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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning new view of a stellar nursery illuminated by the bright blue light of young stars. This vast stellar nursery, known as the Chamaeleon Cloud Complex, stretches 65 light-years wide, occupying most of the Chamaeleon constellation, which is visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Located 522 light-years away from … Read more
Human vision may be limited to a specific range of wavelengths, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never understand the full complexity of light in our Universe. Instruments can peer into the cosmos in regimes that are otherwise invisible to our eyes, showing us not just the dynamics of the stars, but their absolutely awe-inspiring beauty. … Read more
A new image of the Flame Nebula shows the interstellar cloud as we’ve never seen it before. A team of astronomers using the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope has captured the star-forming region in radio wavelengths, revealing details that we had never seen before. The Flame Nebula, which is close to the famous Horsehead … Read more
By Gege Li Tony Wu/naturepl.com Photographer Tony Wu Agency blog/Naturepl.com THE starfish in this image looks suitably electrifying, but the lightning-like currents emanating from this male Leach’s sea star are actually streams of sperm. The shot was taken in Kagoshima prefecture in Japan by nature photographer Tony Wu. Starfish sexually reproduce by a process called … Read more
The Flame Nebula rings in the New Year from the constellation Orion in a blazing new photo from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). In the new telescope view, the nebula, nicknamed “Orion’s fireplace,” looks like an inferno, but it’s actually a colorful cloud of interstellar dust and gas and a nursery for new star formation. … Read more
The image above may look like a fairly normal picture of the night sky, but what you’re looking at is a lot more special than just glittering stars. Each of those white dots is an active supermassive black hole. And each of those black holes is devouring material at the heart of a galaxy … Read more
It might not look like much, but here is the first monumental image from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Earlier this month, a circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera was opened, allowing the camera to take its first image. Now, imagine what the camera’s last image will be like: … Read more
The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It’s also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us. Astronomers rarely use their telescopes to simply take pictures. The pictures in astrophysics are usually generated by a process of scientific inference and … Read more
You’re looking at a 300-megapixel photo of our Sun. Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy used a specially modified telescope, taking over 150,000 individual photos and combining them into this magnificent image (see below). “It took about 10 hours to stack all the data, and another 3-4 hours to get it from a raw stack to the final image,” … Read more
The beautiful birth of a star has produced an exquisitely ethereal structure in interstellar space. It’s called the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula, located about 520 light-years away, and in a new image from the NSF NOIRLab’s International Gemini Observatory in Chile, it appears in the sky like a pale gossamer butterfly wing. At its core, … Read more