Stellary Starry Universe

Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. Hubble’s panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust. The warped shape of Centaurus A’s disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this Hubble close-up. At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, Centaurus A contains the closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but neither the supermassive black hole or the jets are visible in this image. This image was taken in July 2010 with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Pushing the limits of its powerful vision, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered the oldest burned-out stars in our Milky Way Galaxy in this image from 2002. These extremely old, dim “clockwork stars” provide a completely independent reading on the age of the universe without relying on measurements of the expansion of the universe. The ancient white dwarf stars, as seen by Hubble, turn out to be 12 to 13 billion years old. Because earlier Hubble observations show that the first stars formed less than 1 billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang, finding the oldest stars puts astronomers well within arm’s reach of calculating the absolute age of the universe. Though previous Hubble research sets the age of the universe at 13 to 14 billion years based on the rate of expansion of space, the universe’s birthday is such a fundamental and profound value that astronomers have long sought other age-dating techniques to cross-check their conclusions. The new age-dating observations were done using Hubble to hunt for elusive ancient stars hidden inside a globular star cluster located 5,600 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. Image Credit: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting Pluto. The new satellite was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The NASA logo on Bldg. 703 at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., is reflected in the 2.5-meter primary mirror of the SOFIA observatory’s telescope. SOFIA–the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy– is an airborne observatory, built to complement the Hubble, Spitzer and Herschel space telescopes, as well as major Earth-based telescopes. SOFIA features a German-built 100-inch (2.5 meter) diameter far-infrared telescope weighing 20 tons mounted in the rear fuselage of a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft. It is one of the premier space science programs of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SOFIA is a joint program between NASA and the German Aerospace Center. Image Credit: NASA/Tom Tschida

The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from NASA’s Great Observatories–the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms,” seen in wide-angle views of the system.

These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies.

The most massive of these young stars have already sped through their evolution in a few million years and exploded as supernovas. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI