This image shows spectacular ribbons of gas and dust enveloping the pearly center of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1398. This galaxy is located in the constellation Fornax (El Horno), approximately 65 million light years away. Instead of starting at the center of the galaxy and spinning outward, NGC 1398's elegant spiral arms emerge from

It's starting to look a lot like Christmas in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, resembling a swirling storm in a snowball. These stars form the globular cluster Messier 79, located about 40,000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Lepus (The Hare). Globular clusters are gravitationally bound groupings

In one of the largest known star-forming regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, bright young stellar clusters known as OB associations are found. One of these associations, called LH 72, was captured in this spectacular image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It consists of a

Two 2001 images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet's appearance as haze kicked up by dust storm activity in the south became distributed globally. On the left, an image from late June 2001 shows clear conditions over much of the planet, with

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a glowing, ancient globular cluster called NGC 3201, a gathering of hundreds of thousands of stars bound together by gravity. NGC 3201 was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop, who described it as a “quite large and quite bright” object that becomes “rather irregular”

A dark cloud of cosmic dust meanders across this spectacular wide-field image, illuminated by the bright light of new stars. This dense cloud is a star-forming region called Lupus 3, where dazzlingly hot stars are born from the collapse of masses of gas and dust. This image was created from images taken with the VLT

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a spiral galaxy known as NGC 7331. First observed by prolific galaxy hunter William Herschel in 1784, NGC 7331 is located about 45 million light years away, in the constellation of Pegasus (The Winged Horse). . In front of us partially edge-on, the galaxy shows its

A new study has found that the seven planets orbiting the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 are made primarily of rock, and some could potentially contain more water than Earth. The densities of the planets, now known with much more precision than before, suggest that some of them could have up to 5 percent of

About 50 million light-years away lies a small, somewhat overlooked galaxy called NGC 1559. Photographed here by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, this barred spiral is located in the little-observed southern constellation of Reticulum. ). NGC 1559 has huge spiral arms packed with star formation and is moving away from us at a speed of

This ghostly image shows a distant, pulsating red giant star known as R Sculptoris. Located 1,200 light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, R Sculptoris is something known as a carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star, meaning it is nearing the end of its life. At this stage, low- and intermediate-mass stars cool, create extended atmospheres,