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Galaxy NGC 3982  A team of European astronomers is using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look back in time. They have imaged the spiral galaxy NGC 3982 and hundreds of other galaxies in the hope that one of the millions of stars in these images will some day explode as a supernova. They can then look back and pinpoint the exact star that has exploded. Only two such supernova 'mother stars' have ever been identified. Hubble tracks down a galaxy cluster's dark matter  Clusters of galaxies are the largest stable systems in the Universe. They are like laboratories for studying the relationship between the distributions of dark and visible matter. In 1937, Fritz Zwicky realised that the visible component of a cluster (the thousands of millions of stars in each of the thousands of galaxies) represents only a tiny fraction of the total mass. About 80-85% of the matter is invisible, the so-called 'dark matter'. Although astronomers have known about the presence of dark matter for many decades, finding a technique to view its distribution is a much more recent development. 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.
Intergalactic Pipeline  This visible-light picture, eveals an intergalactic 'pipeline' of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago. The pipeline [the dark string of matter] begins in NGC 1410 [the galaxy at left], crosses over 20,000 light-years of intergalactic space, and wraps around NGC 1409 [the companion galaxy at right] like a ribbon around a package. The galaxies reside about 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. Spiral Galaxy NGC 3310  The central region of the 'star-burst' spiral galaxy NGC 3310 shows young and old stars evenly distributed. If this were the case with most galaxies, astronomers would be able to recognize faraway galaxies fairly easily. In most galaxies, however, the stars are segregated by age, making classifying the distant ones more difficult. Birth of Our Galaxy  This is an artist's concept of the early formative years of our Milky Way galaxy, circa 12.7 billion years ago. That long ago, the majestic spiral arms of our galaxy had not yet formed; the sky was a sea of globular star clusters.
Messier 81 spiral arm  A small portion of one of Messier 81?s spiral arms. The supernova companion is the bluish star in the upper right hand corner. Dust lanes in the spiral arms of the galaxy are seen, as well as many other stars and a few star forming nebulae. Grand Spiral Messier 81  This ground-based image shows the spiral galaxy Messier 81 in its entirety. 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.
Swarm of Glittering Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud  a small area within the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble Identifies Source of Ultraviolet Light in an Old Nebula  Hubble Space Telescope's exquisite resolution has allowed astronomers to resolve, for the first time, hot blue stars deep inside an elliptical galaxy. The swarm of nearly 8, 000 blue stars resembles a blizzard of snowflakes near the core (lower right) of the neighboring galaxy M 32, located 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. Birth of stars in Galactic Wreckage  This photograph shows a tumultuous collision between four galaxies located 1 billion light-years from Earth. The galactic wreckage is creating a torrent of new stars. The tangled-up galaxies, called IRAS 19297-0406, are crammed together in the center of the picture. IRAS 19297-0406 is part of a class of galaxies known as ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs). ULIRGs are considered the progenitors of massive elliptical galaxies.
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