Get to know the fastest asteroid in our solar system, which orbits the sun every 113 days. The depiction of this artist shows the asteroid 2021 PH27 (top right) and Mercury (below) orbiting the sun.
A ghostly set of X-ray rings was found around a black hole with a companion star. These rings are created by light echoes.
This image, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter matrix in Chile, shows the PDS system 70 to 400 light-years away. This planetary system is still forming and is still in the process of formation. One of the planets in the system has a moon-forming disk around it.
This image shows the 2018zd supernova (shown as the big white dot on the right), a new type of supernova called electron capture. On the left is the galaxy NGC 2146.
This image from the STARFORGE simulation shows the “Creation Anvil,” a giant gas cloud with individual stars forming inside it.
Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the remnant of the supernova Cassiopeia A and discovered that titanium, shown in light blue, came into the air. The colors represent other detected elements, such as iron (orange), oxygen (purple), silicon (red), and magnesium (green).
The supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87, the first to be imagined, can now be seen with polarized light. The rotating lines reveal the magnetic field near the edge of the black hole.
This image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey shows the galaxy J0437 + 2456, which includes a supermassive black hole in the center that appears to be moving.
This artist’s print shows how the distant quasar P172 + 18 and its radio jets could have looked like 13 billion years ago. The light from the quasar has taken so long to reach us, so astronomers observed the quasar as it was seen in the primitive universe.
This image shows the proximity of the ultra-weak dwarf galaxy Tucana II, captured by the SkyMapper telescope.
These images show two giant radio galaxies found using the MeerKAT telescope. The red in both images shows the radio light emitted by galaxies on a background of the sky as seen with visible light.
The conception of this quasar J0313-1806 by this artist represents it as it did 670 million years after the Big Bang. Quasars are very energetic objects in the centers of galaxies, fed by black holes and brighter than entire galaxies.
Here is a phenomenon known as zodiacal light, caused by sunlight that is reflected in small dust particles in the inner solar system.
This artist’s impression of the distant galaxy ID2299 shows that part of its gas is expelled by a “tidal tail” as a result of a fusion between two galaxies.
This diagram shows the two most important companion galaxies in the Milky Way: the Large Magellanic Cloud (left) and the Small Magellanic Cloud. It was made with data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite.
The Blue Ring Nebula is believed to be a never-before-seen phase that occurs after the merger of two stars. The debris coming out of the fusion was cut by a disk around one of the stars, creating two cones of material that glowed in ultraviolet light.
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, experienced an unprecedented attenuation in late 2019. This image was taken in January using the very large telescope at the Southern European Observatory.
This is an infrared image of Apep, a Wolf-Rayet binary star system located 8,000 light-years from Earth.
An illustration by an artist, on the left, helps visualize the details of an unusual star system, GW Orionis, in the constellation of Orion. The system’s circumstellar disk is broken, causing misaligned rings around its three stars.
It is a simulation of two spiral black holes melting and emitting gravitational waves.
The illustration by this artist shows the unexpected attenuation of the star Betelgeuse.
This extremely distant galaxy, which looks similar to our Milky Way, appears as a ring of light.
This artist’s performance shows the 2019ehk calcium-rich supernova. Orange represents the calcium-rich material created in the explosion. Purple reveals the gas spilled by the star just before the explosion.
The blue dot in the center of this image marks the approximate location of a supernova event that occurred 140 million light-years from Earth, where a white dwarf exploded and created an ultraviolet flash. It was near the tail of the constellation Draco.
This radar image captured by NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus in 1991 shows a crown, a large circular structure 120 miles in diameter, called the Aine Crown.
When the mass of a star is ejected during a supernova, it expands rapidly. Eventually, it will slow down and form a hot glowing gas bubble. From this gas bubble will emerge a white dwarf that will move around the galaxy.
Here is shown in a circle the glow of the short burst of gamma rays detected 10 billion light years away. This image was taken by the Gemini-North telescope.
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 7513, a barred spiral galaxy 60 million light-years away. Due to the expansion of the universe, the galaxy appears to be moving away from the Milky Way at an accelerated rate.
