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A hundred million light-years down the river... 🚣

Nestled in the "Celestial River" constellation of Eridanus, the galaxy NGC 1266 offers a unique glimpse into a "post-starburst" galaxy.

These are galaxies that previously experienced a major burst of star formation, but are now quieter. NGC 1266 is home to a young population of stars, but few active star-forming regions.

Astronomers think that NGC 1266 had a minor merger with another galaxy some 500 million years ago, which triggered its past starburst episode.

Uncover more at the link in our bio!

Image description: This Hubble image is of a bright lenticular galaxy seen nearly face on. Broad bright and dimmer areas of light hint at a spiral structure, but there are no distinct spiral arms. Rusty-reddish-brown dust bisects the galaxy. More distant galaxies dot the black background, some even shining through the less dense regions of the bright foreground lenticular galaxy.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, K. Alatalo (STScI); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

#NASA #Hubble #galaxy #space #science

Name a better office view. 🧑‍🚀🌎

#OTD in 2009, astronauts installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble during Servicing Mission 4. WFC3 not only helps Hubble see deeper into the universe, but it also provides images across three broad regions of light: ultraviolet, visible, and into the near-infrared.

Seventeen years later, WFC3 and Hubble continue to help astronomers make groundbreaking astrophysics discoveries.

Image descriptions:
1 - Astronaut John Grunsfeld poses for a picture, with the reflection of Hubble, Earth, and astronaut Andrew Feustel in his helmet.
2 - Taken through a window on the space shuttle, the lower portion of Hubble is visible with astronaut Andrew Feustel on the robotic arm completing work.
3 - With Earth in the background, Hubble is seen with astronaut Andrew Feustel completing servicing work.

#NASA #OnThisDay #Hubble #astronaut

Name a better office view. 🧑‍🚀🌎

#OTD in 2009, astronauts installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble during Servicing Mission 4. WFC3 not only helps Hubble see deeper into the universe, but it also provides images across three broad regions of light: ultraviolet, visible, and into the near-infrared.

Seventeen years later, WFC3 and Hubble continue to help astronomers make groundbreaking astrophysics discoveries.

Image descriptions:
1 - Astronaut John Grunsfeld poses for a picture, with the reflection of Hubble, Earth, and astronaut Andrew Feustel in his helmet.
2 - Taken through a window on the space shuttle, the lower portion of Hubble is visible with astronaut Andrew Feustel on the robotic arm completing work.
3 - With Earth in the background, Hubble is seen with astronaut Andrew Feustel completing servicing work.

#NASA #OnThisDay #Hubble #astronaut

Name a better office view. 🧑‍🚀🌎

#OTD in 2009, astronauts installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble during Servicing Mission 4. WFC3 not only helps Hubble see deeper into the universe, but it also provides images across three broad regions of light: ultraviolet, visible, and into the near-infrared.

Seventeen years later, WFC3 and Hubble continue to help astronomers make groundbreaking astrophysics discoveries.

Image descriptions:
1 - Astronaut John Grunsfeld poses for a picture, with the reflection of Hubble, Earth, and astronaut Andrew Feustel in his helmet.
2 - Taken through a window on the space shuttle, the lower portion of Hubble is visible with astronaut Andrew Feustel on the robotic arm completing work.
3 - With Earth in the background, Hubble is seen with astronaut Andrew Feustel completing servicing work.

#NASA #OnThisDay #Hubble #astronaut

Why is UGC 12591 so remarkable? Let us count the ways...

1) It's huge! This galaxy and its halo contain several hundred billion times the mass of our Sun, which is four times the mass of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

2) It's hybrid! UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a spiral and lenticular (lens-shaped) classification type.

3) It's quick! It rotates at speeds of up to 1.1 million miles per hour (1.8 million km/hr).

Image description: A massive galaxy seen near lower-left glows from its core, with dark brown dust lanes surrounding it. A smaller galaxy appears in the top right corner, and other galaxies and stars dot the black background of space.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

#HubbleClassic #NASA #Hubble #galaxy #space

This Mother's Day, we're thinking of the "Mother of Hubble": Nancy Grace Roman!

As @NASA's first chief astronomer, she pushed to turn the Hubble mission from hopeful speculation to pioneering reality.

In just a few months, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch and begin the next big mission in astronomy.

With complementary wavelengths of light and a larger field of view, this telescope will work alongside Hubble and @NASAWebb to settle essential questions about dark energy, exoplanets, and much more.

Image descriptions:
1 - In a black-and-white photo, Nancy Grace Roman points at a poster showing the constellations, labeled "A map of the heavens".
2 - Nancy Grace Roman poses for a photo in front of autumn trees and a white house.
3 - In a black-and-white photo, Nancy Grace Roman works on a large, ground-based observatory.

All images courtesy of Nancy Grace Roman.

#MothersDay #HappyMothersDay #NancyGraceRoman #NASA #NASARoman

This Mother's Day, we're thinking of the "Mother of Hubble": Nancy Grace Roman!

As @NASA's first chief astronomer, she pushed to turn the Hubble mission from hopeful speculation to pioneering reality.

In just a few months, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch and begin the next big mission in astronomy.

With complementary wavelengths of light and a larger field of view, this telescope will work alongside Hubble and @NASAWebb to settle essential questions about dark energy, exoplanets, and much more.

Image descriptions:
1 - In a black-and-white photo, Nancy Grace Roman points at a poster showing the constellations, labeled "A map of the heavens".
2 - Nancy Grace Roman poses for a photo in front of autumn trees and a white house.
3 - In a black-and-white photo, Nancy Grace Roman works on a large, ground-based observatory.

All images courtesy of Nancy Grace Roman.

#MothersDay #HappyMothersDay #NancyGraceRoman #NASA #NASARoman

This Mother's Day, we're thinking of the "Mother of Hubble": Nancy Grace Roman!

As @NASA's first chief astronomer, she pushed to turn the Hubble mission from hopeful speculation to pioneering reality.

In just a few months, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch and begin the next big mission in astronomy.

With complementary wavelengths of light and a larger field of view, this telescope will work alongside Hubble and @NASAWebb to settle essential questions about dark energy, exoplanets, and much more.

Image descriptions:
1 - In a black-and-white photo, Nancy Grace Roman points at a poster showing the constellations, labeled "A map of the heavens".
2 - Nancy Grace Roman poses for a photo in front of autumn trees and a white house.
3 - In a black-and-white photo, Nancy Grace Roman works on a large, ground-based observatory.

All images courtesy of Nancy Grace Roman.

#MothersDay #HappyMothersDay #NancyGraceRoman #NASA #NASARoman

What in the worlds?!

When Hubble launched in 1990, there were zero known exoplanets.

Now, NASA has confirmed the existence of over 6,000 planets beyond our solar system! Take a tour to some of the wildest ones that Hubble has studied in this video.

#NASA #Hubble #exoplanet #science #space

Look what the telescope dragged in... 🐈

The Cat's Eye Nebula offers a stunning cosmic "fossil record" of a dying star's episodic mass loss, showing cast-off layers of material forming concentric shells and dense knots.

This nebula is roughly 4,400 light-years away, and calls the constellation Dorado home.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Tsvetanov

Music credit: "Hunger Games" by Sebastian Barnaby Robertson [BMI], Tristan Calder [ASCAP], and Brandon Hale [ASCAP] via Killer Tracks [BMI], Soundcast Music [SESAC], and Universal Production Music

#NASA #Hubble #cats #nebula #space

Even galaxies get bloated.

Called A2261-BCG, the brightest galaxy seen near image-center stretches 10 times the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy!

It's a member of a weird class of galaxy with a puffy core, rather than a concentrated peak of light around a central black hole. In fact, at 10,000 light-years across, the core is one of the largest ever seen.

Studying galaxies like A2261-BCG helps astronomers find out how black hole behavior might shape galactic cores.

Image description: A cluster of galaxies shines against black space, seen as spirals, dots, and disks glowing in hues of white, blue, and orange. Just above center, a particularly large and hazy orange elliptical galaxy glows.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), T. Lauer (NOAO), and the CLASH team

#HubbleClassic #NASA #Hubble #galaxy #space

The force awakens in newborn stars.

Hubble captured some cosmic "lightsabers" far, far away. These are actually young stellar jets, colliding at super fast speeds with neighboring gas and dust.

It's these energetic collisions that create Herbig-Haro objects. HH 24 and HH 111 shine through Jedi-like cloaks of dust in these views.

Image descriptions/credits:
1 - A cloudy region of space glows orange with the light of a jet arcing diagonally through the image. (NASA and ESA; Acknowledgment: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)/Hubble-Europe (ESA) Collaboration, D. Padgett (GSFC), T. Megeath (University of Toledo), and B. Reipurth (University of Hawaii))
2 - A reddish haze of gas and dust is pierced by a diagonal blue filament, against the black backdrop of space. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini)

#MayTheFourthBeWithYou #StarWarsDay #StarWars #NASA #Hubble

The force awakens in newborn stars.

