Galaxy Cluster XDCPJ0044.0-2033

This multi-telescope composite combines X-ray, infrared and optical data of the galaxy cluster XDCPJ0044.0-2033.

The purple/pink in the image corresponds to infrared emission measured by Herschel and X-ray emission detected with NASA's Chandra telescope.

Infrared data from ESA's Herschel telescope has revealed where interstellar dust in the cluster's core is being heated by young, hot, stars. This is the first time that star formation has been found in the core of a cluster of this size and age.

The X-ray data were used to map the mass of this giant cluster.

These data have been combined with optical and near-infrared images of the cluster captured by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru telescope and the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope, the data from which are colored red, green and blue in this image.

XDCPJ0044.0-2033 is a massive galaxy cluster with an estimated mass of about four hundred thousand billion times that of our Sun. It lies at a redshift of almost 1.6, meaning that we see it as it was 9.6 billion years ago.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/P.Tozzi, et al; Optical: NAOJ/Subaru and ESO/VLT; Infrared: ESA/Herschel/J. Santos, et al.

Note: For more information, see Herschel's View of the Early Universe Reveals Galaxy Cluster Fireworks

Ram-Pressure Stripped Galaxy ESO 137-001

The MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has provided researchers with the best view yet of a spectacular cosmic crash. Observations reveal for the first time the motion of gas as it is ripped out of the galaxy ESO 137-001 as it plows at high speed into a vast galaxy cluster. The results are the key to the solution of a long-standing mystery — why star formation switches off in galaxy clusters.

In this picture the colors show the motions of the gas filaments — red means the material is moving away from Earth compared to the galaxy and blue that it is approaching.

Note that the upper-left and lower-right parts of this picture have been filled in using the Hubble image of this object.

Image credit: ESO/M. Fumagalli

Note: For more information, see MUSE Reveals True Story Behind Galactic Crash.

Perseus and Virgo Galactic Clusters

Perseus Cluster and Virgo Cluster: Two galaxy clusters about 250 million and 50 million light years away respectively.

Chandra observations of the Perseus and Virgo galaxy clusters have provided direct evidence that turbulence is helping to prevent stars from forming there. These new results could answer along-standing question about how these galaxy clusters keep their enormous reservoirs of hot gas from cooling down to form stars. Scientists targeted Perseus and Virgo because they are both extremely large and relatively bright, thus providing an opportunity to see details that would be very difficult to detect in other clusters.

Image credit: NASA/CXC/Stanford/I.Zhuravleva et al.

Note: For more information, see Perseus Cluster and Virgo Cluster: NASA's Chandra Observatory Identifies Impact of Cosmic Chaos on Star Birth.

NGC 1291

This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, taken in infrared light, shows where the action is taking place in galaxy NGC 1291. The outer ring, colored red in this view, is filled with new stars that are igniting and heating up dust that glows with infrared light. The stars in the central area produce shorter-wavelength infrared light than that seen in the ring, and are colored blue. This central area is where older stars live, having long ago gobbled up the available gas supply, or fuel, for making new stars.

The galaxy is about 12 billion years old and is located in the Eridanus constellation. It is known as a barred galaxy because a central bar of stars (which looks like a blue "S" in this view) dominates its center.

When galaxies are young and gas-rich, stellar bars drive gas toward the center, feeding star formation. Over time, as the star-making fuel runs out, the central regions become quiescent and star-formation activity shifts to the outskirts of a galaxy. There, spiral density waves and resonances induced by the central bar help convert gas to stars. The outer ring, seen here in red, is one such resonance location, where gas has been trapped and ignited into a star-forming frenzy.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Note: For more information, see Galactic Wheel of Life Shines in Infrared.

Sextans A

A small galaxy, called Sextans A, is shown here in a multi-wavelength mosaic captured by the European Space Agency's Herschel mission, in which NASA is a partner, along with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Jansky Very Large Array observatory near Socorro, New Mexico. The galaxy is located 4.5 million light-years from Earth in the Sextans constellation.

