Gallery: The Most Stunning Space Photos of 2016
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/westerlund-2.html">NASA</a>01BSP-054.jpg
To celebrate American Archive Month in October, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has released a collection of images, including this shot of a cluster of stars 20,000 light years from Earth. The blue and green shows cosmic haze where clouds form; x-rays are shown in purple.
<a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161116.html">David Lindemann</a>02SPoW-001.jpg
These bright emission nebulas, located in Cassiopeia, are named Heart and Soul.
<a href="http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/05/A_golden_veil_cloaks_a_newborn_star">ESA/Hubble & NASA</a>03BSP-061.jpg
This young star is breaking out. Like a hatchling pecking through its shell, this particular stellar newborn is forcing its way out into the surrounding universe. The golden veil of light cloaks a young stellar object known only as IRAS 14568-6304. It is ejecting gas at supersonic speeds and eventually will have cleared a hole in the cloud, allowing it to be easily visible to the outside universe.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1625a/"> ESO/H. Drass et al.</a>04BSP-057.jpg
This spectacular image of the Orion Nebula star-formation region was obtained from multiple exposures using the HAWK-I infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. This is the deepest view ever of this region and reveals more very faint planetary-mass objects than expected.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/maven-celebrates-one-mars-year-of-science">NASA</a>05SPoW16-017.jpg
This image of Mars has been altered to show what we would see with ultraviolet vision: the Valles Marineris appears as a blue cut across the middle, and an ozone build-up at the south pole shows as magenta.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-looks-into-a-cosmic-kaleidoscope">NASA</a>06SPoW16-011.jpg
At first glance, this cosmic kaleidoscope of purple, blue and pink offers a strikingly beautiful — and serene — snapshot of the cosmos. However, this multi-colored haze actually marks the site of two colliding galaxy clusters, forming a single object known as MACS J0416.1-2403.
<a href="https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1616a/">ESO</a>07BSP-056.jpg
In this image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), light from blazing blue stars energizes the gas left over from the stars’ recent formation. The result is a strikingly colorful emission nebula, called LHA 120-N55, in which the stars are adorned with a mantle of glowing gas. Astronomers study these beautiful displays to learn about the conditions in places where new stars develop.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1635a/">ESO</a>08BSP-058.jpg
This is a richly detailed view of the star formation region Messier 78 in the Orion constellation. The blue region is reflected light from hot young stars, and streams of dark dust and red jets emerge from forming stars.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia20505/in-daylight-on-the-night-side">NASA-JPL-Caltech</a>09SPoW16-019.jpg
This image shows the rings of Saturn from above, with the darkened planet on the lower right. Even at night, the part of the rings not shadowed by Saturn remain in sunlight.
NASA/ESA10SPoW16-005.jpg
NASA’s Hubble telescope took this photo of a star dying by discarding its outer layers of gas, leaving a white dwarf (the white spot in the middle) at its core.
NASA, ESA, P Crowther (University of Sheffield)11BSP-046.jpg
Astronomers using the unique ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have identified nine monster stars with masses over 100 times the mass of the Sun in the star cluster R136. This makes it the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date. The results, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, raise many new questions about the formation of massive stars.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/abell-665.html">NASA</a>12SPoW16-018.jpg
Like cold fronts on Earth, merging galaxy clusters generate shock waves, shown in the white wave at the center of this image.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubbles-best-image-of-alpha-centauri-a-and-b">NASA</a>13SPOW16-016.gif
This image shows Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, two stars in the star system closest to Earth, only 4.3 light-years away. Because of their proximity, the two stars are top targets in the search for habitable exoplanets.
NASA/ESA14SPoW16-002.jpg
This supernova exploded long ago, but the heart of the dead neutron star still beats, issuing pulses of energy 6,500 light-years from Earth.
NASA15BSP-063.jpg
This supernova might be beautiful, but it’s also lazy. This composite x-ray image shows the remains of a supernova explosion called RCW 103 with a suspected magnetar star—aka “highly magnetized neutron star”—at its center. The magnetar has a mysteriously slow spin, rotating only once ever 6.67 hours, compared to the 10 seconds other magnetars typically take.
ESA/Hubble & NASA16SPoW16-020.jpg
The Milky Way contains over 150 globular clusters, which each contains hundreds of thousands of stars. This one, NGC 362, is younger than most—only 10-11 billion years old.
NASA/ESA17SPoW16-022.jpg
Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, is best known for its colorful storms, the most famous being the Great Red Spot. Now astronomers have focused on another beautiful feature of the planet, using Hubble's ultraviolet capabilities. The extraordinary vivid glows shown are auroras. They are created when high-energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with atoms of gas.