Hubble captured some cosmic "lightsabers" far, far away. These are actually young stellar jets, colliding at super fast speeds with neighboring gas and dust.

It's these energetic collisions that create Herbig-Haro objects. HH 24 and HH 111 shine through Jedi-like cloaks of dust in these views.

Image descriptions/credits:
1 - A cloudy region of space glows orange with the light of a jet arcing diagonally through the image. (NASA and ESA; Acknowledgment: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)/Hubble-Europe (ESA) Collaboration, D. Padgett (GSFC), T. Megeath (University of Toledo), and B. Reipurth (University of Hawaii))
2 - A reddish haze of gas and dust is pierced by a diagonal blue filament, against the black backdrop of space. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini)

#MayTheFourthBeWithYou #StarWarsDay #StarWars #NASA #Hubble

When the trip makes it out of the group chat 😎

The starry spiral galaxy NGC 3137 travels through space as part of a galaxy group. Dubbed the "NGC 3175 group" after its largest member, this galaxy gang also contains several smaller dwarf galaxies.

Astronomers gathered these observations in hopes of learning more about our own group of galaxies, which they believe is similar to NGC 3175's group. Our Milky Way Galaxy, along with our closest major neighbor Andromeda, are the largest members of the Local Group.

But the galaxy NGC 3137 is also worth observing for its relative cosmic proximity to us, at about 53 million light-years away, making it an ideal laboratory for studying how stars form and die.

Find out more about this new view at the link in our bio!

Image description: A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disk fills the view from corner to corner. Its disk is yellow near to the center and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker and the PHANGS-HST Team

#NASA #Hubble #galaxy #science #space

A galaxy seen in many kinds of light.🌀

This striking view of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) combines data from multiple telescopes. Visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observations (white, light blue, and yellow) reveals the galaxy’s sweeping spiral arms, while ultraviolet light from XMM-Newton (blue), X-rays from Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple), and infrared light from Spitzer Space Telescope (red) highlight different cosmic ingredients.

By layering these wavelengths together, astronomers can trace where stars are forming, where older stars reside, and where extreme environments — like exploding stars, million-degree gas, and matter swirling around black holes — light up the galaxy.

Located about 21 million light-years away, the Pinwheel Galaxy is roughly 170,000 light-years across, making it even larger than our own Milky Way.

Visual Description:
The image shows a luminous, face-on spiral shaped like a softly glowing cosmic pinwheel against a dark, star-speckled background. A compact white central core anchors the scene, from which broad spiral arms sweep outward in graceful arcs, filling much of the frame. These arms look textured and mottled rather than smooth, dotted with bright knots and layered colors with blue highlights, red sprinkles and purple confetti. Together, the overlapping colors give the galaxy a speckled, dynamic appearance, emphasizing both its immense scale and the active environments distributed throughout its wide, extended disk.

X-ray: Chandra: ASA/CXC/JHU/K. Kuntz et al.;
UV/Optical: XMM-Newton: ESA/XMM/R. Willatt;
Optical: Hubble: NASA/ESA/STScI/JHU/K. Kuntz et al.; Ground-based: R. J. GaBany;
IR: Spitzer: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/K. Gordon;
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare, K.Arcand

#Space #NASA #Universe #Galaxy #Astronomy

A space swan song 🦢

Swim through this Hubble view of the Swan Nebula, sometimes also called the Omega Nebula or Messier 17.

This is one of the largest star-forming regions in our Milky Way Galaxy! It also contains some of our home galaxy's youngest star clusters, at only a million years old – practically babies, in cosmic terms.

Located about 5,500 light-years away, the Swan Nebula resides in the constellation Sagittarius.

Music credit: "Space Invaders" by Nigel Sawyer [PRS] via Chappell Recorded Music Library Ltd [PRS] and Universal Production Music

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Kraus (The University of Texas at Austin); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

#NASA #Hubble #nebula #stars #space

We want YOU! 🫵

April is Citizen Science Month! While the month might be wrapping up, citizen scientists can work from anywhere at any time.

Public participation in scientific research helps solve the mysteries of the universe! Thousands of important scientific discoveries have only been made possible through citizen science.

Hubble's vast and growing archive of observations is a treasure trove for researchers, especially with the support of volunteers who help them comb through and catalog data.

@NASA invites people of all ages, backgrounds, and citizenships to volunteer on real science projects! Find out how to get involved at the link in our bio.

#CitizenScienceMonth #CitizenScience #NASA #Hubble #science