The environment in this galaxy is similar to that of our infant universe because it lacks in heavy metals, or elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Heavy metals act in some ways like fertilizers for stars, helping them form and grow. Scientists study galaxies like Sextans A to learn how stars still manage to slowly bloom under these poor-growing conditions. The research provides a better understanding of how the very first stars in our universe came to be.

In this image, the purple shows gas; blue shows young stars and the orange and yellow dots are newly formed stars heating up dust.

Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/NRAO

Artist's Illustration of a Galactic Protocluster

This artist’s impression depicts the formation of a galaxy cluster in the early Universe. The galaxies are vigorously forming new stars and interacting with each other. Such a scene closely resembles the Spiderweb Galaxy (formally known as MRC 1138-262) and its surroundings, which is one of the best-studied protoclusters.

Illustration credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Note: For more information, see Construction Secrets of a Galactic Metropolis.

NGC 6872 and IC 4970

This picture, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), shows a galaxy known as NGC 6872 in the constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). Its unusual shape is caused by its interactions with the smaller galaxy that can be seen just above NGC 6872, called IC 4970. They both lie roughly 300 million light-years away from Earth.

From tip to tip, NGC 6872 measures over 500,000 light-years across, making it the second largest spiral galaxy discovered to date. In terms of size it is beaten only by NGC 262, a galaxy that measures a mind-boggling 1.3 million light-years in diameter! To put that into perspective, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, measures between 100,000 and 120,000 light-years across, making NGC 6872 about five times its size.

The upper left spiral arm of NGC 6872 is visibly distorted and is populated by star-forming regions, which appear blue on this image. This may have been be caused by IC 4970 recently passing through this arm — although here, recent means 130 million years ago! Astronomers have noted that NGC 6872 seems to be relatively sparse in terms of free hydrogen, which is the basis material for new stars, meaning that if it weren’t for its interactions with IC 4970, NGC 6872 might not have been able to produce new bursts of star formation.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Note: For more information, see PIA17808: Hubble Feathers the Peacock.

Lupus 4

The Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile captured this view of dark cloud Lupus 4 blotting out background stars. Lupus 4 is a dense pocket of gas and dust where new stars are expected to form. The cloud is located about 400 light-years away from Earth, on the border between the constellations of Lupus (The Wolf) and Norma (The Carpenter's Square).

Image credit: ESO

Note: For more information, see Cosmic Forecast: Dark Clouds Will Give Way to Sunshine.

Galactic Merger H-ATLAS J142935.3-002836

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and many other telescopes on the ground and in space have been used to obtain the best view yet of a collision that took place between two galaxies when the Universe was only half its current age. The astronomers enlisted the help of a galaxy-sized magnifying glass to reveal otherwise invisible detail. These new studies of the galaxy H-ATLAS J142935.3-002836 have shown that this complex and distant object looks surprisingly like the well-known local galaxy collision, the Antennae Galaxies.

In this picture you can see the foreground galaxy that is doing the lensing, which resembles how our home galaxy, the Milky Way, would appear if seen edge-on. But around this galaxy there is an almost complete ring — the smeared out image of a star-forming galaxy merger far beyond.

This picture combines the views from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck-II telescope on Hawaii (using adaptive optics).

Image credit: ESO/NASA/ESA/W. M. Keck Observatory

Note: For more information, see Best View Yet of Merging Galaxies in Distant Universe and Best View Yet of Merging Galaxies in Distant Universe.

Star Cluster NGC 3603 and Nebula NGC 3576

This mosaic of images from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows two dramatic star formation regions in the southern Milky Way. The first of these, on the left, is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located about 20,000 light-years away, in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The second object, on the right, is a collection of glowing gas clouds known as NGC 3576 that lies only about half as far from Earth.

Image credit: ESO/G. Beccari

Note: For more information, see A Spectacular Landscape of Star Formation.

Galactic Merger 2MASX J06094582-2140234

From objects as small as Newton's apple to those as large as a galaxy, no physical body is free from the stern bonds of gravity, as evidenced in this stunning picture captured by the Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Here we see two spiral galaxies engaged in a cosmic tug-of-war — but in this contest, there will be no winner. The structures of both objects are slowly distorted to resemble new forms, and in some cases, merge together to form new, super galaxies. This particular fate is similar to that of the Milky Way Galaxy, when it will ultimately merge with our closest galactic partner, the Andromeda Galaxy. There is no need to panic however, as this process takes several hundreds of millions of years.

