Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Cones run diagonally across the martial landscape in this image from NASA’s HiRISE camera.

Explore the series of hills and ridges in this image. Scientists see landscape similar to this in Iceland where hot lava has run over wet ground. On Mars, large sheets of lava may have moved over water or ice. Heat from the molten lava boiled the water underneath. The water vapor burst through the lava like an exploding bubble. Some of the bubbles burst creating features that look like craters. Domes formed as gas built up under the lava, raising it but not exploding. A long series of bubbles was needed to create these features. They appear in chains because the surface of lava was moving while the explosions were taking place.

Launched with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005, HiRISE is one of six instru­ments aboard the space­craft orbit­ing Mars. HiRISE’s cam­era can see objects on the sur­face as small as a beach ball.

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Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Arms of dark dust tightly wind around the bright center of NGC 2787 in this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Explore the concentric rings around this barred lenticular galaxy. Lens-shaped galaxies, such as this one, don’t share the grand spiral arms of galaxies like our Milky Way Galaxy or the Andromeda Galaxy. NGC 2787 does show a faint bar. The bar is not apparent in this image, however. While NGC 2787 isn’t as spectacular as other galaxies, it does help astronomers while they look for clues about the process of galaxy formation and the nature of black holes at the cores of galaxies.

As you zoom into the ring-like dust lanes, you may notice star–like objects around the galaxy. these are actually globular star clusters orbiting NGC 2787. Globular clusters are tightly knit balls of stars. Hundreds of thousands of ancient stars are bound by gravity to form these clusters.

NGC 2787 lies about 24 million light-years from Earth toward the constellation Ursa Major, the Big Bear. The galaxy itself is fairly small, spanning about 4,400 light-years. By comparison, our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (Observatoire de Paris, France)

New stars in N83B are blowing bubbles in this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The newly born, bright stars of N83B are blowing out intense radiation, sculpting the parent star clouds with powerful winds. Also known as NGC 1748, the giant stars resemble the eyes of some beast with a giant maw. Explore the nebula of N83B. Leave a note below on what you see in this image.

The bright stars within the nebula are massive. The star at the center of the nebula looks dim but it is more than 30 times more massive than our Sun and 200,000 times brighter. This star is the big bubble blower in the nebula creating an opening about 25 light-years in diameter. For scale, that is about the size of the famous Orion Nebula. The hottest star in the region is more massive still; more than 45 times more massive than our Sun. Zoom into the brightest part of the nebula just above the center. This bright area is only two light-years across. The small size and intense brightness mean that it is very young. The pink arc below N83B could be a ridge of stellar wind pushed through the glowing gas by the massive star. Zoom through the larger nebula to the right of N83B. This much larger nebula, cut through by a lane of dust, is known as DEM22d.

Astronomers believe that stars are born from nebulae such as N83B. As gas and dust collect, gravity pulls the material together. If enough mass is gathered into one area, the cloud begins to glow with its own heat and a star is born. These stars have just emerged from their cocoon of gas and dust. Astronomers are lucky to catch the stars at this stage. Because of their massive size, the stars evolve rapidly, blowing away the nebula surrounding them. But viewing them too soon and astronomers cannot see them.

N83B is a compact star–forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring irregular dwarf galaxy, about 165,000 light-years from Earth. The LMC can easily be seen with the naked eye as a faint cloud from the Southern Hemisphere in the constellations of Dorado and Mensa.

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Credit: European Space Agency & NASA

A cluster of jewels, known as NGC 265, glows in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Explore the most detailed image of the open star cluster taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Most of the stars in this cluster were born at about the same from the same nebula. Some clusters are tightly packed balls of stars called globular clusters. The stars of NGC 265, however, are held loosely together by gravity. The cluster spans 65 light-years. It takes a light beam, traveling 6 trillion miles a year, 65 years to zip from one side of the cluster to the other. Eventually, the stars will disperse, moving farther and farther from their shared birthplace. The cluster is dominated by young and hot white stars. Zoom in closer on one of the red stars. These are red supergiants, destined to become supernovae one day, mingle with the younger stars.

NGC 265 lies about 200,000 light-years from Earth in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The SMC is one of several irregular dwarf galaxies near our Milky Way Galaxy. It is one of our galaxy’s nearest neighbors. If you are deep in the southern hemisphere, it is one of the most distant objects that can be seen with the naked eye.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Jullo (JPL/LAM), P. Natarajan (Yale) and J-P. Kneib (LAM).

Sometimes what we can’t see is as important as what we can. Using new techniques, astronomers are helping solve the big mystery of dark energy in the Universe and perhaps its ultimate fate.

Explore the image of Abell 1689 from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The purple area is the scientists’ layout of gravitational lens made up of both visible matter and dark matter. The purple haze is a visualization. Scientists use this sort of visual overlay to help us see what is there but not visible. Light from the distant galaxies is bent by the dark matter in the cluster producing arcs and other distorted views of the galaxies.

