Welcome to the Universe

Discover the universe: Learn about the history of the cosmos, what it's made of, and so much more.

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Exoplanets

Worlds beyond our solar system.

Stars

Giant balls of hot gas that burn for millions to billions of years. 

Black Holes

Concentrations of matter with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Galaxies

Collections of stars, planets, and vast clouds of gas and dust bound together by gravity.

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NASA’s Chandra Finds Galaxy Cluster That Crosses the Streams

Astronomers using Chandra’s X-Ray Observatory spotted a galaxy with two streams of superheated gas crossing – a risky move in any universe. Instead of destroying all life as we know it, the crossed streams might lead to a new structure.

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This release features a composite image of two pairs of hot gas tails found inside a single galaxy cluster. The image is presented both labeled and unlabeled, with color-coded ovals encircling the hot gas tails. In both the labeled and unlabeled versions of the image, mottled purple gas speckles a region of space dotted with distant flecks of red and white. Also present in this region of space are several glowing golden dots. These dots are individual galaxies that together form the cluster Zwicky 8338. To our right of center is a glowing golden galaxy with a mottled V shaped cloud of purple above it. Yellow labels identify the two arms of the V as tails trailing behind the hurtling galaxy below. To our left of center is another golden galaxy, this one surrounded by purple gas. Behind it, opening toward our right in the shape of a widening V lying on its side, are two more mottled purple clouds. Labeled in white, these newly-discovered gas tails are even larger than the previously discovered tails labeled in yellow. These tails, which overlap with the galaxy on our right, are over 1.6 million light-years long.
Researchers have discovered a second pair of tails trailing behind a galaxy in this cluster. Previously, astronomers discovered a shorter pair of tails from a different galaxy close to this latest one. This newer and longer set of tails was only seen because of a deeper observation with Chandra that revealed the fainter X-rays that have been shown in the optical data. These tails span for over a million light-years and help determine the evolution of the galaxy cluster.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Xiamen Univ./C. Ge; Optical: DESI collaboration; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

Galaxy of Horrors

Take a tour of some of the most terrifying and mind-blowing destinations in our galaxy … and beyond. After a visit to these nightmare worlds, you may never want to leave Earth again!

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A scarlet star looms behind the ruins of an exoplanet that resembles the shape of a skull. A red galaxy arm is visible in the background. It is apparent that this galaxy, named MACS 2129-1, has been decaying since it stopped producing stars only a few billion years after the big bang.

Creepy Cosmic News

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A Dead Star’s Ghostly Glow

wispy green swirling through space
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Halloween Special: Universe of Monsters

An illustration of zombies on an exoplanet
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What is Betelgeuse? Inside the Strange, Volatile Star

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Bright orange-red "cobwebs" appear to encircle the star, CW Leonis.
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Hubble Celebrates Halloween with a Glowering, Dying Star

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Bright white dwarf star at center of the image, a disk of dust and rocks encircles it, black chunks of rock in the foreground and off to the right swirl into the white dwarf star at center
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Dead Star Caught Ripping Up Planetary System

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Featured Video

Data Sonification: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster

 In this haunting sonification of Perseus, sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.

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Featured News

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2 min read

Hubble Captures a New View of Galaxy M90

A spiral galaxy. It has a bright core with light spilling out. Its disk holds thick clumps of dark reddish dust, which swirls around the galaxy following its rotation. Brighter and hotter stars, shown in blue, speckle parts of the disk. A halo of faint gas wraps around the galaxy, extending beyond the edges of the image.
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NASA’s Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano

A bright binary star surrounded by a colorful loops of nebula on the black background of space. One loop is vertical the other is horizontal across the center of the image.
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Snippet of Euclid Mission’s Cosmic Atlas Released by ESA

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Explorando el cosmos con Webb

Purple, blue and white swirls overlaid with a pattern of orange dashed lines in the center.
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Revealing the Hidden Universe with Full-shell X-ray Optics at NASA MSFC

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MSH 15-52

In this composite image, a pulsar, a pulsar wind nebula, and a low-energy X-ray cloud combine to create an uncanny scene of a skeletal hand preparing to grab a glowing ember.

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In this composite image, a pulsar, a pulsar wind nebula, and a low energy X-ray cloud combine to create an uncanny scene of a skeletal hand preparing to grab a glowing ember. The hand reaches up from the bottom of the image, the ghostly blue flesh and white bones representing pulsar wind nebula X-rays observed by Chandra. A bright white spot in the wrist is the pulsar itself. Just beyond the hand’s fingertips, near our upper right, is a mottled yellow and orange shape that appears to glow from within. This is the low energy X-ray cloud observed by Chandra.
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Galaxies

Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.

Black Holes

Stars

Exoplanets