Hubble’s view offers a sneak peek at the dramatic vistas NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will provide. The most obvious difference between Hubble’s infrared and visible photos of this region is the abundance of stars that fill the infrared field of view. Most of them are more distant, background stars located behind the nebula itself.
The Hubble Space Telescope floats against the background of space as it is released by the Space Shuttle Atlantis after Servicing Mission 4 (SM4, STS-125) on , 7:57 a.m. (CDT).
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations.
Caption A Hubble Space Telescope image of the giant galaxy M87 shows a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blasting from the galaxy's 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole. The blowtorch-like jet seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. These novae are not caught inside the jet, but are apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby. During a recent 9-month survey, astronomers ...
Caption This series of Hubble Space Telescope images reveals the breakup of an asteroid over a period of several months starting in late 2013. The largest fragments are up to 180 meters (200 yards) in radius, each with "tails" caused by dust lifted from their surfaces and pushed back by the pressure of sunlight. The ten pieces of the asteroid drift apart slowly and show a range of breakup ...
Caption Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to zoom in for a close-up look at one sliver of the Cygnus Loop nebula—a huge bubble of glowing gasses. They found gossamer filaments resembling lines in a wrinkled bedsheet stretched across two light-years. This region lies at the outer edge of the expanding bubble, and was produced by an exploding star 20,000 years ago.