Image: Hubble spots a lonely blue dwarf

This captivating image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 shows a lonely dwarf galaxy 100 million light-years away from Earth. This image depicts the blue compact dwarf galaxy ESO 338-4, which ...

Image: Newborn stars blow bubbles in the Cat's Paw Nebula

This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Cat's Paw Nebula, so named for the large, round features that create the impression of a feline footprint. The nebula is a star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy, ...

Magnetic waves create chaos in star-forming clouds

New research by Stella Offner, assistant professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, finds that magnetic waves are an important factor driving the process of star formation within the enormous clouds that ...

The fading ghost of a long-dead star

Thin, red veins of energized gas mark the location of one of the larger supernova remnants in the Milky Way galaxy in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Image: Hubble's galaxy cluster cornucopia

At first glance, this image is dominated by the vibrant glow of the swirling spiral to the lower left of the frame. However, this galaxy is far from the most interesting spectacle here—behind it sits a galaxy cluster.

An amazingly wide variety of planet-forming disks

With an instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile scientists of ETH Zurich observed planet-forming disks around young stars similar to the sun 4,5 billion years ago. Surprisingly, the disks are very different. The data ...

Image: Star-forming filaments

The plane of the Milky Way is rich in star-forming regions, such as the one pictured in this stunning scene by ESA's Herschel space observatory. To the far-infrared eye of Herschel, this region reveals an intricate network ...

Far-infrared instrument to map star formation in the universe

Questions about how and when stars are formed continue to tug at human curiosity. Star formation is governed by gravity and heat. Gravity causes molecular clouds to collapse and eventually form stars and planetary systems, ...

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