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Star Nursery
Photograph courtesy NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
A black-and-white Hubble Space Telescope image shows the swirling, dusty nebula of a massive star-forming region within the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy, just outside the Milky Way. Nearby "stellar nurseries" like these offer astrophysicists a laboratory for studying how stars and galaxies form and for understanding what the young universe may have looked like.
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Oldest Known Planet
Photograph courtesy NASA/Brad Hansen (UCLA)/Harvey Richer (UBC)/Steinn Sigurdsson (Penn State)/Ingrid Stairs (UBC)/Stephen Thorsett (UCSC)
Bright-blue Earth looms over the oldest known planet in the Milky Way. The ancient planet is thought to be about 13 billion years old, more than twice as old as Earth and a mere billion years younger than the estimated age of the universe. Its discovery, made using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is evidence that planets began forming soon after the big bang and may be very abundant in our galaxy.
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Deep Space Portrait
Photograph courtesy NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith (STScI)/HUDF Team
A one-million-second exposure of a small fraction of the sky reveals thousands of distant galaxies, some of which emerged less than a billion years after the big bang. The image, the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever made, was taken as part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) project, an effort to detect objects that formed in the infancy of the universe. It shows a hodgepodge of galaxies, including younger, well-formed spirals as well as misshapen "oddball" galaxies that formed in the cosmic chaos after the big bang.
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Galaxy Collision
Photograph courtesy NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith (STScI)/HUDF Team
A cigar-shaped spiral galaxy is seen colliding with a smaller galaxy (seen in blue) in this deep-field portrait of a tiny fraction of the sky. The image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope during a four-month period in 2003-04, reveals distant galaxies too faint to be seen by ground-based telescopes or even in Hubble's previous faraway looks. Some galaxies in this photo were created less than one billion years after the formation of the universe.
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X-Ray Jet
Illustration courtesy NASA/CXC/M. Weiss
An artist's rendering, made using data collected by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows a quasar galaxy with a jet of high-energy particles extending more than 100,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole at its center. The object, located 12 billion light-years from Earth, is the most distant such jet ever detected. These quasar jets are formed when electrons emitted from a black hole impact with cosmic background radiation left by the big bang, giving astronomers clues about the conditions in the early universe.
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