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We've looked at the Carina Nebula before, but we've never looked into it. While the nebula is plenty beautiful in regular optical wavelengths, this infrared image allows us to peer behind the thick gas clouds to see the gorgeousness inside. More »
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The fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the young stars of NGC 3324 has carved this giant cavity in space. And, thanks to our old friend pareidolia, that boundary between different gases looks an awful lot like a person's profile. More »
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Every cosmic phenomenon deserves its own unique claim to fame, but Abell 2052 deserves better than this. Its gas jerks back and forth like a drink sloshing around in a glass. It's like the cosmic equivalent of a tipsy uncle. More »
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These red dots represent some of the earliest galaxies known to astronomy. Located ten billion light-years away, they're only a few billion years older than the Big Bang. Their presence explains why we're now surrounded by massive elliptical galaxies. More »
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This absolutely gorgeous image from the European Southern Observatory reveals a planetary nebula, the short-lived phenomenon between the death of a star and birth of a white dwarf that has nothing to do with planets. More »
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This galaxy cluster is nicknamed El Gordo, which means "The Fat One" in Spanish. Located seven billion light-years away, it's the biggest cluster ever found at that distance — and it's resounding proof that dark matter is everywhere in the cosmos. More »
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Our Milky Way is just a spiral galaxy, but NGC 1232 here is a grand spiral galaxy, its diameter twice as long as ours. Everything is bigger in NGC 1232, including the giant satellite galaxy warping it out of shape. More »
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The image up top is an artist's impression of a gamma-ray burst blasting through a pair of galaxies on its billion-year journey to Earth. These ancient, incredibly powerful explosions reveal the composition of early galaxies. It's not what we expected. More »
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Situated 5,000 meters above sea level, atop a vast, arid plateau in northern Chile, sits the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). Despite being only one-third complete, ALMA is already the most powerful telescope of its kind, and is well on its way to becoming the most technologically advanced telescope we've ever built. And now, for select research teams, it's finally open for business. More »
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HD 85512 b is a rocky planet about 3.6 times the mass of Earth, located right at the edge of its star's habitable zone. That means it's capable of supporting life... and the early results suggest it's a very real possibility. More »
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This tiny white dwarf and the shell of gas that surrounds it was once a star very much like our Sun, and the gas is positioned just right so that it looks like a faint, glowing ring in space. More »
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Many stars form in giant groups known as open clusters, which are crucial for the galaxy's development. There should be about 30,000 clusters in the Milky Way, but we've only ever found 2,500. Now, you can raise that number to 2,596. More »
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This is the galaxy NGC 6744, located about 30 million light-years away. It just so happens that this galaxy looks pretty much exactly like what our own galaxy would look like...except this galaxy is twice as big as ours. More »
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This gorgeous image of the Meathook Galaxy captures the bizarre distortion in what was once a spiral galaxy. But a recent supernova, combined with ancient encounters with other galaxies and birthing stars, has given it this strange S shape. More »
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This messy spiral galaxy, known only as NGC 247, is birthing stars at the ragged edges of its arms. It's part of a volume of space dominated by a bright cluster of galaxies called the Sculptor Group. Scientists have recently revised their estimates of how far away it is - turns out it's most likely a million light years closer than we believed. More »
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Here's awesome time-lapse footage of a single evening from the in-development ALMA Array Operations Site, the largest astronomical project in human history which happens to sit at 5000 meters on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile. More »
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Check out this artist's impression of an super-violent supernova. The Very Large Telescope managed to obtain the first 3-D view of material after a star's explosion, traveling 100 million kilometers per hour. And check out a video below. More »
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The Whirlpool Galaxy crashes into its dwarf companion, NGC 5195, and the insane forces of the collision form the galaxy's distinctive spiral "arms" of stars. Note the bright pink, showing hydrogen. That's just one of two insane new galaxy pictures. More »
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This gorgeous image — which you can bet is beastly in size at full resolution — features the endless parade of faraway stars that occupy our universe. It's the deepest photograph of its kind ever taken from a ground-based telescope, enabling us to see constellations from Earth that are a billion times too faint for us to detect with the naked eye. For 55 hours, astronomers from the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO) focused their Very Large Telescope at the sky and developed this rich composite image. In the process, they discovered a plethora of new galaxies — and the trippy thing is, we're seeing them as they were when the universe was a sprightly 2 billion years old. More »
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You are looking right into the burning, hydrogen gas-shrouded heart of one of the biggest star nurseries that Earth astronomers have ever seen. This image was created by the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO), and shows part of the Gum 29 region, which researchers say is probably about 1-2 million years old (making it possibly younger than some of our hominid ancestors). Gum 29 is about 26,000 light years from Earth, at the edge of the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. And within its bright heart are two of the most massive stars we've ever seen, in a tight orbit around each other. Want to see that binary system up close? More »
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