The 35th Anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope

This towering structure of billowing gas and dark dust is only a small portion of the Eagle Nebula. More than nine light-years long and 7,000 light-years distant from Earth, this image of the nebula has been refreshed with the use of new processing techniques, and released as part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations. The cosmic cloud shown here is made of cold hydrogen gas, like the rest of the Eagle Nebula. In such regions of space new stars are born among the collapsing clouds. Hot, energetic and formed in great numbers, the stars unleash an onslaught of ultraviolet light and stellar winds that sculpt the gas clouds around them. This produces fantastical shapes like the narrow pillar with blossoming head that we see here. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA, K. Noll

Hubble captured this face-on view of NGC 5335, a remarkable-looking galaxy about 225 million light-years distant, categorized as a flocculent spiral galaxy with patchy streamers of star formation across its disk. #

NASA, ESA, STScI

This Hubble image captures the beauty of the moth-like planetary nebula NGC 2899. This object has a bipolar, cylindrical outflow of gas, propelled by radiation and stellar winds from a hot white dwarf at the center. There may be two companion stars that are interacting and sculpting the nebula, which is pinched in the middle by a fragmented ring or torus—looking like a half-eaten donut. It has a forest of gaseous “pillars” that point back to the source of radiation and stellar winds. The nebula lies approximately 4,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Vela. #

NASA, ESA, STScI

As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, a revisit to the star cluster Messier 72 with new data and image processing techniques. M72 is a collection of stars, formally known as a globular cluster, located in the constellation Aquarius roughly 50,000 light-years from Earth. The intense gravitational attraction between the closely packed stars gives globular clusters their regular, spherical shape. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, G. Piotto, M. Libralato

Located around 30 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, the Sombrero Galaxy is instantly recognizable. Though the Sombrero Galaxy is packed with stars, it’s surprisingly not a hotbed of star formation. Less than one solar mass of gas is converted into stars within the knotted, dusty disc of the galaxy each year. Even the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, which is more than 2,000 times more massive than the Milky Way’s central black hole, is fairly calm. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA, K. Noll

This new image showcases NGC 346, a dazzling young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana. NGC 346 is home to more than 2,500 newborn stars. The cluster’s most massive stars, which are many times more massive than our Sun, blaze with an intense blue light in this image. The glowing pink nebula and snakelike dark clouds are the remnant of the birth site of the stars in the cluster. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA

This skewed spiral galaxy, called Arp 184 or NGC 1961, sits about 190 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis. The name Arp 184 comes from the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which was compiled by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966. The 338 galaxies in the atlas are oddly-shaped, tending to be neither entirely elliptical nor entirely spiral-shaped. Arp 184 earned its spot in the catalogue thanks to its single broad, star-speckled spiral arm that appears to stretch toward us. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA

A view into the dusty recesses of the nearest massive star-forming region to Earth, the Orion Nebula, some 1,300 light-years away. The nebula is home to hundreds of newborn stars including the subject of this image: the protostars HOPS 150 and HOPS 153. These protostars get their names from the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey. The object that can be seen in the upper-right corner of this image is HOPS 150: it’s a binary system, two young protostars orbiting each other. Each has a small, dusty disc of material surrounding it that it is feeding from. The dark line that cuts across the bright glow of these protostars is a cloud of gas and dust, over 2,000 times wider than the distance between Earth and the Sun, falling in on the pair of protostars. Extending across the left side of the image is a narrow, colorful outflow called a jet. This jet comes from the nearby protostar HOPS 153, out of frame. HOPS 153 is a significantly younger stellar object than its neighbor, still deeply embedded in its birth nebula and enshrouded by a cloud of cold, dense gas. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA, T. Megeath

A tiny patch of sky, seen in the constellation Hydra. The stars and galaxies depicted here span a mind-bending range of distances. Nearest to us in this image are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, which are marked by diffraction spikes. The bright star that sits just at the edge of the prominent bluish galaxy is only 3,230 light-years away, as measured by ESA's Gaia space observatory. Behind this star is a galaxy named LEDA 803211. At 622 million light-years distant, this galaxy is close enough that its bright galactic nucleus is clearly visible. Many of the more distant galaxies in this frame appear star-like, with no discernible structure, but without the diffraction spikes of a star in our galaxy. Of all the galaxies in this frame, one pair stands out in particular: a smooth golden galaxy encircled by a nearly complete ring at left. This curious configuration is the result of gravitational lensing, where a distant object is warped and magnified by the gravity of a massive foreground object. The lensed galaxy, whose image we see as the ring, lies incredibly far away from Earth: we are seeing it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA, D. Erb

A Hubble Space Telescope photo of a small portion of the Rosette Nebula, a huge star-forming region spanning 100 light-years across and located 5,200 light-years away. Hubble zoomed into a small portion of the nebula that is only 4 light-years across (the approximate distance between our Sun and the neighboring Alpha Centauri star system.) Dark clouds of hydrogen gas laced with dust are silhouetted across the image. The clouds are being eroded and shaped by the seething radiation from the cluster of larger stars in the center. #

NASA, ESA, STScI

Hubble observations have allowed researchers to hone in on more of the Bullseye galaxy’s rings—and helped confirm which galaxy dove through its core. LEDA 1313424, aptly nicknamed the Bullseye, is two and a half times the size of our Milky Way and has nine rings—six more than any other known galaxy. Hubble has confirmed eight rings, and data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii confirmed a ninth. Hubble and Keck also confirmed which galaxy dove through the Bullseye, creating these rings: the blue dwarf galaxy that sits to its immediate center-left. This relatively tiny interloper traveled like a dart through the core of the Bullseye about 50 million years ago, leaving rings in its wake like ripples in a pond. A thin trail of gas now links the pair, though they are currently separated by 130,000 light-years. #

NASA, ESA

A sparkling and dusty scene from the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, about 160 000 light-years away. The scene pictured here is on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula, the largest and most productive star-forming region in the local Universe. At its center, the Tarantula Nebula hosts the most massive stars known, which weigh in at roughly 200 times the mass of the Sun. The section of the nebula shown here features serene blue gas, brownish-orange dust patches and a sprinkling of multicolored stars. The stars within and behind the dust clouds appear redder than those that are not obscured by the dust. #

ESA / Hubble & NASA, C. Murray