Day 7 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). The Antennae Galaxies. These two galaxies—once normal, spiral galaxies like the Milky Way—have spent the past few hundred million years violently clashing with one another. This interaction has ripped stars away from their host galaxies, forming a streaming arc between the two. Clouds of gas are seen in bright pink and red, surrounding the bright flashes of blue star-forming regions—some of which are partially obscured by dark patches of dust. This gigantic cosmic dance is taking place 65 million light years away, in the Corvus constellation. (ESA / Hubble & NASA)
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December 7, 2018
December 6, 2018
Day 6 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Protostellar Jet. A young star, IRAS 14568-6304, at center, is cloaked in a haze of golden gas and dust. It appears to be embedded in a swath of dark sky. This dark region is known as the Circinus molecular cloud, an object with a mass around 250,000 times that of the Sun, filled with gas, dust and young stars. The star IRAS 14568-6304 is driving a protostellar jet, which appears here as the “tail” below, made up of the leftover gas and dust that the star took from its parent cloud in order to form. (ESA / Hubble & NASA)
December 5, 2018
Day 5 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Galactic Collision. NGC 5256, also called Markarian 266, is a pair of galaxies in its final messy stage of merging. Located 350 million light-years away from Earth, the pair of galaxies is swirling ever closer, their two glowing cores a mere 13,000 light-years apart, throwing off gas and dust structures in multiple directions. The crush of energy and matter is creating multiple star-forming regions, even though existing stars themselves rarely collide, because the distances are still so vast. Image made on December 14, 2017. (ESA / Hubble, NASA)
December 4, 2018
Day 4 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Cosmic Shroud. This Hubble image shows a compact star forming region called S106 in the constellation Cygnus, some 3,300 light years away from the Earth. A newly-formed star called S106 IR is hidden within swirls of dust at the center of the image, and is responsible for the surrounding gas cloud’s hourglass-like shape and the turbulence visible within. Light from glowing hydrogen is colored blue in this image. (NASA & ESA)
December 3, 2018
Day 3 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). An Enormous Einstein Ring. At the center of this image full of various distant galaxies sits the glowing bulge of galaxy cluster SDSSJ0146-0929—a huge collection of hundreds of galaxies. The mass of this galaxy cluster is large enough to severely distort the spacetime around it, creating the odd, looping curves that almost encircle the cluster. These graceful arcs are examples of a cosmic phenomenon known as an Einstein ring, created as the light from a distant object passes by an extremely large mass. Here, the light from a background galaxy is diverted and distorted around the massive intervening cluster and forced to travel along many different light paths towards Earth, making it appear as though the galaxy is in several places at once. (ESA / Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt)
December 2, 2018
Day 2 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Distant Whirlpool. A face-on view of spiral galaxy NGC 3344, located about 20 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy is roughly half the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, and can be seen in the constellation of Leo Minor. This composite image is made up of observations made in wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the optical and the near-infrared in February of 2018. ESA / Hubble, NASA)
December 1, 2018
Day 1 of the 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Colossal and Colorful Lagoon. To celebrate its 28th anniversary in space the Hubble Space Telescope made this spectacular image of glowing clouds of interstellar gas in the Lagoon Nebula, with observations taken between February 12 and 18, 2018. The whole nebula, about 4,000 light-years away, is an incredible 55 light-years across and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, about four light-years across. (NASA, ESA, STScI)
December 25, 2017
Day 25 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos. The Pillars of Creation. The Eagle Nebula’s four-light-year-tall pillars are seen here seen in a visible light image, capturing the multi-colored glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-colored elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The nebula lies 7,000 light-years away. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. – Merry Christmas everyone, and many thanks to all of the scientists and engineers who designed, built and have used this amazing orbiting instrument that so magnifies the heavens. (NASA, ESA / Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team)
December 24, 2017
Day 24 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). Galaxies Among the Stars. Two distant background galaxies can be seen through the spaces between the 8-billion-year-old stars of open cluster NGC 6791. (NASA, ESA, and L. Bedin, STScI)
December 23, 2017
Day 23 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Cosmic Merger. NGC 5256 is a pair of galaxies 350 million light-years away, viewed in their final chaotic stage of merging into one. (ESA / Hubble, NASA)
December 22, 2017
Day 22 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). Gazing Into The Ring. The Ring Nebula lies 2,500 light-years away. From Earth’s perspective, it looks like a shaggy ellipse, but we now know that it’s shaped more like a distorted doughnut. (NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O’Dell, Vanderbilt University)
December 21, 2017
Day 21 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). Galaxies, Galaxies, Everywhere. Every object in this image (save for two nearby stars) is a separate galaxy made up of billions of stars - a detail of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field completed in 2004. (NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team)
December 20, 2017
Day 20 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). The Twin Jet Nebula. About 4,000 light-years away, PN M2-9 is a striking example of a bipolar planetary nebula - a type formed when the central object is not a single star, but a binary system. (ESA, Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt)
December 19, 2017
Day 19 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). My God, It’s Full of Stars. In 2006, Hubble was pointed at the center of our galaxy in search of other planets. For a week it imaged the stars in a dense collection in the Milky Way’s central hub. (ESA / A. Calamida and K. Sahu, STScI and the SWEEPS Science Team / NASA)
December 18, 2017
Day 18 of the 2017 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar, one of 25 photos (eventually). A Giant Galactic Hybrid. The galaxy UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral galaxy. It lies just under 400 million light-years away from us in the Pisces–Perseus Supercluster. (ESA / Hubble & NASA)
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