Saxton/Lockman/NRAO/AUI/NSF/Mellinger18SPoW16-014.jpg
Hundreds of enormous, high-velocity gas clouds whiz around the outskirts of our galaxy, but the Smith Cloud is unique because its trajectory is well known. Discovered in the 1960s, astronomers believe it was launched from the outer regions of the galactic disk around 70 million years ago. It’s now on a return collision course and is expected to plow into the Milky Way in about 30 million years, where it will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation. The Smith Cloud is made of hydrogen gas and can’t be seen in visible light. This image a false-color composite created by Hubble to show its size and location in space.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1606/?lang">ESO/APEX/ATLASGAL consortium/NASA/GLIMPSE consortium/ESA/Planck</a>19SPoW16-013.jpg
The southern plane of the Milky Way gets an incredible close up via the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope in Chile. Apex created a panorama of the galactic plane in detailed sub-millimeter wavelengths invisible to the eye and the sharpest map of the galaxy ever made. The APEX telescope helps astronomers study cold gas and dust just above absolute zero where new stars form.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-unveils-a-tapestry-of-dazzling-diamond-like-stars">ASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz, Acknowledgment: N. Smith</a>20BSP-047.jpg
Trumpler 13 is a glittering star cluster that contains a collection of some of the brightest stars seen in our Milky Way galaxy. Because the cluster is only 500,000 years old, it has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars. The small, dark knot left of center is a nodule of gas laced with dust, and seen in silhouette. The blue-white stars are burning their hydrogen fuel so ferociously they will explode as supernovae in just a few million years. The combination of outflowing stellar “winds” and, ultimately, supernova blast waves will carve out cavities in nearby clouds of gas and dust. These fireworks will kick-start the beginning of a new generation of stars in an ongoing cycle of star birth and death.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-frames-a-unique-red-rectangle"> European Space Agency</a>21BSP-066.jpg
The star HD 44179 is surrounded by an extraordinary structure known as the Red Rectangle. It acquired its moniker because of its shape and its apparent color when seen in early images from Earth. This strikingly detailed Hubble image reveals how, when seen from space, the nebula, rather than being rectangular, is shaped like an X with additional complex structures of spaced lines of glowing gas, a little like the rungs of a ladder.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-hotbed-of-vigorous-star-formation">ESA/Hubble & NASA</a>22SPoW16-008.jpg
This is NGC 1569, a small starburst galaxy that’s a hotbed of vigorous star formation. As a result, the glittering galaxy is home to super star clusters, three of which are visible in this image. Each containing more than a million stars, these brilliant clusters reside within a large cavity of gas carved out by multiple supernovae, the energetic remnants of massive stars.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-s-hubble-looks-to-the-final-frontier"> NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)</a>23BSP-059.jpg
The Hubble image unveils a very cluttered-looking universe filled with galaxies near and far. Some are distorted like a funhouse mirror through a warping-of-space phenomenon first predicted by Einstein a century ago. In the center of the image is the immense galaxy cluster Abell S1063, located 4 billion light-years away, and surrounded by magnified images of galaxies much farther. The cluster contains approximately 100 million-million solar masses, and contains 51 confirmed galaxies and perhaps over 400 more.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/nasa-s-chandra-finds-supermassive-black-hole-burping-nearby.html"> NASA/STScI</a>24SPoW16-015.jpg
A view of the galaxy NGC 5195, home to a supermassive black hole located in the upper right hand corner of the image. The black hole has powerful, active eruptions or “burps” of debris.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1630a/">ESO</a>25BSP-062.jpg
This deep view of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds is actually a combination of two photos, captured from ESO’s La Silla Observatory. The clouds are shown in color as glittering blue holes while the thousands of stars are captured in black and white. Getting rid of noise from unwanted objects is a crucial aspect of astrophotography, and so a luminance exposure is sometimes used to produce richly detailed monochrome images like the one seen here.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/t-38c-passes-in-front-of-the-sun-at-supersonic-speed">NASA/Ken Ulbrich</a>26SPoW16-024.jpg
An Air Force Test Pilot School T-38 passes in front of the sun at supersonic speed, creating shockwaves that are captured using schlieren photography to visualize supersonic flow.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1605/?lang">ESO</a>27BSP-055.jpg
A newly formed star lights up the surrounding cosmic clouds in this new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Dust particles in the vast clouds that surround the star HD 97300 diffuse its light, like a car headlight in enveloping fog, and create the reflection nebula IC 2631. Although HD 97300 is in the spotlight for now, the very dust that makes it so hard to miss heralds the birth of additional, potentially scene-stealing, future stars.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasas-hubble-captures-the-beating-heart-of-the-crab-nebula"> NASA & ESA</a>28BSP-048.jpg
Peering deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, this close-up image reveals the beating heart of one of the most historic and intensively studied remnants of a supernova, an exploding star. The inner region sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and tsunamis of charged particles embedded in magnetic fields.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-spots-a-secluded-starburst-galaxy">ESA/Hubble & NASA</a>29SPoW16-029.jpg
MCG+07-33-027 is a starburst galaxy, meaning it is experiencing an extraordinarily high rate of star formation. For galaxies in a state of starburst, this intense period of star formation has to be triggered somehow---often by a collision with another galaxy. But MCG+07-33-027 is rather isolated, so it’s most likely not due to a collision with a neighboring or passing galaxy. Astronomers are still speculating about the cause. The bright object to the right of the galaxy is a foreground star in our own galaxy.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/a-space-spider-watches-over-young-stars">NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS</a>30SPoW16-031.jpg
A nebula known as "the Spider" glows fluorescent green in an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey. The Spider, officially named IC 417, lies near a much smaller object called NGC 1931, not pictured in the image. Together, the two are called "The Spider and the Fly" nebulae. Nebulae are clouds of interstellar gas and dust where stars can form.
