A Galactic Jam Session To Celebrate 400 Years Of Stargazing

It was the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first telescopic view of the heavens the other day, and NASA unveiled this incredible panoramic view of the center of our galaxy. It's a composite of images from all of NASA's great observatories. More »

This Sparkling Galaxy Hides A Stellar Secret

This spiral galaxy, NGC 2841, is helping NASA solve a huge mystery: why do galaxies look so smooth, with such an even distribution of stars? More »

A Wounded Galaxy Sings With Light

Another galaxy smashed through the heart of the Cartwheel Galaxy 100 million years ago, and today the Cartwheel remains one of the most powerful UV-emitting galaxies near us, as that blue outer ring shows. More »

Look Into The Heart Of A Stellar Collision Zone

They call this the Swan nebula, but don't let the serene nickname fool you. It's a battlezone, where solar winds from super-massive stars collide, creating "bow shocks" like the wake of a speedboat.

The New Hottest Spot in the Milky Way

Two days ago, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed an image of what could be the brightest star in our galaxy: Wolf-Rayet star WR 102ka or, more fondly, the "Peony nebula" star. Astronomers say that it burns with the light intensity of 3.2 million suns — but that's a rough estimate, and one that might even stretch to 4 or 5 million suns. More »

Our Future Galactic Overlords Glow Red With Power Lust

Do you notice anything funny about this picture of NGC 6946, the "Fireworks Galaxy"? Like that lurid wealth of red splotches, for example? The bright red areas represent regions in the galaxy that are actively forming new stars, and there do seem to be an awful lot of them. Could we be facing a star-formation gap with this malevolent galaxy, which is a mere 100 million light years away from us? Could all those bonus stars be the breeding ground for the invaders who will subjugate our descendants in a mere billion years or so? We'd better start preparing for the worst. To help you prepare, here's a rogues gallery of the many faces of the Fireworks Galaxy. (Even its name is violent!) More »

Look into the Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy

No it's not some Heidiggerian metaphor, that pushpin really does mark the black hole at the center of our lives. Meet Sagittarius A, the ginormous black hole that resides in mega-gravitational splendor at the center of the Milky Way, sucking up energy and spitting it back out in the form of X-rays and even hotter, crazier particles too. Do you dare look more closely at its firey depths? More »

The Biggest Space Explosions Ever Recorded

You can still see the shock wave from the explosion of supernova Cassiopeia A in this color-enhanced image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The blue glow around the dead star is the "forward shock," material blasted with energy by the shock wave when the star blew. Click through for a gallery of the biggest space detonations ever, including a deep-space eruption that released thousands of suns' worth of energy in a few seconds. More »