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This composite image shows the location of a one-light-year square region in the Orion Nebula which was imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The area is near the edge of a cavity of ionized hydrogen, which is heated by ultraviolet radiation from a star cluster at the center of the nebula. View the full article

Recent images made with the Wide Field Camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed the structure of a thin sheet of gas located at the edge of the famous "Great Nebula" in Orion, an estimated 1500 light years from Earth. Astronomers, who compare the appearance of this sheet of gas with that of a rippled window curtain, report that this emission traces the boundary between the hot, diffuse interior of the nebula and an adjacent dense cool cloud. The sheet is seen in light emitted by atoms of gaseous sulfur (shown in red in the photograph). This emission is strongest under conditions which are intermediate between those in the interior of nebula and those in the dense cloud. View the full article

The energy source needed to create and maintain the galactic jet in galaxy PKS 0521-36 is generated deep within the core of the galaxy, and is far too small to resolved. The favored mechanism behind these cosmic fireworks is a spinning, massive black hole. The hole is fueled by a continual in-fall of nearby gas and stars. This gravitational accretion process is far more efficient at converting mass to energy than thermonuclear fusion processes which power individual stars. The extraordinary high pressure and temperature generated near the hole would cause some of the in-falling gas to be ejected along the direction of the black hole's spinning axis to create the galactic jet. View the full article

The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on board NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided a fascinating close-up view of Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. View the full article

The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on board NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the most detailed image ever taken of the gravitational lens G2237 + 0305, sometimes referred to as the "Einstein Cross." The photograph shows four images of a very distant quasar which has been multiple-imaged by a relatively nearby galaxy acting as a gravitational lens. The angular separation between the upper and lower images is 1.6 arcseconds. View the full article

The Hubble Space Telescope has resolved, to an unprecedented detail of 0.1 arcsecond, a mysterious elliptical ring of material around the remnants of Supernova 1987A. View the full article

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided a remarkably new detailed view of the core of a galaxy which lies 40 million light-years away, more than half way to the great Virgo Cluster of galaxies. These results promise that astronomers will be able to use the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the mysterious centers of galaxies, in a search for massive black holes. View the full article

NASA is releasing today a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photograph of the most remarkable star forming region in the Local Group of Galaxies, 30 Doradus. The photograph shows about 60 stars within a central tight cluster in 30 Doradus. In contrast, earlier photographs with ground-based telescopes, supplemented by mathematical analysis, have shown only 27 stars in the tight cluster, which is called R136. Before the ground-based studies showed that so many stars are present in R136, some astronomers thought it was a single, supermassive object, with as much as 3,000 times the mass of the Sun. This recent HST photograph shows even more individual stars within R136. Furthermore, its high resolution suggests that some of the stars have more than 100 times the mass of the Sun. That would make them among the most massive stars ever identified. View the full article

The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, has successfully taken its first engineering test pictures of the heavens. This "first light" picture for the Faint Object Camera (FOC) is the culmination of several weeks of intensive check-out and testing of the camera, following the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) last April 24. View the full article

The image on the right is a portion of the first image returned by the Wide Field/Planetary Camera on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). On the left is a ground based image of the same area of the sky. The object shown in these images is a double star: the pair of stars is well separated in the HST image but blurred together in the ground based image. View the full article

On the right is part of the first image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) Wide Field/Planetary Camera. It is shown with a ground-based picture from a Las Campanas, Chile, observatory of the same region of the sky. The Las Campanas picture was taken with a 100-inch telescope and it is typical of high-quality pictures obtained from the ground. All objects seen are stars within the Milky Way galaxy.. View the full article