Not all interacting galaxies result in mergers though. The merger is dependent on the mass of each galaxy, as well as the relative velocities of each body. It is quite possible that the event pictured here, romantically named 2MASX J06094582-2140234, will avoid a merger event altogether, and will merely distort the arms of each spiral without colliding — the cosmic equivalent of a hair ruffling!

These galactic interactions also trigger new regions of star formation in the galaxies involved, causing them to be extremely luminous in the infrared part of the spectrum. For this reason, these types of galaxies are referred to as LIRGs, or Luminous Infrared Galaxies. This image was taken as part of as part of a Hubble survey of the central regions of LIRGs in the local Universe, which also used the NICMOS instrument.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Messier 33 - The Triangulum Galaxy

The spiral galaxy M33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is one of our closest cosmic neighbors, just three million light-years away. Home to some forty billion stars, it is the third largest in the Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and our own Milky Way.

M33 is popular with astrophotographers and from exceptionally dark sites it can even be seen with the naked eye. Thanks to its orientation, we can enjoy a face-on view of the beautiful spiral structure of the galaxy's disc.

This image, from ESA's Herschel space observatory, shows M33 in far-infrared light, revealing the glow of cosmic dust in the interstellar medium that permeates the galaxy. The patchy, disorganized structure of M33's spiral arms resembles a tuft of wool, leading astronomers to classify it as a flocculent spiral galaxy.

The brightest spots sprinkled along the spiral arms are dense pockets of gas and dust where massive stars are born. The most prominent of these is NGC 604, visible in the upper left spiral arm. This is an enormous star-forming region where hundreds of thousands of stars are taking shape.

The image is a composite of the wavelengths: 70 microns (blue), 100 microns (green) and 160 microns (red). At the shortest wavelengths, astronomers trace warmer dust, revealing individual regions of star formation and parent clouds. At longer wavelengths, they detect emission from colder dust, outlining some of the cool dust reservoir along the galaxy’s winding spiral arms. This is where stars may be born in the future.

The image spans about one degree on each side; north is up and east is to the left. The data were collected with Herschel's PACS instrument as part of the Herschel M33 extended survey (HerM33es) Key Programme to study the star formation in the Triangulum Galaxy.

Image credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/HerM33es Key Programme/C. Kramer/M. Boquien

Star Cluster NGC 3293

In this image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile young stars huddle together against a backdrop of clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. The star cluster, known as NGC 3293, would have been just a cloud of gas and dust itself about ten million years ago, but as stars began to form it became the bright group we see here. Clusters like this are celestial laboratories that allow astronomers to learn more about how stars evolve.

Image credit: ESO/G. Beccari

Note: For more information, see Lives and Deaths of Sibling Stars.

Star Superclusters Forming Near Two Galaxies Merging in Galactic Cluster SDSS J1531+3414

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows two galaxies from the cluster SDSS J1531+3414.

The two galaxies have been found to be merging into one and a "chain" of young stellar superclusters are seen winding around the galaxies' nuclei. The galaxies are surrounded by an egg-shaped blue ring caused by the immense gravity of the cluster bending light from other galaxies beyond it.

Image credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and Grant Tremblay (European Southern Observatory)

Acknowledgements: M. Gladders & M. Florian (University of Chicago, USA), S. Baum, C. O'Dea & K. Cooke (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA), M. Bayliss (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA), H. Dahle (University of Oslo, Norway), T. Davis (European Southern Observatory), J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA), K. Sharon (University of Michigan, USA), E. Soto (The Catholic University of America, USA) and E. Wuyts (Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany).

Note: For more information, see Merging Galaxies and Droplets of Starbirth and Droplets of Star Formation and Two Merging Galaxies in SDSS J1531+3414.

Gum 15

This richly detailed new view from the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the star formation region Gum 15. This little-known object is located in the constellation of Vela (The Sails), some 3000 light-years from Earth. The glowing cloud is a stunning example of an HII region. It also has a similarity to a more famous HII region, the Trifid Nebula (Messier 20).

