Astronomy Pride Flags

The Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared-light observations provide a detailed and spectacular view of the galactic center region. The swirling core of our galaxy harbors hundreds of thousands of stars that cannot be seen in visible light. These stars heat the nearby gas and dust. These dusty clouds glow in infrared light and reveal their often dramatic shapes. Some of these clouds harbor stellar nurseries that are forming new generations of stars. Like the downtown of a large city, the center of our galaxy is a crowded, active and vibrant place. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, E. Churchwell (University of Wisconsin, USA), SSC and STScI

Here we see the spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it. Both objects, captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are found in the constellation of Sagittarius and lie 15,000 light-years away. The star Hen 2-427 shines brightly at the very center of this explosive image and around the hot clumps of gas are ejected into space at over 150 000 kilometers per hour. The nebula M1-67 is estimated to be no more than 10,000 years old — just a baby in astronomical terms — but what a beautiful and magnificent sight it makes. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt. Text credit: European Space Agency

This close-up shot of the centre of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) clearly shows the delicate structures formed when the powerful radiation of young stars interacts with the hydrogen cloud they formed from. This image was created from exposures taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. Light from glowing hydrogen is colored red. Light from ionized nitrogen is colored green and light through a yellow filter is colored blue. The blue-white flare at the upper-left of the image is scattered light from a bright star just outside the field of view. Credit: NASA, ESA.

This Hubble image shows galaxy cluster Abell 1689. It combines both visible and infrared data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) with a combined exposure time of over 34 hours to reveal this patch of sky in greater and more striking detail than in previous observations. This image is peppered with glowing golden clumps, bright stars, and distant, ethereal spiral galaxies. Material from some of these galaxies is being stripped away, giving the impression that the galaxy is dripping, or bleeding, into the surrounding space. Also visible are a number of electric blue streaks, circling and arcing around the fuzzy galaxies in the center. These streaks are the telltale signs of a cosmic phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Abell 1689 is so massive that it bends and warps the space around it, affecting how light from objects behind the cluster travels through space. These streaks are the distorted forms of galaxies that lie behind the cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Blakeslee (NRC Herzberg Astrophysics Program, Dominion Astrophysical Observatory), and H. Ford (JHU)

More than 11,000 years ago, a massive, supergiant star came to the end of its life. The star's core collapsed to form an incredibly dense ball of neutrons, and its exterior was blasted away in an immense release of energy astronomers call a supernova. The light from this supernova first reached Earth from the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia around 1667 A.D. If anyone alive at the time saw it, they left no records. It is likely that large amounts of dust between the dying star and Earth dimmed the brightness of the explosion to the point that it was barely, if at all, visible to the unaided eye. In the image, the central bright cloud of dust is the blast wave moving through interstellar space heating up dust as it goes. The blast wave travels fast – at about 6% the speed of light. The orange-colored echoes further out from the central remnant are from interstellar dust that was heated by the supernova flash centuries after the original explosion. The false colors in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Commonly called the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, M45 is known as an open star cluster. It contains over a thousand stars that are loosely bound by gravity, but it is visually dominated by a handful of its brightest members. The Pleiades cluster has been observed since ancient times, so it has no known discoverer. However, Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist best known for discovering the largest moons of Jupiter and championing a heliocentric model of the solar system, was the first to observe the Pleiades through a telescope. M45 is located an average distance of 445 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. It has an apparent magnitude of 1.6 and can be seen with the naked eye. The cluster is best observed during January. Image Credit: Davide De Martin & the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator Caption Credit: NASA/Rob Garner

This image shows a composite view of the Crab nebula, an iconic supernova remnant in our Milky Way galaxy, as viewed by the Herschel Space Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. A wispy and filamentary cloud of gas and dust, the Crab nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion that was observed by Chinese astronomers in the year 1054. The image combines Hubble's view of the nebula at visible wavelengths, obtained using three different filters sensitive to the emission from oxygen and sulphur ions and is shown here in blue. Herschel's far-infrared image reveals the emission from dust in the nebula and is shown here in red. Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/MESS Key Programme Supernova Remnant Team; NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester (Arizona State University)

This image composite shows visible views of the famous Orion nebula and its surrounding cloud, an industrious star-making region located near the hunter constellation's sword. This image is from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Toledo/NOAO

This Hubble Space Telescope view shows one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. At the center of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. A dramatic structure of arched, ragged filaments with a distinct ridge surrounds the cluster.   A torrent of radiation from the hot stars in the cluster NGC 346, at the center of this Hubble image, eats into denser areas around it, creating a fantasy sculpture of dust and gas. The dark, intricately beaded edge of the ridge, seen in silhouette, is particularly dramatic. It contains several small dust globules that point back towards the central cluster, like windsocks caught in a gale. Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Nota (ESA/STScI, STScI/AURA)

This finely detailed image shows the heart of NGC 1097, a barred spiral galaxy that lies about 48 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Fornax. This picture reveals the intricacy of the web of stars and dust at NGC 1097’s center, with the long tendrils of dust seen in a dark red hue. We can see this intricate structure thanks to two instruments on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope: the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Raw images from telescopes are always in grayscale, only showing the amount of the light captured across all those wavelengths. Color images from telescopes are created with the help of filters. This multicolor image of NGC 1097 is composed of images using seven different filters in total. Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA) Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Sand, K. Sheth

Pictured here is part of the captivating galaxy NGC 2525. Located nearly 70 million light-years from Earth, this galaxy is part of the constellation of Puppis in the southern hemisphere. Together with the Carina and the Vela constellations, it makes up an image of the Argo from ancient Greek mythology.  On the left, a brilliant supernova is clearly visible in the image. The supernova is formally known as SN2018gv and was first spotted in mid-January 2018. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured the supernova in NGC 2525 as part of one of its major investigations; measuring the expansion rate of the Universe, which can help answer fundamental questions about our Universe’s very nature. Supernovae like this one can be used as cosmic tape measures, allowing astronomers to calculate the distance to their galaxies.  Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess and the SH0ES team Acknowledgment: Mahdi Zamani

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team