Galactic silhouettes: Through an extraordinary chance alignment, the Hubble telescope has captured a view of a face-on spiral galaxy lying precisely in front of another larger spiral. The unique pair is called NGC 3314. This line-up provides astronomers with the rare chance to see the dark material within the foreground galaxy, seen only because it is silhouetted against the light from the object behind it. NGC 3314 lies about 140 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the southern hemisphere constellation Hydra. This picture is one of many produced by the Hubble Heritage Program, created 1-1/2 years ago to publicly release some of the best celestial views taken by the telescope's visible-light camera. Now, the International Center of Photography in New York City has rewarded the program for its work with the annual Infinity Award for Applied Photography.

Name: NGC 3314
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Spiral
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Hydra
Release date: 11 May 2000, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Peering into the heart of the Crab Nebula: Multiple observations made over several months with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured the spectacle of matter and antimatter propelled to near the speed of light by the Crab pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star the size of Manhattan. In the year 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers were startled by the appearance of a new star, so bright that it was visible in broad daylight for several weeks. Today, the Crab Nebula is visible at the site of that bright star.

Name: Crab Nebula, Messier 1
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Supernova Remnant
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Taurus
Distance: 6500 light years
Release date: 1 June 2000, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Trapezium Cluster in the Orion Nebula: Appearing like glistening precious stones, the Trapezium cluster's central region is here seen through the eyes of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. All of the celestial objects in the Trapezium were born together in this hotbed of star formation. The cluster is named for the trapezoidal alignment of those central massive stars. Probing deep within a neighborhood stellar nursery, NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope uncovered a swarm of newborn brown dwarfs. The orbiting observatory's near-infrared camera revealed about 50 of these objects throughout the Orion Nebula's Trapezium cluster about 1, 500 light-years from Earth.

Name: Messier 42, Orion Nebula, Trapezium Cluster
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : OpenMilky Way : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: Stars
Constellation: Orion
Distance: 1400 light years
Release date: 24 August 2000, 07:00
Credit: K.L. Luhman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.); and G. Schneider, E. Young, G. Rieke, A. Cotera, H. Chen, M. Rieke, R. Thompson (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.) and NASA/ESA

Trapezium Cluster in the Orion Nebula: Probing deep within a neighborhood stellar nursery, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope uncovered a swarm of newborn brown dwarfs. The orbiting observatory's near-infrared camera revealed about 50 of these objects throughout the Orion Nebula's Trapezium cluster about 1,500 light-years from Earth. The brown dwarfs are too dim to be seen in a visible-light image taken by the Hubble telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. This view also doesn't show the assemblage of infant stars seen in the near-infrared image. That's because the young stars are embedded in dense clouds of dust and gas. The Hubble telescope's near-infrared camera, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, penetrated those clouds to capture a view of those objects.

Name: Trapezium Cluster
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : OpenMilky Way : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: NebulaeStar Clusters
Constellation: Orion
Distance: 1400 light years
Release date: 24 August 2000, 07:00
Credit: C.R. O'Dell and S.K. Wong (Rice University) and NASA/ESA

A cosmic searchlight: Streaming out from the centre of the galaxy M87 like a cosmic searchlight is one of nature's most amazing phenomena, a black-hole-powered jet of electrons and other sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. In this Hubble telescope image, the blue jet contrasts with the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unseen stars and the yellow, point-like clusters of stars that make up this galaxy. Lying at the centre of M87, the monstrous black hole has swallowed up matter equal to 2 billion times our Sun's mass. M87 is 50 million light-years from Earth.

Name: Messier 87, NGC 4486, Virgo Galaxy
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : EllipticalLocal Universe : Galaxy : Size : GiantLocal Universe : Galaxy : Activity : AGN
Category: Quasars and Black Holes
Constellation: Virgo
Distance: 55 million light years
Release date: 6 July 2000, 07:00
Credit: The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and NASA/ESA

Active Galaxy NGC 4438: A monstrous black hole's rude table manners include blowing huge bubbles of hot gas into space. At least, that's the gustatory practice followed by the supermassive black hole residing in the hub of the nearby galaxy NGC 4438. Known as a peculiar galaxy because of its unusual shape, NGC 4438 is in the Virgo Cluster, 50 million light-years from Earth.

Name: IRAS 12252+1317, NGC 4438
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Component : Central Black Hole
Category: GalaxiesQuasars and Black Holes
Constellation: Virgo
Distance: 50 million light years
Release date: 5 June 2000, 16:30
Credit: NASA/ESA, Jeffrey Kenney (Yale University), Elizabeth Yale (Yale University)

Three ways to grow a black hole: Astronomers are concluding that monstrous black holes weren't simply born big but instead grew on a measured diet of gas and stars controlled by their host galaxies in the early formative years of the universe. These results, gleaned from a NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope census of more than 30 galaxies, are painting a broad picture of a galaxy's evolution and its long and intimate relationship with its central giant black hole. Though much more analysis remains, an initial look at Hubble evidence favors the idea that titanic black holes did not precede a galaxy's birth but instead co-evolved with the galaxy by trapping a surprisingly exact percentage of the mass of the central hub of stars and gas in a galaxy.

Name: Black Hole
Type: Unspecified : Galaxy : Type : InteractingUnspecified : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Black HoleUnspecified : Galaxy : Component : Bulge
Category: Quasars and Black Holes
Release date: 5 June 2000, 16:30
Credit: K. Cordes (STScI), S. Brown (STScI)

Hubble Watches Star Tear Apart its Neighborhood: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a view of a stellar demolition zone in our Milky Way Galaxy: a massive star, nearing the end of its life, tearing apart the shell of surrounding material it blew off 250, 000 years ago with its strong stellar wind. The shell of material, dubbed the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888), surrounds the 'hefty', aging star WR 136, an extremely rare and short-lived class of super-hot star called a Wolf-Rayet. Hubble's multicolored picture reveals with unprecedented clarity that the shell of matter is a network of filaments and dense knots, all enshrouded in a thin 'skin' of gas [seen in blue]. The whole structure looks like oatmeal trapped inside a balloon. The skin is glowing because it is being blasted by ultraviolet light from WR 136.

Name: Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888, WR 136
Type: Milky Way : Star : Type : Wolf-RayetMilky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Emission
Category: Stars
Constellation: Cygnus
Distance: 4500 light years
Release date: 13 July 2000, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA, Brian D. Moore, Jeff Hester, Paul Scowen (Arizona State University), Reginald Dufour (Rice University)