Image credit: ESO

Note: For more information, see A Stellar Womb Shaped and Destroyed by its Ungrateful Offspring.

Messier 106's Anomalous Spiral Arms

A galaxy about 23 million light-years away is the site of impressive, ongoing, fireworks. Rather than paper, powder, and fire, this galactic light show involves a giant black hole, shock waves, and vast reservoirs of gas.

This galactic fireworks display is taking place in NGC 4258 (also known as M106), a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. This galaxy is famous, however, for something that our galaxy doesn't have -- two extra spiral arms that glow in X-ray, optical, and radio light. These features, or anomalous arms, are not aligned with the plane of the galaxy, but instead intersect with it.

The anomalous arms are seen in this new composite image of NGC 4258, where X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory are blue, radio data from the NSF's Karl Jansky Very Large Array are purple, optical data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are yellow and blue, and infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are red.

A new study of these anomalous arms made with Spitzer shows that shock waves, similar to sonic booms from supersonic planes, are heating large amounts of gas -- equivalent to about 10 million suns. What is generating these shock waves? Radio data shows that the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4258 is producing powerful jets of high-energy particles. Researchers think that these jets strike the disk of the galaxy and generate shock waves. These shock waves, in turn, heat some of the gas -- composed mainly of hydrogen molecules -- to thousands of degrees. As shown in our additional, composite image, part of the evidence for this heating process comes from the similarity in location between the hydrogen and X-ray emission, both thought to be caused by shocks, and the radio jets.

The Chandra X-ray image reveals huge bubbles of hot gas above and below the plane of the galaxy. These bubbles indicate that much of the gas that was originally in the disk of the galaxy has been heated to millions of degrees and ejected into the outer regions by the jets from the black hole.

The ejection of gas from the disk by the jets has important implications for the fate of this galaxy. Researchers estimate that all of the remaining gas will be ejected within the next 300 million years -- very soon on cosmic time scales -- unless it is somehow replenished. Because most of the gas in the disk has already been ejected, less gas is available for new stars to form. Indeed, the researchers used Spitzer data to estimate that stars are forming in the central regions of NGC 4258, at a rate which is about ten times less than in the Milky Way galaxy.

The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, for which NASA plays an important role, was used to confirm the estimate from Spitzer data of the low star-formation rate in the central regions of NGC 4258. Herschel was also used to make an independent estimate of how much gas remains in the center of the galaxy. After allowing for the large boost in infrared emission caused by the shocks, the researchers found that the gas mass is ten times smaller than had been previously estimated.

Because NGC 4258 is relatively close to Earth, astronomers can study how this black hole is affecting its galaxy in great detail. The supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4258 is about ten times larger than the one in the Milky Way, and is also consuming material at a faster rate, potentially increasing its impact on the evolution of its host galaxy.

Image credit: NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/STScI/NSF/NRAO/VLA

Note: For more information, see PIA18462: Black Hole Jets Make Shock Waves, NGC 4258 (M106): Galactic Pyrotechnics On Display and Black Hole Fireworks in Nearby Galaxy.

Artist's Concept of a Protostar within the Orion A Molecular Cloud

Orion A, a star-forming nebula lying about 1500 light-years from Earth, as viewed by ESA's Herschel space observatory. Orion A is located within the 'sword of Orion' – below the three main stars that form the belt of the Orion constellation.

Embedded in the gaseous and dusty environment of this molecular cloud is the prolific stellar nursery called OMC2 FIR4 (highlighted with a red circle).

Astronomers studying OMC2 FIR4 with Herschel have discovered that at least one of the embryo stars that are taking shape in this protostellar cocoon is gusting a powerful wind of very energetic particles.

The inset shows an illustration of the wind blown by this newborn star. When the energetic particles hit the surrounding material, they may collide with atoms that are present in the star's environment, break them apart and produce new elements.

Our Sun likely gusted a similar wind of particles in its early days; this could explain the origin of a puzzling isotope of beryllium, whose traces are found in meteorites.

