NGC 6744

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose; "An Experience,"

Io's Close-Up by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

WR 134, Cygnus

NGC 7635, Bubble Nebula

Perseverance: Drifting clouds just before sunrise on Mars (March 18, 2023)

Cosmic Cliffs in Carina © JWST

M78 // Capturing Ancient Photons

A beautiful series of reflection nebulae make up M78. These reflection nebulae, like their name suggests, contain little ionized gas and primarily reflect the light of nearby stars. In this case, it is only two stars' light that the gas is reflecting despite containing a few hundred young stars within.

Brothers Betelgeuse and Rigel

A stellar exodus was caught in action!  Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to watch the white dwarf exodus in the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, a dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Hubble took snapshots of fledgling white dwarf stars beginning their slow-paced, 40-million-year migration from the crowded center of an ancient star cluster to the less populated suburbs. By observing ultraviolet light, astronomers examined 3,000 white dwarfs, tracing two populations with diverse ages and orbits. One grouping was 6 million years old and had just begun their journey. Another was around 100 million years old and had already arrived at its new homestead far from the center, roughly 1.5 light-years, or nearly 9 trillion miles (14 trillion kilometers), away. The cluster resides 14,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Tucana. Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Richer and J. Heyl (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada). ALT TEXT: Thousands of stars, seen as tiny dots, are shown on a black background. The stars vary in size and color, including orange, yellow, and white.