Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the remains of Cassiopeia A and found titanium, shown in light blue, exploding from it. The color represents other elements detected, such as iron (orange), oxygen (purple), silicon (red), and magnesium (green).
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The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, the first black hole ever photographed, can now be seen in polarized light. The circular lines indicate the magnetic field near the edge of the black hole.
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This image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey shows the galaxy J0437 + 2456, which has a supermassive black hole in its center that appears to be moving.
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This artist’s impression shows what a distant quasar P172 + 18 and its radio jet looked like 13 billion years ago. Light from quasars takes a long time to reach us, so astronomers observe quasars as they appeared at the beginning of the universe.
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This image shows the surrounding dwarf galaxy Tucana II, captured by the SkyMapper telescope.
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These images show two giant radio galaxies found with the Meerkat telescope. The red color in both images shows radio light emitted by the galaxy against the sky as seen in visible light.
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This artist envisioned the quasar J0313-1806 670 million years after the Big Bang. Quasars are high-energy objects at the center of galaxies, powered by black holes and brighter than all galaxies.
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Shown here is a phenomenon called zodiacal luminance, which is caused by the reflection of sunlight by tiny dust particles in the inner solar system.
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This artist’s impression of the distant galaxy ID2299 shows that some of its gas is emitted by the “tidal tail” as a result of the merging of two galaxies.
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This diagram shows the Milky Way’s two most important companions: the Large Magellanic Cloud (left) and the Small Magellanic Cloud. Created using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite.
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The Blue Ring Nebula is believed to be an unprecedented stage that occurred after the merger of two stars. The debris flowing from the merger is sliced by the disk around the star, forming two cones of matter that glow in ultraviolet light.
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The red giant star Bethel Gemini, in the constellation Orion, experienced an unprecedented blackout in late 2019. This image was taken in January using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.
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This is an infrared image of Apep, a Wolf-Rayet star binary system located 8,000 light years from Earth.
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The artist’s illustration, on the left, helps visualize details of the unusual star system, GW Orionis, in the constellation Orion. The stellar disk of this system cracks, resulting in an oblique ring around its three stars.
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This is a simulation of two spiral black holes combining and emitting gravitational waves.
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This artist’s illustration illustrates the unexpected blur of the star Betelgeuse.
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This faraway galaxy, which resembles our Milky Way, looks like a ring of light.
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Explains this artist’s interpretation of the 2019ehk calcium-rich supernova. The orange color represents the calcium-rich material from the explosion. The purple color represents the gas that the star fired before the explosion.
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The blue dot in the center of this image shows the approximate location of a supernova event that occurred 140 million light years from Earth, during which a white dwarf explodes and produces an ultraviolet flash. It lies near the tail of the constellation Draco.
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Radar images taken by NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus in 1991 show a wreath, a large circular structure 120 miles long called the Aine Corona.
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When a star’s mass is expelled during a supernova explosion, it expands rapidly. Eventually, it will slow down and form hot, fluorescent gas bubbles. White dwarfs will emerge from these gas bubbles and move across the galaxy.
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The glow of short gamma-ray bursts detected from 10 billion light-years away appears here in a circle. This image was taken by the Gemini-North Telescope.
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This image of the Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 7513, shows a spiral galaxy extending for 60 million light years. Due to the expansion of the universe, galaxies appear to be moving away from the Milky Way at an accelerating rate.
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This artist’s concept illustration shows what a blue glowing variable star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy looked like before disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
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This is an illustration of a supermassive black hole and the gas disk around it. Inside this disk are two tiny black holes that revolve around each other. The researchers identified bursts of light thought to have originated from one of these binary pairs shortly after they merged into a larger black hole.
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The image from this video shows what happens when two objects of different masses join together and create a gravitational wave.
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This is an artist’s impression showing the rapid detection of repeated radio bursts seen in blue, in orbit with astrophysical objects appearing pink.
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The rapid radio explosion, which scattered by leaving the parent galaxy in bright radio waves, helped find “lost matter” in the universe.
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A new type of explosion has been discovered in a small galaxy 500 million light years from Earth. This type of explosion is referred to as a fast blue optical transient.
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Astronomers have discovered a rare type of galaxy that is described as a “cosmic ring of fire”. This artist’s illustration shows a galaxy like 11 billion years ago.
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This is an artist’s impression of a wolf’s disc, a large disk galaxy that spun at the beginning of the universe.
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The bright yellow “veil” near the center of this image suggests possible planets forming around the star AB Aurigae. Image taken by the Very Large Telescope of the Southern European Observatory.
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This artist’s illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1,000 light years from Earth. This system includes one star (small blue orbit) orbiting the newly discovered black hole (orbit in red), as well as a third star in a wider orbit (also in blue).
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This illustration shows the core of a star, known as a white dwarf, dragged into orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole shreds more material from the star and pulls it into the disk of incandescent material around the black hole. Before discovering the black hole, the star was a red giant in the final stages of stellar evolution.
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The artist’s illustration shows the collision of two icy bodies 125 miles wide, orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. It is thought that observing the aftermath of this collision is an exoplanet.
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This is the artist’s impression of the interstellar comet 2I / Borissov as it moves through our solar system. The new observations reveal carbon monoxide in the comet’s tail as the sun heats the comet.
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This rose pattern is the orbit of a star, called S2, around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
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This is the artist’s illustration of SN2016aps, which astronomers believe to be the brightest supernova ever observed.
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This is an artist’s drawing of a brown dwarf, or “failed star” object, and its magnetic field. The atmosphere and magnetic field of the brown dwarf rotate at different speeds, allowing astronomers to determine the speed of winds over the object.
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This artist’s illustration shows a medium mass black hole being torn apart into a star.
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This is the artist’s impression of a large star known as HD74423 and its much smaller red dwarf in the binary star system. The massive star appears to pulsate only on one side, and is distorted by the companion star’s gravitational pull in the form of teardrops.
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Here is the artist’s impression of two white dwarves in the fusion process. While astronomers speculated that this might lead to a supernova, they found an example of two white dwarfs that had escaped fusion.
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The combination of space and ground telescopes has found evidence of the largest explosion seen in the universe. The explosion was caused by a black hole located at the center of the galaxy cluster Ophiuchus, releasing jets and carving a large cavity around the hot gas.
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This new ALMA image shows the result of a stellar battle: a very complex gas environment around the binary star system HD101584.
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NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captures the Tarantula Nebula in two wavelengths of infrared light. Red symbolizes hot gas, and blue symbolizes interstellar dust.
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The white dwarf, left, pulls material from the brown dwarf, on the right, about 3,000 light years from Earth.
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This image shows the orbits of six G-objects at the center of our galaxy, with supermassive black holes indicated by a white cross. Stars, gas and dust in the background.
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After stars die, they eject their particles into space, which then form new stars. In one case, stellar dust became an integral part of meteorites that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that stellar dust can flow from sources such as the Egg Nebula to produce grains obtained from meteorites, which land in Australia.
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The former North Star, Alpha Draconis or Thuban, is circled here in a picture of the northern sky.
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UGC 2885, nicknamed the “Godzilla Galaxy”, is perhaps the largest in the local universe.
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The parent galaxy from the newly traced repetitive fast radio explosion was obtained with the 8m Gemini-North telescope.
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