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Explanation: Stars are forming in the gigantic dust pillar called the Cone Nebula. Cones, pillars, and majestic flowing shapes abound in stellar nurseries where natal clouds of gas and dust are buffeted by energetic winds from newborn stars. The Cone Nebula, a well-known example, lies within the bright galactic star-forming region NGC 2264. The Cone was captured in unprecedented detail in this close-up composite of several observations from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. While the Cone Nebula, about 2,500 light-years away in Monoceros, is around 7 light-years long, the region pictured here surrounding the cone's blunted head is a mere...

The Milky Way appears as a relatively flat structure when viewed along its plane in visible light. Gamma-ray emission, however, paints a different picture: two huge structures billowing outward from the galaxy’s bulge like an enormous hourglass. Named the Fermi Bubbles, these structures are the result of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole gorging itself on interstellar gas in the past. Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have now determined just when these structured formed. A team of astronomers led by Rongmon Bordoloi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has used distant quasars to trace the structure and motion...

The discovery of seven habitable planets just 40 light years away is certainly impressive, but the fact is, they are still 40 light years away. Unless we're willing and able to spend thousands of years traveling through space, we won't be rolling into the TRAPPIST-1 system anytime soon. This means that over the coming decades, advanced scientific instruments closer to home will play very important roles in exploring these distant worlds – perhaps none more so than the James Webb Space Telescope. So what can we expect when it is fired into orbit next year? We checked in with some...

From any point on Earth's surface, a clear night sky reveals a treasure trove of stars and deep-sky objects. Through a powerful telescope, billions of objects become visible, from stars and nebulae to the galaxies beyond our own. With the success of the Hubble deep fields in revealing distant, hitherto unseen galaxies, 2010 brought a new camera and a new ambition. The installation of the Wide Field Camera 3 enabled simultaneously large, deep views of space as never before. The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) began with this 2010 mosaic, which stitched together hundreds of images in visible and...

The wispy, glowing veil sitting on top of Jupiter in the image above is actually a humongous aurora captured on cam by Hubble. A team of astronomers are using the telescope's ultraviolet instruments to study nature's light shows on the poles of the gas giant. They timed their study to coincide with Juno's arrival on the planet, since one of their goals is to determine how different solar wind conditions and other factors affect Jupiter's auroras. The spacecraft is in charge of measuring various solar wind properties, while they continue capturing images and videos almost every day during the duration...

Explanation: Move over Hubble -- here comes the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST promises to be the new most powerful telescope in space. In the last month, the 18-segment gold-plated primary mirror for JWST was unveiled. In the featured time-lapse video taken last week, the 6.5-meter diameter mirror was raised to a vertical position. The dramatic 30-second sequence shows NASA engineers monitoring the test as room lights glint brightly off the mirror's highly reflective surface. The beryllium mirrors have been coated with a thin film of gold to make them more reflective to infrared light. The science goals of...

The Red Rectangle, so named because of its bizarre shape and striking color, is a nebula — a cosmic cloud of gas and particles. In this case, the nebula is formed by the central star, HD 44179, which is reaching the end of its life and shedding most of its mass into space. The source of the red light emitted by the Red Rectangle baffled scientists for more than 30 years. The same kind of red emission was seen throughout the Milky Way and in other galaxies, but scientists weren't sure what created it. The mystery was finally solved in...

Explanation: It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, featured here in scientifically mapped colors...

Explanation: Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Below and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and around 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The...

Explanation: Now sweeping high above the ecliptic plane, Comet Lemmon has faded dramatically in planet Earth's night sky as it heads for the outer solar system. Some 16 light-minutes (2 AU) from the Sun, it still sports a greenish coma though, posing on the right in this 4 degree wide telescopic view from last Saturday with deep sky star clusters and nebulae in Cassiopeia. In fact, the rich background skyscape is typical within the boundaries of the boastful northern constellation that lie along the crowded starfields of the Milky Way. Included near center is open star cluster M52 about 5,000...

Explanation: Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and right of the Bubble's center is a hot, O star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and around 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The...

Explanation: It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, pictured above in scientifically mapped colors...

Explanation: Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and around 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The...

The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7653, is an emission nebula located 11,000 light-years away. This stunning new image was observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to celebrate its 26th year in space. Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team =============================================================================================================== This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, released to celebrate Hubble's 26th year in orbit, captures in stunning clarity what looks like a gigantic cosmic soap bubble. The object, known as the Bubble Nebula, is in fact a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the brilliant star within it. The vivid new portrait of this dramatic scene...

An international team of scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to successfully dissect the young star cluster R136 in the ultraviolet for the first time [1].The image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen at the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young blue stars, among them the most massive star detected in the...

This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889 (arrowed) in front of hundreds of background galaxies. Well-hidden from human eyes, there is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. (Credit: NASA & ESA) ===================================================================================================================================== Astronomers have found one of the largest-ever black holes in giant galaxy NGC 4889, some 300 million light years away. The Hubble space telescope has captured an incredible image of elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, which is located in the Coma Cluster. Scientists, however, note that the giant galaxy harbors a dark secret. The European Space Agency...

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This image, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the galaxy NGC 6052, located around 230 million light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. It would be reasonable to think of this as a single abnormal galaxy, and it was originally classified as such. However, it is in fact a "new" galaxy in the process of forming. Two separate galaxies have been gradually drawn together, attracted by gravity, and have collided. We now see them merging into a single structure. As the merging...

Although impressive, the number of galaxies found at this early epoch is not the team’s only remarkable breakthrough, as Johan Richard from the Observatoire de Lyon, France, points out. “The faintest galaxies detected in these Hubble observations are fainter than any other yet uncovered in the deepest Hubble observations.” By looking at the light coming from the galaxies the team discovered that the accumulated light emitted by these galaxies could have played a major role in one of the most mysterious periods of the universe’s early history — the epoch of reionization. Reionization started when the thick fog of...

Bill and Hillary Clintons’ convict crony Webster Hubbell said that Ken Starr’s investigation into his wrongdoing “made me a better person.” Hubbell, 67, told The Daily Caller that he has no bitterness toward independent prosecutor Starr, whose extensive investigation of the Clintons snared Hubbell for overbilling his clients at Arkansas’ Rose Law Firm — where he worked alongside Hillary Clinton. Hubbell served about a year and a half in prison. “You always have regrets,” Hubbell said. “I don’t have any bitterness toward anyone, even Ken Starr. He was doing his job. It made me a better person. It gave me...

With the 25th anniversary of The Hubble Space Telescope fast approaching, Brady and Keith look at a priceless artefact - Sir Isaac Newton's very own reflecting telescope.