Image credit: Herschel image: ESA/Herschel/Ph. André, D. Polychroni, A. Roy, V. Könyves, N. Schneider for the Gould Belt survey Key Programme; inset and layout: ESA/ATG medialab

Note: For more information, see Young Sun's Violent History Solves Meteorite Mystery.

Molecular Cloud W48

Just as children are sorted into age groups at school, so the seeds of new stars can also be found in ‘classes’ of others of similar ages. This is especially true when the birth of stars in a cloud of gas and dust is triggered by an external event, like the explosion of a nearby supernova.

This image from ESA’s Herschel space observatory shows a sequence of star-forming regions in the molecular cloud W48, some 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila (the Eagle).

The blue, jellyfish-shaped cloud at the lower left is the oldest stellar nursery in the image. Young and massive stars embedded within it have shaped it into a bubble and heated the diffuse gas, making it shine at the longest wavelengths probed by Herschel.

To its right, another glowing cloud conceals clumps that will evolve into massive stars. These clumps, some of which are visible as bright blotches of light, are also lined up by their age: the older ones at the lower-left and the younger ones to the upper-right. The youngest in this sequence is the small cyan lump at the center of the image, harboring the seeds of future massive stars.

Astronomers believe that this sequence of stellar birth is the result of dozens of supernovas that exploded over 10 million years ago in a region called Aquila Supershell, beyond the left edge of this image. Compressing the surrounding material, these supernovas may have initiated a wave of star formation that sparked, one by one, these stellar cribs.

The image is a composite of the wavelengths of 70 microns (blue), 160 microns (green) and 250 microns (red) and spans about one degree on the long side. North is to the upper-left and east is to the lower left. The data were acquired with Herschel’s PACS and SPIRE instruments in September 2010, as part of a larger map of the W48 molecular complex in the HOBYS Key Programme. This was first published in a paper by Q. Nguyen Luong, et al. 2011. A more detailed study of the star-forming regions shown in this image is presented in a paper by K.L.J. Rygl, et al. 2014.

Image credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/HOBYS Key Programme Consortium

Hunting for Dwarf Galaxies in the GOODS Field

This image shows a region of space containing a sample of dwarf galaxies studied by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to unlock the secrets of star formation in the early Universe.

Hiding amongst these thousands of galaxies are faint dwarf galaxies that reside in the early Universe, between two and six billion years after the Big Bang, an important time period when most of the stars in the Universe were formed. Some of these galaxies are undergoing starbursts and have been studied by astronomers to deduce their contribution to star formation in this crucial era of the Universe's history.

The image is part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), and this image shows only one section that the survey covered.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, the GOODS Team and M. Giavalisco (STScI/University of Massachusetts)

Note: For more information, see Small But Significant - Astronomers Use Hubble to Study Bursts of Star Formation in the Dwarf Galaxies of the Early Universe.

NGC 3081

Taking center stage in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a galaxy known as NGC 3081, set against an assortment of glittering galaxies in the distance. Located in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Serpent), NGC 3081 is located over 86 million light-years from us. It is known as a type II Seyfert galaxy, characterized by its dazzling nucleus.

NGC 3081 is seen here nearly face-on. Compared to other spiral galaxies, it looks a little different. The galaxy's barred spiral center is surrounded by a bright loop known as a resonance ring. This ring is full of bright clusters and bursts of new star formation, and frames the supermassive black hole thought to be lurking within NGC 3081 — which glows brightly as it hungrily gobbles up infalling material.

These rings form in particular locations known as resonances, where gravitational effects throughout a galaxy cause gas to pile up and accumulate in certain positions. These can be caused by the presence of a "bar" within the galaxy, as with NGC 3081, or by interactions with other nearby objects. It is not unusual for rings like this to be seen in barred galaxies, as the bars are very effective at gathering gas into these resonance regions, causing pile-ups which lead to active and very well-organized star formation.

Hubble snapped this magnificent face-on image of the galaxy using the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. This image is made up of a combination of ultraviolet, optical, and infrared observations, allowing distinctive features of the galaxy to be observed across a wide range of wavelengths.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA