The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images as diverse and spectacular as galaxy collisions across space and time and the Atlantis Space Shuttle, which began its final mission Friday.
NASA launched Hubble 21 years ago and has taken tens of thousands of photographs. The images produced has enlightened astronomers on how our universe works, as well as dazzled anyone who looks at them.
This false-color image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the "mountains" where stars are born. Dubbed "Mountains of Creation" by Spitzer scientists, these towering pillars of cool gas and dust are illuminated at their tips with light from warm, embryonic stars. The new infrared picture is reminiscent of Hubble's iconic visible-light image of the Eagle Nebula (inset), which also features a star-forming region, or nebula, that is being sculpted into pillars by radiation and winds from hot, massive stars. The pillars in the Spitzer image are part of a region called W5, in the Cassiopeia constellation 7,000 light-years away and 50 light-years across. They are more than 10 times in the size of those in the Eagle NebulaReuters/NASAHubble, NASAReuters/NASANGC 520 is the product of a collision between two disk galaxies that started 300 million years ago. It exemplifies the middle stages of the merging process: the disks of the parent galaxies have merged together, but the nuclei have not yet coalesced.Reuters/NASANASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star in this image released by NASA November 13, 2008. Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the "Southern Fish."Reuters/NASAThe NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette from a solar transit image as it moves in space with the sun in background, in this image made May 12, 2009, from Florida and released by NASA May 14.Reuters/NASAJubilant astronomers unveiled April 30, 2002 humankind's most spectacular views of the universe as captured by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The Cone Nebula, M17 is pictured in this NASA handout photo. As spectacular as the central subjects of the photographs are, the background is of critical importance to astronomers. What appear as jewel-toned pinwheels, ovals and diamonds on the blackness of space are actually faraway galaxies. The sharpness of these images will allow scientists to study the furthest reaches of the universe.Reuters/NASAStar dust.Reuters/NASA
