Thursday Thirteen

NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer and Spitzer Space Telescope combined to show a pair of interacting galaxies might be experiencing the galactic equivalent of a mid-life crisis.




The many personalities of our great galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are exposed in this new composite image from NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer and Spitzer Space Telescope.



The perfectly picturesque spiral galaxy known as Messier 81, or M81, looks sharp in this new composite from NASA Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes and NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

 

Most galaxies are clumped together in groups or clusters. A neighboring galaxy is never far away. But this galaxy, known as NGC 6503, has found itself in a lonely position, at the edge of a strangely empty patch of space called the Local Void. The Local Void is a huge stretch of space that is at least 150 million light-years across. It seems completely empty of stars or galaxies. The galaxy’s odd location on the edge of this never-land led stargazer Stephen James O’Meara to dub it the “Lost-In-Space galaxy” in his 2007 book, Hidden Treasures.


Astronomers using NASA Hubble Space Telescope have found a spiral galaxy that may rotate in the opposite direction from what was expected.




NASA Spitzer, Hubble and Chandra space observatories teamed up to create this multi-wavelength, false-colored view of the M82 galaxy. The lively portrait celebrates Hubble sweet sixteen birthday.



This false-color composite image shows the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer, where the first ripple appears as an ultraviolet-bright blue outer ring.



NASA image release August 5, 2010 A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms," seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies. The most massive of these young stars have already sped through their evolution in a few million years and exploded as supernovas.



This image shows two companion galaxies, NGC 4625 top and NGC 4618 bottom, and their surrounding cocoons of cool hydrogen gas purple. The huge set of spiral arms on NGC 4625 blue was discovered by the ultraviolet eyes of NASA GALEX.



Black-hole-powered galaxies called blazars are the most common sources detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. As matter falls toward the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center, some of it is accelerated outward at nearly the speed of light along jets pointed in opposite directions. When one of the jets happens to be aimed in the direction of Earth, as illustrated here, the galaxy appears especially bright and is classified as a blazar.



NASA Spitzer Space Telescope shows the supernova remnant 1E0102.2-7219 sits next to the nebula N76 in a bright, star-forming region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy.



NASA Hubble and Spitzer telescopes combined to make these shape-shifting galaxies taking on the form of a giant mask. The icy blue eyes are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, and the mask is their spiral arms.



NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope set its infrared eyes on one of the most famous objects in the sky, Messier 104, also called the Sombrero galaxy. In this striking infrared picture, Spitzer sees an exciting new view of a galaxy that in visible light has been likened to a "sombrero," but here looks more like a "bulls-eye." Recent observations using Spitzer's infrared array camera uncovered the bright, smooth ring of dust circling the galaxy, seen in red.

Photos from NASA Image & Video Library, which is open and free to public to use.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 574th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.