Solar System Family Portrait

The Dolphin Head Nebula, Sh2-308 // TRE

Strike a pose, vogue! 📸

The galaxy on the left looks like it went with extreme eye makeup, while the one on the right went with a more natural look. Together, they’re known as Arp 107, a pair of colliding galaxies.

The glamorous galaxy on the left is an extremely energetic galaxy with a very active core. Its small companion is connected to it by a faint “bridge” of gas and dust. This view was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton.

ALT TEXT: A pair of merging galaxies. The galaxy on the left has a single, large spiral arm curving out from the core toward 3 o’clock and wrapping counterclockwise, ending in a straighter line pointing toward the bottom of the frame. This arm is bright blue with shades of brown mixed in. The right-hand galaxy has a bright core that is approximately the same size as the galaxy at left, but only a tiny bit of very faint material surrounds it. A broad curtain of gas connects the two galaxies’ cores and hangs beneath them. Small stars and galaxies are scattered throughout the black background of space.

Hickson Compact Group 40 © Hubble

Prepare for visual overload! Today, 19 images of nearby face-on spiral galaxies by the James Webb Space Telescope were released. This marks the first time we’ve observed these galaxies in high-resolution near- and mid-infrared light. What do they uniquely show?

The galaxies’ clearly defined spiral arms are brimming with millions of stars. Their centers may be filled with old star clusters or active supermassive black holes. And Webb has shown us where stars that haven’t yet fully formed are still encased in the gas and dust that feed their growth, like bright red seeds.

Webb’s new images are part of a large, long-standing project, the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) program, and will be added to images and data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. Now, astronomers around the world can examine these galaxies carefully in ultraviolet, visible, radio—and now near- and mid-infrared light.

Skip to the bottom of the page to look at each galaxy: https://webbtelescope.pub/3SxNSaU

ALT TEXT: Nineteen Webb images of face-on spiral galaxies are combined in a mosaic. Some appear within squares, and others horizontal or vertical rectangles. Many galaxies have blue hazes toward the centers, and all have orange spiral arms. Many have clear bar shaped-structures at their centers, but a few have spirals that begin at their cores. Some of the galaxies’ arms form clear spiral shapes, while others are more irregular. Some of the galaxies’ arms appear to rotate clockwise and others counterclockwise. Most galaxy cores are centered, but a few appear toward an image’s edge. Most galaxies appear to extend beyond the captured observations. The galaxies shown, listed in alphabetical order, are IC 5332, NGC 628, NGC 1087, NGC1300, NGC 1365, NGC 1385, NGC 1433, NGC 1512, NGC 1566, NGC 1672, NGC 2835, NGC 3351, NGC 3627, NGC 4254, NGC 4303, NGC 4321, NGC 4535, NGC 5068, and NGC 7496.

Hubble image of Arp 142 by Hubble Space Telescope / ESA

Cosmic Jellyfish: Interacting Galaxies UGC 9326/7 ©

HDR Negative Image Of The Andromeda Galaxy from NASA

We are truly children of the stars. —Brian Cox

l all taken by David Moulton

Galaxy Collision in Action (NASA, Chandra, 7/09/09) by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

M57, Ring Nebula