Deep-Space Photos: Hubble's Greatest Hits

NASA

Space Spider
The Tarantula Nebula is a spectacular formation named for its spidery shape. Home to half a million young stars, it is 170,000 light years from Earth, and in fact lies outside of the Milky Way altogether. It is instead part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, satellite galaxy that circles our own.

 

NASA / ESA

Old Age Home
Messier 9 is a spherical formation that contains about a quarter of a million stars, located near the center of our galaxy. If the Tarantula Nebula is a stellar nursery, Messier 9 is a retirement home. Its stars are up to 10 billion years old—twice as old as our own sun.

 

NASA / ESA

E.T. Lives Here?
You can call this galaxy NGC 2683 if you want, but even astronomers refer to it simply as the UFO Galaxy because of its flying-saucer shape. That resemblance, however, is a function merely of the edge-on view we get of it. If you could soar above the UFO, it would reveal itself to be a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way.

NASA / ESA

Stellar Spotlight
Messier 70 is a globular cluster like Messier 9, though its stars are packed more tightly. The denser a cluster the brighter it is, and Messier 70 is thus easy for backyard astronomers to spot. Indeed, if anything, it will likely get brighter over the course of cosmic time, since it has experienced what's known as a core collapse, causing even more stars to huddle near its center.

NASA / ESA

Inferno
The Carina Nebula is a huge and exceedingly hot mass of stars located 7,500 light years from Earth. Outflowing stellar wind and blistering ultraviolet radiation roil the primal gas cloud that gave birth to the stars, making the nebula a beautiful thing to look at—but from a very safe distance

NASA / ESA

Pas de Deux
A delicate cosmic dance is taking place between two galaxies known together as ARP 273. The larger galaxy is an off-kilter spiral, suggesting that the smaller one has actually passed through it. Given the titanic forces that can be released when galaxies merge, these two are lucky to be in the healthy shape they are.

 

NASA / ESA

Star Storm
Sagittarius never looked like this. A two-lobed nebula in the heart of the constellation, it lies some 3,000 light years from Earth and is home to the hottest star ever recorded. The nebula's powerful stellar winds send gas streaming 100 billion kilometers (62 billion miles) away, and its intense heat generates its brilliant light

NASA / ESA

Dueling Galaxies
About 300 million light years from Earth, twin galaxies face off in the constellation Coma Berenices. The galaxies' dynamic look is belied by their timid nickname; they are known as "The Mice" because of their long, glowing tails.

NASA / ESA

More Than a Caterpillar
A cosmic butterfly hovers in a lightly populated region of the Milky Way, 2,000 light years from Earth. Known as Sharpless 2-106, it gets its roughly symmetrical shape from outrushing heat streaming into a cold environment.

AFP / Getty Images

Dark Matter and Dark Energy
The collection of photos taken by the Hubble includes some of the most detailed photographs ever taken of the things in our universe. In the 20 years since its launch, the Hubble has made close to 100 million images, confirming the existence of black holes, exoplanets, supernovae, nebulae, proplyds, and more recently, the existence of dark matter and energy.

NASA / ESA

Pluto
Taken in 2002 and 2003, this is the most detailed and highest resolution image of the entire surface of the dwarf planet Pluto, a member of the population of bodies that reside in a part of our Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. It is believed that the methane on Pluto's surface is broken up by the ultraviolet radiation from the sun, leaving behind a dark, carbon-rich residue.

STScI / NASA / Corbis

V838 Monocerotis
In the beginning of 2002, a dull star floating some 20,000 light-years away from the sun, in the constellation Monceros, experienced a major outburst that threw illuminating dust or 'light echos' into space, temporarily making it the brightest star in the Milky Way galaxy. Since its explosion, this mysterious star's apparent brightness has changed to mere obscurity.

NASA

Antennae Galaxies
Approximately 500 years ago, two galaxies collided together to form the Antennae galaxies in the constellation Corvus. They are the nearest and youngest example of galaxies fusing together to form what astronomers call interacting galaxies. In this process, billions of stars and star clusters are formed.

STScI / NASA

Centaurus A
By looking deep into space, the Hubble has been able to photograph the past. Incredibly, with the help of Hubble, astronomers have been able to see what the universe looked like 600 million years after the Big Bang. It is believed that the firestorm of starbirth along the dark dust rift of Centaurus A is a result of a violent collision. Over 100 star formations have been identified here, mostly young stars in blue. The older, more evolved stars reside in the bulge of the galaxy, which also contains a super massive black hole at its center that is swallowing up a spiral galaxy containing millions of stars.

NASA / JPL / Caltech / Corbis

Crab Nebula
In 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers witnessed a stellar explosion in the constellation Taurus. one thousand years later, the tattered remnants of the super dense neutron star's explosion, also known as a supernova, are still visible, sweeping up gas as they expand at a rate of 1,500 kilometers per second and rotating about 30 times per second

 

STScI / NASA / Corbis

Butterfly Nebula
Also known as the Bug Nebula, the butterfly-shaped nebula consists of heated gas made up of oxygen and nitrogen, the whole of which tears through space at speeds in excess of 60,000 miles an hour. The dying star in the center is not unlike our sun.

STScI / NASA

Saturn Aurora
A large amount of solar wind activity from the sun creates a bright aurora around the south pole of the planet Saturn, rising more than a thousand miles above its cloud tops.

NASA / Hubble Space Telescope / Science Faction / Corbis

Jupiter's Moon
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed Jupiter and four of its largest moons. The one called Io, (center) is the most geologically active in our Solar System, due to its many volcanoes. Although it appears to be skimming the planet's cloud tops, Io is actually 310,000 miles from the surface of Jupiter. The black dot to right center is the moon's shadow. It takes Io just 42.5 hours to revolve once around Jupiter

NASA / ESA

Eagle Nebula
The Hubble orbits at around 370 miles above earth. Unlike previous telescopes, it can make digital photographs using light visible to the naked eye. And since it orbits above the earth's atmosphere, its photos are not obscured by smog, haze or light. For Jeff Hester, the astronomer responsible for this photo of the Eagle Nebula, taken just a few years after the telescope's first service mission, the image represents "the recovery of Hubble and the dreams that had originally accompanied its launch."

NASA

Horsehead Nebula
Located approximately 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, this dark nebula is one of the most photographed and identifiable nebulae; its cloud dust and gases form what appears to be a horsehead in the night sky.

STScI / NASA / Corbis

Deep Field View
In 1995, the telescope peered into a tiny spot in the sky for ten days, which surprisingly revealed the existence of at least 10,000 galaxies, some billions of light years away. This is the deepest visible light image ever made.

NASA / GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Black Hole
On April 24, 1990, the telescope named after the great astronomer Edwin Hubble burst through earth's atmosphere and it has been taking photos of the edges of the known Universe ever since. Shortly after its launch, the Hubble snapped a photo of NGC 4261, an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Although the telescope had a flawed mirror at the time, astronomers nevertheless were able to detect a super massive black hole at least half a billion times larger than the sun at the center of this galaxy.