hubble ...

During many holidays, the folks working on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope try and find an image that captures the essence of the celebration. We've seen Christmas Tree clusters and spooky nebulae. To show their holiday spirit, the Hubble folks have released this beautiful image of the spiral galaxy M74. It's a stretch, I guess, but ...

Ahh, another beautiful photograph captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This time we're looking at two big, beautiful spiral galaxies… tearing each other apart. The large, face-on spiral is NGC 3808, while its dueling partner is the smaller, edge-on NGC 3808A. And between the two is a long today tail of stars, gas and dust, [...]

Look at the picture associated with this story. It just looks like a pretty galaxy, right? Well, according to astronomers, it's actually much older than it appears. This image, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, provides one of the most detailed observations ever taken of I Zwicky 18 - a galaxy that looks younger than [...]

It's not a huge story, just some cool science and a pretty picture. Here's a newly released image of the Orion Nebula, captured by two of the great observatories: the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright blue and orange points are young stars, blazing out the X-rays visible to Chandra, while [...]