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'Crown of Thorns' Galaxy Photographed in Space
Cartwheel in the sky: The kaleidoscopic galaxy 500million light years from Earth
Giant 'Hand' Reaches Across Space
An unusual large galaxy with a shape bordering between spiral and elliptical has been spotted by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
NGC 7049 sits in the southern constellation Indus, and is the brightest of a cluster of galaxies, a so-called Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG). Typical BCGs are some of the oldest and most massive galaxies, which provide excellent opportunities for astronomers to study the elusive globular clusters lurking within.
The halo, a ghostly region of diffuse light surrounding the galaxy, is composed of myriads of individual stars and provides a luminous background to the swirling ring of dust lanes surrounding NGC 7049's core.
Small faint points of light sprinkled throughout the galaxy represent globular clusters, which are gravitational groupings of several hundreds of thousands of stars. They contain some of the first stars to be produced in a galaxy.
NGC 7049 has far fewer such clusters than other similar giant galaxies in very big, rich groups. This indicates to astronomers how the surrounding environment influenced the formation of galaxy halos in the early universe.
Hubble captured this image using its Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is primed to hunt galaxies and galaxy clusters in the remote and ancient universe. The space telescope recently imaged a group of colliding galaxies chosen in an online voting contest.
Cartwheel in the sky: The kaleidoscopic galaxy 500million light years from Earth
This is the magnificent Cartwheel galaxy, a stellar structure which measures more than 100,000 light years across.
It was released to promote a 24-hour webcast from observatories around the world, marking the International Year of Astronomy.
The kaleidoscopic galaxy lies 500million light years from Earth, and its unusual shape is due to a catastrophic collision with one of the smaller galaxies on the lower left hundreds of millions of years ago.
The smaller galaxy produced compression waves in the gas of the Cartwheel as it plunged through it, which triggered bursts of star formation, lighting up the rim.
Our view of the spectacular result was only possible thanks to a combination of four very different telescopes, which each added a layer of colour to the composite.
The Galaxy Evolution Explorer revealed the blue tint; the Hubble Space Telescope the green; the Spitzer Space Telescope the red and the Chandra X-ray Observatory the purple.
The public were invited to see how these and 76 other of our most advanced telescopes work and what they add to our understanding of the universe.
A live video webcast called 'Around the World in 80 Telescopes' ran from 9am (GMT) on Friday to the following Saturday morning.
Hosted by the European Southern Observatory's headquarters in Germany, the footage jumped between observatories around the globe.
Viewers were promised stunning new images of the cosmos and sent in questions and comments during the event.
Giant 'Hand' Reaches Across Space
Tiny and dying but still-powerful stars called pulsars spin like crazy and light up their surroundings, often with ghostly glows.
So it is with PSR B1509-58, which long ago collapsed into a sphere just 12 miles in diameter after running out of fuel.
And what a strange scene this one has created.
In a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, high-energy X-rays emanating from the nebula around PSR B1509-58 have been colored blue to reveal a structure resembling a hand reaching for some eternal red cosmic light.
The star now spins around at the dizzying pace of seven times every second — as pulsars do — spewing energy into space that creates the scene.
Strong magnetic fields, 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, are thought to be involved, too. The combination drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the dying star. As the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate away their energy as X-rays.
The red light actually a neighboring gas cloud, RCW 89, energized into glowing by the fingers of the PSR B1509-58 nebula, astronomers believe.
The scene, which spans 150 light-years, is about 17,000 light years away, so what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago, and that light is just arriving here.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
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