This artist’s conceptual illustration shows what the blue luminous variable star in the dwarf galaxy Kinman might look like before it mysteriously disappeared.
It is an illustration of an artist of a supermassive black hole and his gas disk surrounding it. Inside this disk are two smaller black holes that orbit each other. The researchers identified a flame of light that is suspected to have come from one of these binary pairs shortly after merging into a larger black hole.
This image, taken from a video, shows what happens when two objects of different masses melt and create gravitational waves.
This is the impression of an artist showing the detection of a repeating rapid burst, seen in blue, which is in orbit with an astrophysical object seen in pink.
The bursting gusts, which make a shock leaving their host galaxy in an explosion of bright radio waves, helped detect “missing matter” in the universe.
A new type of explosion was found in a small galaxy 500 million light-years away from Earth. This type of explosion is known as a fast blue optical transient.
Astronomers have discovered a rare type of galaxy described as a “cosmic ring of fire.” This artist’s illustration shows the galaxy as it existed 11 billion years ago.
This is an artist’s impression of the disk Wolfe, a massive disk galaxy in rotation in the initial universe.
A bright yellow “twist” near the center of this image shows where a planet can form around the star AB Aurigae. The image was captured by the Very Large Telescope of the Southern European Observatory.
This artist’s illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1,000 light-years from Earth. This system includes a star (small orbit seen in blue) that orbits a newly discovered black hole (orbit in red), as well as a third star in a wider orbit (also in blue).
This illustration shows the core of a star, known as a white dwarf, dragged in orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole tears more material from the star and pulls it toward a shiny disk of material around the black hole. Prior to its encounter with the black hole, the star was a red giant in the later stages of stellar evolution.
This artist’s illustration shows the collision of two 125-mile-wide dusty and icy bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away. It was thought that observing the consequences of this collision was an exoplanet.
This is an artist’s impression of the interstellar comet 2I / Borisov as it travels through our solar system. New observations detected carbon monoxide in the comet’s tail as the sun warmed the comet.
This rosette pattern is the orbit of a star, called S2, around the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
This is an artist illustration from SN2016aps, which astronomers believe is the brightest supernova ever observed.
It is an illustration of an artist of a brown dwarf or a “failed star” object and its magnetic field. The atmosphere and magnetic field of the brown dwarf rotate at different speeds, which allowed astronomers to determine the wind speed over the object.
This artist’s illustration shows a black hole of intermediate mass breaking into a star.
This is an artist’s impression of a large star known as HD74423 and his much smaller red dwarf companion in a binary star system. The large star appears to be pounding only on one side and is being distorted by the gravitational pull of its accompanying teardrop-shaped star.
This is the impression of an artist of two white dwarfs in the process of merging. Although astronomers hoped this could cause a supernova, they have found an example of two white dwarf stars that survived the fusion.
A combination of spaceships and ground-based telescopes have found evidence of the largest explosion seen in the universe. The explosion was created by a black hole in the central galaxy of the Ophiuchus cluster, which exploded jets and sculpted a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas.
This new image from ALMA shows the result of a stellar fight: a complex and impressive gaseous environment surrounding the HD101584 binary star system.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured the Tarantula Nebula at two wavelengths of infrared light. Red represents hot gas, while blue regions are interstellar dust.
A white dwarf, on the left, pulls material from a brown dwarf, on the right, about 3,000 light-years from Earth.
This image shows the orbits of the six G objects in the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated by a white cross. The stars, gas and dust are in the background.
After the stars die, they expel their particles into space, which in turn form new stars. In one case, star dust was embedded in a meteorite that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that star dust could spring from sources such as the egg nebula to create the recovered grains of the meteorite, which landed in Australia.
The ancient North Star, Alpha Draconis or Thuban, is here encircled in an image of the northern sky.
The UGC 2885 galaxy, nicknamed the “Godzilla galaxy”, may be the largest in the local universe.
The host galaxy of a fast-paced fast recovery acquired with the 8-meter Gemini-North telescope.