Image: Spiral extraordinaire

M101 is a spiral galaxy, 170 000 light-years in diameter. AKARI’s new observations reveal differing populations of stars spread across its spiral arms.

Looking like a child's pinwheel ready to be set a spinning by a gentle breeze, this dramatic spiral galaxy is one of the latest viewed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Stunning details of the face-on spiral ...

The colorful, intricate shapes in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images reveal how the glowing gas ejected by dying Sun-like stars evolves dramatically over time.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new image taken with the powerful HAWK-I camera on ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the beautiful barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 in infrared light. NGC 1365 ...

Probing a glowing bubble of gas and dust encircling a dying star, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a wealth of previously unseen structures.

This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the diverse collection of galaxies in the cluster Abell S0740 that is over 450 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus.

(Phys.org) —How much light has been emitted by all galaxies since the cosmos began? After all, every photon (particle of light) from ultraviolet to far infrared wavelengths ever radiated by all galaxies ...

(Phys.org) —A trio of German space scientists has worked out a way to use pulsars as navigation aids for space vehicles traveling in the solar system. As they describe in their paper uploaded to the preprint ...

(Phys.org) —Super-high-energy galactic gamma rays have trillions of times more energy than visible light, and they disappear in the atmosphere before they hit the Earth's surface. So if you want to detect ...

(Phys.org) —The Ring Nebula's distinctive shape makes it a popular illustration for astronomy books. But new observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the glowing gas shroud around an old, dying, ...

(Phys.org) —Sometimes astronomy is like real estate—what's important is location, location, and location. Astronomers have resolved a major problem in their understanding of a class of stars that undergo ...

(Phys.org) —Magnetars – the dense remains of dead stars that erupt sporadically with bursts of high-energy radiation - are some of the most extreme objects known in the Universe. A major campaign using ...