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Hubble Space Telescope

These are assets that appear on Hubble mission pages and are managed by the Hubble mission team.

The star V380 Orionis shines on the cloud of material left over from its formation, here seen as the NGC...

Faint, wispy clouds glow from the light of a central, pale star. A hole in the clouds, roughly in the shape of a keyhole, shows black space.

The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars shaping the nebula to the...

Bright cloud of pink, white, orange, and yellow with dark dust lanes.

Approximately 10,000 galaxies fill a small area of sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. This is the deepest image...

A myriad of colorful galaxies, in all shapes, sizes, and forms, dot the image.

The dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 4214 resides about 10 million light-years away. The galaxy's relative proximity, combined with the wide...

bright white and pink clouds and blue-white stars bisect the image from lower left to upper right

The Whirlpool Galaxy is a spiral galaxy located 31 million light-years away. Also known as M51, it highlights the attributes...

a large, face-on spiral galaxy fills the image. It's bright core is surrounded by pinkish-red dusty spiral arms

These four candidate galaxies might have emitted their light when the universe was just 750 million years old. The bottom...

Four rows represent and five columns. Each column represents a Hubble filter. Each row is a different redshift. The images in each cell are black and white representing the intensity of the light gathered by Hubble's instruments.

This photo of a portion of the Hubble Deep Field South captures galaxies in both visible and infrared light. The...

The field is dotted with galaxies of various sizes, shapes, and colors

Light from far-distant objects must cross unimaginably vast expanses of space over millions to billions of years to reach us....

Image Title: Evolution of Galaxies Left-center: Hubble peers through a cone of galaxies that extend off to the upper-right corner where a bright light represents the Big Bang. Near Hubble the galaxies appear as we see them today. As we move further through the cone, the galaxies become more misshapen, diffuse, and redder.

The image shows a central portion of the Hubble Deep Field, created from exposures taken in 1995. The Hubble Deep...

Field is filled with galaxies in colors of white, yellow, blue-white, and red; all on a black background.

One of Hubble’s most iconic images is of this portion of the Eagle Nebula (M16). Dubbed the “Pillars of Creation,”...

Three dark brown pillars of dust and gas jut out against a greenish background.

Long streamers of stars and gas appear as tails in this Hubble image of the gravitationally interacting galaxies NGC 4676,...

Two interacting galaxies centered in the image. The left galaxy is a spiral galaxy with its arms distorted and drawn out toward the left side of the image. The right galaxy has a long tail that extends to the upper-right corner of the image. Gas and dust also extends between the two galaxies.

Astronomers classify galaxy NGC 1300 as a barred spiral because its arms do not swirl into the center but instead...

Image center holds the an oval of stars that mark the galaxy's center. Arms extend toward the upper-left and lower right of the central bulge of stars. Extending beyond the ends of each of these arms is are long curving tails that swirl above and below the galaxy.

Looking like a broad-brimmed Mexican hat, the “Sombrero” galaxy, M104, is a spiral galaxy seen nearly edge-on.

A bright hazy, oblate ball of stars fills the scene. Its core is bright white. Around the equator is a disk of bright stars and dark dust. The dust lane is prominent and bisects the sphere of stars.

Hubble discovered Pluto’s four small moons, Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos. This is a composite of two images of the...

Pluto and its large moon, Charon, are at image center. White ovals indicate the orbits of each of the small moons Hubble discovered. Bright, blue-white blobs, and points of light are the individual moons.

Images of asteroid P/2013 P5 revealed its unique dust trails radiating in multiple directions and changing in appearance with time.

Left: Bright, blue-white asteroid at top with a tail extending toward the center bottom. Right: Bright, blue-white asteroid at top with a fainter tail extending to the center-left.

A sample of the faintest and farthest galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field shows that they were irregularly shaped...

Faint, distant galaxies, observed by Hubble. They are arranged on four columns and seven rows. Most appear as red splotches. A few of the images also hold regions of yellow, blue, and or green pixels.

Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field is one of the most distant looks into space ever. The cumulative exposure time needed to...

The field of view is filled with galaxies in all shapes, sizes, colors, and galaxy types. All against a black backdrop.

In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 21 large pieces that rained down upon the thick clouds of Jupiter. Shown...

Four images of Jupiter, from bottom to top: 1) Jupiter with a puff of bright light near its limb. 2) The deep maroon scar of the impact is visible against the stripes of Jupiter's clouds. 3) The impact scar is larger with two distinct regions. 4) The impact scar is becoming more diffuse.

Two views from Hubble of the massive galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 (ZwCl 0024+1652) are shown. To the left is the...

two Hubble images of galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 (ZwCl 0024+1652), with right image shaded to illustrate dark matter

Observations with Hubble not only helped confirm that the center of the elliptical galaxy M87 harbors a black hole 2.6...

