Galaxy playing twister: The Hubble telescope has captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars. The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on. This Hubble Heritage image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that, by contrast, has an unusual twisted disk structure, first seen in ground-based photographs.

Name: ESO 510-G13, IRAS 13522-2632
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Interacting
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Hydra
Distance: 150 million light years
Release date: 2 August 2001, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Baby Boom in Galaxy NGC 3310: Most galaxies form new stars at a fairly slow rate, but members of a rare class known as 'starburst' galaxies blaze with extremely active star formation. The galaxy NGC 3310 is one such starburst galaxy that is forming clusters of new stars at a prodigious rate. Scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are perfecting a technique to determine the history of starburst activity in NGC 3310 by studying the colours of its star clusters.

Name: IRAS 10356+5345, NGC 3310
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Activity : Starburst
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Ursa Major
Distance: 55 million light years
Release date: 6 September 2001, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Baby Burp in Galaxy's Core (Galaxy View): These NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope snapshots reveal dramatic activities within the core of the galaxy NGC 3079, where a lumpy bubble of hot gas is rising from a cauldron of glowing matter. The picture at left shows the bubble in the center of the galaxy's disk. The structure is more than 3, 000 light-years wide and rises 3, 500 light-years above the galaxy's disk. The smaller photo at right is a close-up view of the bubble. Astronomers suspect that the bubble is being blown by 'winds' (high-speed streams of particles) released during a burst of star formation. Gaseous filaments at the top of the bubble are whirling around in a vortex and are being expelled into space. Eventually, this gas will rain down upon the galaxy's disk where it may collide with gas clouds, compress them, and form a new generation of stars. The two white dots just above the bubble are probably stars in the galaxy.

Name: IRAS 0958+559P15, NGC 3079
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : SpiralLocal Universe : Galaxy : Type : Barred
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Ursa Major
Distance: 65 million light years
Release date: 16 August 2001, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA, Gerald Cecil (University of North Carolina), Sylvain Veilleux (University of Maryland), Joss Bland-Hawthorn (Anglo-Australian Observatory), and Alex Filippenko (University of California at Berkeley)

Ancient black hole speeds through Sun's galactic neighborhood, devouring companion star: Data from the Digitized Sky Survey has played an important supporting role in the discovery of an ancient black hole speeding through the Sun's galactic neighborhood, devouring a small companion star as the pair travels in an eccentric orbit looping to the outer reaches of our Milky Way galaxy. This artist's impression illustrates the dramatic journey.

Name: XTE J1118+480
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Black HoleMilky Way : Star : Type : Exotic : X-Ray BinaryMilky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : Globular
Category: Quasars and Black Holes
Distance: 5500 light years
Release date: 12 September 2001, 20:00
Credit: A. Feild (STScI)

Peering into the Core of a Globular Cluster: Astronomers have used NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to peer into the centre of a dense swarm of stars called Omega Centauri. Located some 17, 000 light-years from Earth, Omega Centauri is a massive globular star cluster, containing several million stars swirling in locked orbits around a common centre of gravity. The stars are packed so densely in the cluster's core that it is difficult for ground-based telescopes to make out individual stars. Hubble's high resolution is able to pick up where ground-based telescopes leave off, capturing distinct points of light from stars at the very centre of the cluster.

Name: NGC 5139, Omega Centauri
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : Globular
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Centaurus
Distance: 17000 light years
Release date: 4 October 2001, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Hubble Reveals Ultraviolet Galactic Ring: The appearance of a galaxy can depend strongly on the colour of the light with which it is viewed. This Hubble Heritage image of NGC 6782 illustrates a pronounced example of this effect. This spiral galaxy, when seen in visible light, exhibits tightly wound spiral arms that give it a pinwheel shape similar to that of many other spirals. However, when the galaxy is viewed in ultraviolet light with NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, its shape is startlingly different.

Name: NGC 6782
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Spiral
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Pavo
Distance: 180 million light years
Release date: 1 November 2001, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)