Science & Tech

12 jaw-droppingly beautiful pictures of space

12 jaw-droppingly beautiful pictures of space

1.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)

A pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. Nasa believes the smaller galaxy has passed through the larger one, causing the ripple effect.

2.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

This picture captured light "echoing" from the star V838 Monocerotis three years after it suddenly brightened to 600,000 times the luminosity of Earth's Sun, in what's known as a stellar outburst.

3.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

The Carina Nebula is a cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other gases around 7,500 light years away from Earth. In this picture the oxygen is blue, hydrogen and nitrogen are green and sulphur red.

4.

(image: Nasa, ESA, N Smith, and The Hubble Heritage Team)

This second image of the Carina Nebula shows a star forming over 50 light years.

5.

(image: Nasa, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)

Another Nebula, known as Barnard 33, rising in the constellation of the Orion.

6.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

The MyCN18 is a planetary Nebula shaped like an hourglass around 8,000 light-years away from Earth. It was featured on the front of National Geographic in April 1997 and on the cover of Pearl Jam album Binaural.

7.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

The NGC 2174 (also known as the Monkey Head Nebula) is filled with young stars.

8.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a complete galaxy, the NGC 1300.

9.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team)

What look like butterfly wings in this image are actually incredibly hot cauldrons of gas ejected from a dying star five times bigger than the Sun. The gas is tearing through space at more than 950,000 kilometres per hour.

10.

(image: Nasa, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

The Messier 15 is 35,000 light years away and, at 12 billion, is one of the oldest cluster of stars known to man.

11.

(Picture: Nasa, ESA)

Astronauts Robert L Curbeam, Jr (left) and Christer Fuglesang during a spacewalk in 2006.

12.

(Picture: ESA, Nasa and Martino Romaniello, European Southern Observatory, Germany)

It is thought a supernova blast created this double cluster of stars.

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