Bright, golden light in the upper-left corner. It diffuses out from the point gradually giving way to a darker background in the lower-right corner. Emanating from the bright point is a clumpy stream of white gas that stretches toward the lower-right corner.

These Hubble images show disks of dust that fuel black holes at the centers of the galaxies NGC 4261 (left)...

Two images. Left: A yellow-orange, and reddish disk (looking like a doughnut) surrounded by broader white and rust colored disk. Right: A nearly edge-on rusty-colored disk the far side appearing more white.

Combining images with data from Hubble’s spectrographs, researchers have peered into the center of many galaxies and established the existence...

Four quadrants. The upper two hold images of the galaxies NGC 3377 (left) and NGC 3379 (right). The bottom left quadrant holds and image of the galaxy NGC 4486B. The lower-right quadrant shows an expanded view of NGC 4486B's center. Each image holds a bright-yellow core surrounded by more diffuse a yellow, then orange, and later red glow.

Hubble has given astronomers the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star...

Two images, both hold a black center with blue-white lobes on either side. Top is from 1997, bottom from 2012.

This Hubble image (left) and graphic (right) show a gap in a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas whirling around...

TW Hydrae Hubble observation (left) and illustration (right). Left: pinkish disk that is black at its center, a lighter pink around the center. A darker pink ring midway through the disk. Right: illustration outlining features in the observation.

This series of observations by Hubble documents changes in a powerful jet called Herbig-Haro 34 (HH 34) located in the...

Glowing, clumpy streams of material moving left and right. Left side of the image is a small blue-white cloud slowly moving further to the left. Extending from the blue cloud is a strand of clumpy orange gas moving toward the right.

The glowing, clumpy streams of material shown moving left and right in this Hubble image are the signposts of star...

Glowing, clumpy streams of material moving left and right. Left side of the image is a bright-blue cloud slowly moving further to the left. Extending from the blue cloud is a tenuous strand of material moving toward the right. It appears to connect to a bright-white cloud at far right. This white cloud is also moving further to the right

Dubbed “Mystic Mountain,” this is a region of the much more extensive Carina Nebula. In it, towers of cool hydrogen...

The Mystic Mountain is a chaotic, colorful pillar of gas and dust stretching up and narrowing toward the top of the image. The pillar is seen in mostly brown, yellow, and orange hues, jutting against a hazy blue and purple background dotted with a few pink stars.

Certain supernovas have a characteristic maximum brightness that can be used to calculate their distances from Earth. Refining celestial distances...

A portion of the Hubble Deep Field. Two observations of the same part of the sky. 1995 reels a bright star that is no longer there in the 2002 observation. This animated gif cycles between the two images making the supernova appear to blink on and off.

Astronomers use cyclical changes in the brightness of Cepheid stars to determine astronomical distances. The arrow points to a Cepheid...

Ground-based image of the Andromeda Galaxy stretches from lower left to upper right. A white arrow points to the location of the Hubble observations. Above the galaxy are four boxes containing Hubble images of the variable star at different luminosities.

Black background dotted with stars. A dark-red transparent bubble of gas looking like a ring. Stars are visible through the center of the ring.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 image is a composite of separate exposures taken by the telescope from 2002 to...

Field is filled with galaxies in colors of white, yellow, blue-white, and red; all on a black background.

A dark greenish-blue background that is lighter on the left side than it is on the right. Rising up from the bottom-center of the image is a golden-orange pillar of gas and dust. Stars dot the background.

Hubble's view of the Lagoon Nebula.

Bright nebula with dark clouds of gas extending from center

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures...

Three pillars of gas and dust rise from the bottom of the image. They are rusty-brown and black with golden highlights. A bright, hazy background of varying shades of blue and turquoise helps silhouette the darker pillars. Bright stars dot the background.

The light we can see with our eyes is part of a range of radiation known as the electromagnetic spectrum....

HST Electromagnetic Spectrum - horizontal

This star chart for M99 represents the view from mid-northern latitudes for the given month and time.

locator star chart for M99

The mysterious star PTF 10fqs appears at the tip of the arrow in this Hubble image of M99.

An image of spiraling galaxy arms full of bright blue new stars, with a white arrow pointing to the star PTF 10fqs.

This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a detailed view of the spiral arms on one side...

The bright blue spiraling arms of a galaxy are seen against black space, with a yellowish core visible near the top of the image.

This star chart for M98 represents the view from mid-northern latitudes for the given month and time.

star chart showing location in night sky of M98

This image of M98 was taken in 1995 with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.

A bright yellow galaxy core shines, surrounded by spiral arms laced through with dark dust and bluish regions of star formation. A black stair step region near the upper left shows an area without Hubble data.