Photo Gallery: Stars

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Pleiades

Photograph courtesy NASA

An infrared image reveals clouds of dust swaddling the stars of the Seven Sisters cluster, also known as the Pleiades. The cluster, located some 400 light-years away, formed about 100 million years ago. It contains thousands of stars but gets its name from seven of its brightest members.

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Dying Star

Photograph courtesy NASA/ESA/Hans Van Winckel (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)/Martin Cohen (University of California, Berkeley)

Ground-based telescopes make the nebula pictured here look rectangular in shape, hence its name: the Red Rectangle. But images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that it should more accurately be called the "Red X" nebula. The nebula's unique shape comes from gas and dust emitted in cone-shaped bursts from the dying star at its center. This star, which began shedding its outer layers about 14,000 years ago, will slowly become smaller and hotter and begin to release a flood of ultraviolet light.

Neutron Star

Image courtesy NASA

An artist's rendering shows a neutron star—located 50,000 light-years from Earth—that flared up so brightly in December 2004 that it temporarily blinded all the x-ray satellites in space and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere. The flare-up occurred when the star's massive, twisting magnetic field ripped open its crust, releasing an explosion of gamma rays.

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Quintuplet Cluster

Photograph courtesy NASA

An image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope gives the clearest view ever of the Quintuplet star cluster, a massive collection of young stars 25,000 light-years from Earth but only a hundred light-years from the center of the Milky Way. The cluster's proximity to the core of our galaxy means it is destined to be ripped apart in just a few million years.

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Remnants of a Supernova

Photograph courtesy NASA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows debris from the massive Cassiopeia A supernova arranged into thousands of small, cooling knots of gas. Each clump, originally just a small fragment of the star, is tens of times larger than the diameter of our solar system.