Wide-field image of Messier 77 (ground-based image): This image from the Digitized Sky Survey shows spiral galaxy Messier 77 and its surroundings.

Name: M 77, Messier 77
Type: Unspecified : Galaxy
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Cetus
Release date: 28 March 2013, 14:30
Credit: NASA, ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2

Record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey: This is a NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view looking long ago and far away at a supernova that exploded over 10 billion years ago — the most distant Type Ia supernova ever detected. The supernova’s light is just arriving at Earth, having travelled more than 10 billion light-years (redshift 1.914) across space. Astronomers spotted the supernova in December 2010 in the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) field, and named it SN UDS10Wil (nicknamed SN Wilson). The small box in the top image pinpoints the supernova’s host galaxy in the CANDELS survey. The image is a blend of visible and near-infrared light, taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The search technique involved taking multiple near-infrared images with WFC3 spaced roughly 50 days apart over the span of three years, looking for a supernova’s faint glow. The three bottom images, taken in near-infrared light with WFC3, demonstrate how the astronomers found the supernova. The image at the far left shows the host galaxy without the supernova. The middle image, taken a year later, reveals the galaxy with the supernova. The supernova cannot be seen because it is too close to the centre of its host galaxy. To detect the supernova, astronomers subtracted the left image from the middle image to see the light from the supernova alone, shown in the image at far right. The astronomers then used WFC3’s spectrometer and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to verify the supernova’s distance and to decode its light, finding the unique signature of a Type Ia supernova.

Name: SN UDS10Wil
Type: Early Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: z=1.914 (redshift)
Release date: 4 April 2013, 16:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI and JHU), and D. Jones and S. Rodney (JHU)

Record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey (compass and scale): This is a NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view looking long ago and far away at a supernova that exploded over 10 billion years ago — the most distant Type Ia supernova ever detected. The supernova’s light is just arriving at Earth, having travelled more than 10 billion light-years (redshift 1.914) across space. This image reveals the sky around the supernova, known as SN UDS10Wil, which is shown inset within its host galaxy.

Name: SN UDS10Wil
Type: Early Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: z=1.914 (redshift)
Release date: 4 April 2013, 16:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

The CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS): This image shows the field covered by the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey.

Type: Early Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Constellation: Cetus
Distance: z=1.914 (redshift)
Release date: 4 April 2013, 16:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI and JHU), D. Jones and S. Rodney (JHU), S. Faber (University of California, Santa Cruz), H. Ferguson (STScI), and the CANDELS team.

Record-breaking supernova in the CANDELS Ultra Deep Survey: before, after, and difference: These three frames show the supernova dubbed SN UDS10Wil, or SN Wilson, the most distant Type Ia supernova ever detected. The discovery was part of a three-year Hubble program begun in 2010, called the CANDELS+CLASH Supernova Project. This program aimed to survey faraway Type Ia supernovae to determine their distances and see if they have changed over the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, using the sharpness and versatility of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The leftmost frame in this image shows just the supernova’s host galaxy, before the violent explosion. The middle frame shows the galaxy after the supernova had gone off, and the third frame indicates the brightness of the supernova alone.

Name: SN UDS10Wil
Type: Early Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: z=1.914 (redshift)
Release date: 4 April 2013, 16:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI and JHU), and D. Jones and S. Rodney (JHU)

New infrared view of the Horsehead Nebula — Hubble’s 23rd anniversary image: This new Hubble image, captured and released to celebrate the telescope’s 23rd year in orbit, shows part of the sky in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter). Rising like a giant seahorse from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33. This image shows the region in infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than visible light and can pierce through the dusty material that usually obscures the nebula’s inner regions. The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas — very different to the nebula’s appearance in visible light.

Name: Barnard 33, Horsehead Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Dark
Category: AnniversaryNebulae
Constellation: Orion
Distance: 1300 light years
Release date: 19 April 2013, 15:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

Visible and infrared views of the Horsehead Nebula: This image shows two different views of the Horsehead Nebula. On the right is a view of the nebula in visible light, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile (eso0202a). The new image on the left shows the nebula in the infrared, using observations from Hubble’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

Name: Barnard 33, Horsehead Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Dark
Category: Nebulae
Distance: 1300 light years
Release date: 19 April 2013, 15:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI); ESO

Artist's impression of a galaxy undergoing a starburst: This illustration shows a messy, chaotic galaxy undergoing bursts of star formation. This star formation is intense; it was known that it affects its host galaxy, but this new research shows it has an even greater effect than first thought. The winds created by these star formation processes stream out of the galaxy, ionising gas at distances of up to 650 000 light-years from the galactic centre.

Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Activity : Starburst
Category: GalaxiesIllustrations
Release date: 25 April 2013, 15:00
Credit: ESA, NASA, L. Calçada

Artist’s impression of debris around a white dwarf star: This illustration is an artist's impression of the thin, rocky debris disc  discovered around the two Hyades white dwarfs. Rocky asteroids are  thought to have been perturbed by planets within the system and diverted  inwards towards the star, where they broke up, circled into a debris  ring, and were then dragged onto the star itself.

Name: Hyades, WD0421+162, WD0431+126
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : White DwarfMilky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : OpenMilky Way : Star : Circumstellar Material : Disk : Debris
Category: Illustrations
Distance: 150 light years
Release date: 9 May 2013, 16:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)