A Galactic spectacle: A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms," seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies. The most massive of these young stars have already sped through their evolution in a few million years and exploded as supernovae. The X-ray image from Chandra shows huge clouds of hot, interstellar gas that have been injected with rich deposits of elements from supernova explosions. This enriched gas, which includes elements such as oxygen, iron, magnesium, and silicon, will be incorporated into new generations of stars and planets. The bright, point-like sources in the image are produced by material falling onto black holes and neutron stars that are remnants of the massive stars. Some of these black holes may have masses that are almost one hundred times that of the Sun. The Spitzer data show infrared light from warm dust clouds that have been heated by newborn stars, with the brightest clouds lying in the overlapping region between the two galaxies. The Hubble data reveal old stars and star-forming regions in gold and white, while filaments of dust appear in brown. Many of the fainter objects in the optical image are clusters containing thousands of stars. The Chandra image was taken in December 1999. The Spitzer image was taken in December 2003. The Hubble image was taken in July 2004, and February 2005.

Name: Antennae Galaxies, NGC 4038, NGC4039
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Interacting
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Corvus
Distance: 60000 light years
Release date: 5 August 2010, 17:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, SAO, CXC, JPL-Caltech, and STScI. Acknowledgment: G. Fabbiano and Z. Wang (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA, USA), and B. Whitmore (STScI)

Cosmic ice sculptures: dust pillars in the Carina Nebula: Enjoying a frozen treat on a hot summer day can leave a sticky mess as it melts in the Sun and deforms. In the cold vacuum of space, there is no edible ice cream, but there is radiation from massive stars that is carving away at cold molecular clouds, creating bizarre, fantasy-like structures. These one-light-year-tall pillars of cold hydrogen and dust, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, are located in the Carina Nebula. Violent stellar winds and powerful radiation from massive stars are sculpting the surrounding nebula. Inside the dense structures, new stars may be born. This image of dust pillars in the Carina Nebula is a composite of 2005 observations taken of the region in hydrogen light (light emitted by hydrogen atoms) along with 2010 observations taken in oxygen light (light emitted by oxygen atoms), both times with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The immense Carina Nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina.

Name: Carina Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Emission : H II RegionMilky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Dark
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Carina
Distance: 7500 light years
Release date: 16 September 2010, 15:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Project  (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: M. Livio (STScI) and N. Smith (University of California,  Berkeley, USA)

Shocked region around SN 1987A: This image shows the entire region around supernova 1987A. The most prominent feature in the image is a ring with dozens of bright spots. A shock wave of material unleashed by the stellar blast is slamming into regions along the ring's inner regions, heating them up, and causing them to glow. The ring, about a light-year across, was probably shed by the star about 20,000 years before it exploded.

Name: SN 1987A
Type: Local Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: NebulaeStars
Constellation: Dorado
Release date: 2 September 2010, 20:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, K. France (University of Colordo, Boulder, USA),  and P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA)

Trans-Neptunian Object (artist's impression): This is an artist's concept of a craggy piece of solar system debris that belongs to a class of bodies called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Most TNOs are small and faint, making them difficult to spot. Generally, they are more than 100 million times fainter than objects visible to the unaided eye. The newfound TNOs range from 40 to 100 kilometres across. In this illustration, the distant Sun is reduced to a bright star at a distance of about 5 billion kilometres. Astronomers culling the data archives of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have added 14 new TNOs to the catalog. Their search method promises to turn up hundreds more.

Name: Trans-Neptunian object
Type: Solar System : Interplanetary Body
Category: IllustrationsSolar System
Release date: 13 September 2010, 15:00
Credit: Artwork Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI). Science Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Fuentes (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Hubble probes comet 103P/Hartley 2 in preparation for DIXI/EPOXI flyby: Hubble Space Telescope observations of comet 103P/Hartley 2, taken on 25 September, are helping in the planning for a 4 November flyby of the comet by the Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI) on NASA's EPOXI spacecraft. Analysis of the new Hubble data shows that the nucleus has a diameter of approximately 1.5 kilometres, which is consistent with previous estimates. The comet is in a highly active state as it approaches the Sun. The Hubble data show that the coma is remarkably uniform, with no evidence for the types of outgassing jets seen from most "Jupiter Family" comets, of which Hartley 2 is a member. Jets can be produced when the dust emanates from a few specific icy regions, while most of the surface is covered with relatively inert, meteoritic-like material. In stark contrast, the activity from Hartley 2's nucleus appears to be more uniformly distributed over its entire surface, perhaps indicating a relatively "young" surface that hasn't yet been crusted over. Hubble's spectrographs — the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) — are expected to provide unique information about the comet's chemical composition that might not be obtainable any other way, including measurements by DIXI. The Hubble team is specifically searching for emissions from carbon monoxide (CO) and diatomic sulfur (S2). These molecules have been seen in other comets but have not yet been detected in 103P/Hartley 2. 103P/Hartley has an orbital period of 6.46 years. It was discovered by Malcolm Hartley in 1986 at the Schmidt Telescope Unit in Siding Spring, Australia. The comet will pass within 18 million kilometres of Earth (about 45 times the distance to the Moon) on 20 October. During that time the comet may be visible to the naked eye as a 5th magnitude "fuzzy star" in the constellation Auriga.

Name: 103P/Hartley 2
Type: Solar System : Interplanetary Body : Comet
Category: Solar System
Release date: 5 October 2010, 21:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Weaver (The Johns Hopkins University/Applied  Physics Lab, USA)