The massive galaxy cluster, about 2.2 billion light years from Earth, warps the light of background galaxies, curving and distorting their light. Astronomers call this gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing is similar to the way a magnifying lens distorts how we see an object. The immense gravity from this cluster is so strong, it bends the beams of light coming from distant galaxies. The warping of space is a confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Astronomers were able to study the light from these bent, dim galaxies. They could reconstruct the path the light takes between the far-off galaxies before finally reaching Earth. Studying these paths and the way objects are bent by the galaxy cluster offers clues into the geometry of space and any effects from stuff we cannot see, such as dark energy.

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Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Looking like the closeup of an elephant’s hide, polygonal ridges form odd geometric patterns on Mars.

Explore the odd landscape in the Gordii Dorsum region of Mars taken from NASA’s HiRISE camera aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Scientists think that the ridges may have originally been sand dunes that hardened. Although they don’t know yet how the dunes became fossilized. Groundwater may have some role in the geology of this area of Mars. As you wander across these ridges near the equator of Mars, you can see that wind plays a big role in shaping the landscape. What other shapes do you see in this image? Share your story by leaving a comment below.

Launched with MRO in 2005, HiRISE is one of six instru­ments aboard the space­craft orbit­ing Mars. HiRISE’s cam­era can see objects on the sur­face as small as a beach ball. The instru­ment also offers sci­en­tists stereo views of the sur­face. When com­bined with dig­i­tal ter­rain mod­els, sci­en­tists can “drape” the imagery to pro­duce real­is­tic land­scapes to study and explore.

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Credit: NASA and ESA

The Universe seems to marvel in the weird. A hook, like a cosmic question mark, makes NGC 4696 stand out from its more shapeless elliptical galaxies in this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Explore NGC 4696 starting with the unusual hook, or question mark shaped thread of dust. Astronomers see dust lanes in spiral galaxies. Elliptical galaxies, however, are usually globs of aging stars looking like bright halos. Elliptical galaxies likely form from the merging of spiral galaxies. The compressing and stretching of gas and dust causes a brief burst of star formation. The gas and dust run out quickly though and with no new material, elliptical galaxies grow older and more faint.

What makes NGC 4696 so different is the huge dust lane, stretching 30,000 light-years across the galaxy’s bright core. At certain wavelengths of light, thin filaments of hydrogen gas give the galaxy a marbled effect. Stranger still is what we cannot see in this Hubble image. Using NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers see jets of material blasting away from the core of the galaxy at nearly the speed of light indicating a supermassive black hole lurks in the center of this odd galaxy.

As we explore farther from the center of NGC 4699, beyond the haze of its distant stars, we see a myriad of background galaxies. Those distant galaxies, of all shapes and sizes, offer astronomers a history lesson in how galaxies are made.

NGC 4699 is the largest galaxy in the Centaurus Cluster, a huge group of galaxies about 150 million light-years away.

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Credit: The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA)

A majestic face-on spiral, known as NGC 4911, is an island universe amid a thousand other galaxies in this deep image by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Explore the dark dust lanes of NGC 4911. Glowing pink clouds of hydrogen and newborn star clusters silhouette the dark lanes of gas and dust. The pink clouds, similar to the Orion Nebula, show that NGC 4911 is still an active star producer. New, blue stars glow at the fringes of the spiral arms. On your way to exploring the background galaxies of varying shapes and sizes, follow the faint extended spiral arms. NGC 4911 is part of a large group of galaxies called the Coma Cluster. The cluster is dominated by giant elliptical galaxies as well as dwarf ellipticals.

NGC 4911 is found deep within the Coma Cluster of galaxies about 320 million light-years from Earth toward the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice.

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

Dozens of stars in the Pleiades star cluster glow through a cool mist in this image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

Explore the image. Do you see any patterns in the dust cloud? Share what you find by leaving a comment below. WISE views the universe in infrared. The orbiting telescope sees cool objects that are invisible to our eyes. WISE shows us an immense, thick cloud of dust. Not too long ago, astronomers believed that the dust around the Pleiades was just leftover dust from the formation of the cluster. Recently, astronomers have found the cluster to be about 100 million years old; pretty young for stars but time enough for the gas and dust to have been blown away by the new stars. What we’re seeing today is the Pleiades passing through an interstellar cloud, heating up the dust and causing it to glow.

At 436 light-years from Earth, the Pleiades is one of the closest star clusters to Earth. From Earth, stargazers through the centuries have noticed the tight, dipper-shaped cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus, just over the shoulder of Orion, the Hunter. We now know it as the Pleiades but other cultures created other stories and other names for the open star cluster; Parveen in ancient Persia, Tianquiztli in the Aztec cultures, and Subaru in Japan.

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Credit: ESA

R Coronae Australis lights up wispy blue clouds of gas and dust of this intense star–forming region 420 light-years from Earth.

Explore this new image from ESO’s Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. If we were to hop in our starship and it would take us nearly four years at the speed of light to sail across this star–forming region of cool gas. We would pass patterns and swirls in the dust cloud that resemble a painting. The young stars passing outside of the window are similar to our Sun in size. Many nebulae we see in the universe glow red. The stars in this nebula don’t give off enough ultraviolet light to cause hydrogen atoms to glow with their characteristic reddish light. Instead, the blue light comes from starlight reflecting off dust particles in the star cloud.

R Coronae Australis is found about 420 light-years from Earth toward the small, southern constellation of Corona Australis, the Southern Crown.

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