A bouquet of thousands of stars in bloom has arrived. This composite image contains the deepest X-ray image ever made of the spectacular star forming region called 30 Doradus. By combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue and green) with optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (yellow) and radio data from the … Read more
X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Clow, M.; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand This new view of the “Christmas tree cluster” NGC 2264, released on Dec. 17, 2024, combines data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from astrophotographer Michael Clow’s telescope in Arizona. Chandra data is represented in red, purple, blue, and white, while … Read more
Since antiquity, wreaths have symbolized the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is fitting then that one of the best places for astronomers to learn more about the stellar lifecycle resembles a giant holiday wreath itself. The star cluster NGC 602 lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest … Read more
Most stars form in collections, called clusters or associations, that include very massive stars. These giant stars send out large amounts of high-energy radiation, which can disrupt relatively fragile disks of dust and gas that are in the process of coalescing to form new planets. A team of astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in … Read more
Scientists used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine select star-forming areas in the Extreme Outer Galaxy in near- and mid-infrared light. Within this star-forming region, known as Digel Cloud 2S, the telescope observed young, newly formed stars and their extended jets of material. This Webb image also shows a dense sea of background galaxies … Read more
Westerlund 1 is the biggest and closest “super” star cluster to Earth. New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in combination with other NASA telescopes, is helping astronomers delve deeper into this galactic factory where stars are vigorously being produced. This is the first data to be publicly released from a project called the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open … Read more
The reason that Hubble can observe objects of such wildly different sizes is two-fold. First, the distance to an object will determine how big it appears from Earth, so entire galaxies that are relatively far away might take up the same amount of space in the sky as a globular cluster like NGC 1651 that … Read more
2 min read Hubble Uncovers a Celestial Fossil This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a densely populated group of stars, the globular cluster NGC 1841. ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini This densely populated group of stars is the globular cluster NGC 1841, which is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy … Read more
This new image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights. NGC 2264 is, in fact, a cluster of young stars — with ages between about one and five million years old — in our Milky Way about 2,500 light-years away from Earth. The stars in … Read more
This striking Hubble Space Telescope image shows the densely packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210, which is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC lies about 157,000 light-years from Earth and is a so-called satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, meaning that the two galaxies are gravitationally bound. Globular clusters are very stable, tightly bound clusters of thousands … Read more