10 Of The Coolest Images Hubble Has Taken So Far

Space has an annoying habit of making our best science-fiction artists look unambitious.

Since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed everything from stars being born inside enormous clouds of dust to entire galaxies crashing into each other. Some of those images are scientifically important. Some are beautiful.

And a few look like somebody accidentally gave the universe access to Photoshop.

So, using the highly scientific ranking system of “which ones made us stare at the screen the longest,” here are 10 of the coolest and most interesting images ever captured by Hubble.

10. The Sombrero Galaxy

Messier 104 might be one of the cleanest-looking galaxies Hubble has ever photographed.

We see the Sombrero Galaxy almost edge-on, giving us a brilliant central bulge wrapped in an absurdly sharp lane of dark dust. The result looks less like a galaxy and more like the mothership in a science-fiction movie five minutes before everyone on Earth starts having a very bad day.

The galaxy is roughly 30 million light-years away. Hubble’s mosaic is an enormous 11,472 by 6,429 pixels, which means the image becomes even more ridiculous once you start zooming in.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: Hubble mosaic of the majestic Sombrero Galaxy

Image credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

9. The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared

You have probably seen the Horsehead Nebula before. Normally, it appears as a dark silhouette against a glowing background.

Then Hubble looked at it in infrared.

Infrared wavelengths can penetrate some of the dust that blocks visible light, transforming the familiar Horsehead into something almost ghostlike. Instead of a nearly black silhouette, the structure becomes a towering translucent cloud surrounded by stars.

Also known as Barnard 33, the Horsehead Nebula lies roughly 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Orion.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: Horsehead Nebula in infrared

Image credit: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

8. The Antennae Galaxies

This picture gets considerably more interesting once you know what you are looking at.

Those are not oddly shaped clouds.

They are two galaxies colliding.

NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, collectively known as the Antennae Galaxies, have spent hundreds of millions of years gravitationally beating each other up.

The encounter has triggered enormous amounts of star formation. Brilliant blue clusters of young stars appear among glowing pink and red clouds of gas, while stars and material have been pulled from the galaxies into gigantic tidal structures.

Eventually, the two galaxies are expected to merge into a single larger galaxy.

So yes, Hubble basically photographed a galaxy merger while it was still in progress.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: Antennae Galaxies Reloaded

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

7. The Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula is what remains after a star exploded.

Which feels like something you should probably mention before showing someone this picture.

Located roughly 6,500 light-years away, the Crab is an expanding supernova remnant. The explosion itself was observed from Earth nearly a thousand years ago.

Hubble’s modern view reveals an absurdly complicated web of glowing filaments surrounding the nebula’s central pulsar: the incredibly dense, rapidly spinning remnant of the original star.

The colors trace different elements and physical conditions throughout the debris, while the strange glow closer to the center is associated with energetic particles interacting with the pulsar’s extreme environment.

The result looks like somebody dropped a neon spiderweb into space.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: The Crab Nebula

Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, W. Blair (JHU). Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

6. The Cat’s Eye Nebula

The Cat’s Eye Nebula looks less like a dying star and more like the universe attempting to open a portal.

NGC 6543 sits roughly 4,400 light-years away. At its center is a dying star surrounded by overlapping shells, bubbles, dense knots and complex structures made from material the star expelled during different stages near the end of its life.

Those layers are more than just pretty. They effectively preserve a record of repeated episodes of stellar mass loss.

In other words, astronomers can use the nebula’s structure to reconstruct parts of the star’s final chapter.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: Looking at the Cat’s Eye Nebula with Hubble

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Tsvetanov

5. The Whirlpool Galaxy

If somebody asked you to draw a galaxy without giving you any additional instructions, you would probably draw something resembling M51.

The Whirlpool Galaxy is an almost suspiciously perfect example of a grand-design spiral galaxy.

Hubble’s enormous mosaic reveals dark dust lanes winding through the galaxy, brilliant blue clusters of young stars and glowing pink regions of hydrogen associated with ongoing star formation.

But M51 did not necessarily become this photogenic all by itself.

Its smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195, has interacted gravitationally with the Whirlpool. Those interactions are thought to have helped strengthen the spectacular spiral structure we see today.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: The Whirlpool Galaxy

Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

4. The Veil Nebula

This image looks surprisingly delicate considering its origin was a star violently exploding.

The Veil Nebula is part of the Cygnus Loop, an enormous supernova remnant left behind after a massive star exploded thousands of years ago.

Hubble photographed only a portion of the entire remnant, but at extremely high resolution. The image reveals thin, tangled strands of glowing gas created as the expanding supernova shock wave plows through surrounding material.

The blue portions trace oxygen, while red tones reveal hydrogen and nitrogen.

It looks like a piece of translucent fabric floating through space.

It is actually the remains of a dead star expanding through the galaxy.

That is slightly cooler.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: Veil Nebula

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay

3. The Butterfly Nebula

NGC 6302 demonstrates that a dying star can apparently go out with significantly more style than the rest of us.

Known as the Butterfly Nebula, this object consists of enormous quantities of gas expelled by a star approaching the end of its life.

Two spectacular lobes extend from the obscured central region, producing the nebula’s remarkably recognizable butterfly shape.

The entire structure stretches more than two light-years from end to end.

Hubble has also revealed complicated jets and rapidly changing bubbles of gas near its center, showing that this apparently elegant structure is actually an extremely energetic environment.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: NGC 6302 — The Butterfly Nebula

Image credit: NASA, ESA and J. Kastner (RIT)

2. Mystic Mountain

There are space photographs, and then there are photographs that look like somebody illustrated a fantasy novel and forgot to mention that the subject was real.

This is Mystic Mountain, a gigantic pillar of gas and dust inside the Carina Nebula.

The structure is roughly three light-years tall.

Radiation and powerful stellar winds from nearby young stars are blasting away its surface. Meanwhile, stars are actively forming inside the pillar, and some of those newborn stars are firing narrow jets of material outward into space.

So the gigantic glowing mountain in this image is simultaneously being destroyed from the outside while producing new stars on the inside.

Space is efficient like that.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: Mystic Mountain

Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and The Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

1. The Pillars of Creation

Yeah.

It had to be.

Hubble’s Pillars of Creation image has become so famous that it is almost easy to forget what we are actually looking at.

These enormous columns are clouds of cold gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula. They are stellar nurseries: dense regions inside the pillars can collapse under their own gravity and produce new stars.

At the same time, intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from nearby massive stars are slowly eroding the pillars.

They are creating stars while simultaneously being destroyed by other stars.

Hubble first photographed the Pillars of Creation in 1995. It returned years later with the newer Wide Field Camera 3 to create this dramatically sharper visible-light portrait.

The resulting image is an enormous 6,780 by 7,071 pixels.

It has appeared on posters, stamps, shirts, album covers and probably at least one dorm-room wall belonging to every astronomy major since the mid-'90s.

And somehow, after decades of seeing it, the thing still does not really look real.

Full-resolution image: Open the high-resolution JPEG

Official Hubble page: New View of the Pillars of Creation

Image credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and The Hubble Heritage Team

Hubble’s Greatest Trick

Hubble’s most important contribution to astronomy obviously is not that it takes nice desktop wallpapers.

Its observations have helped astronomers measure the expansion of the universe, investigate dark matter, study worlds beyond our Solar System, watch stars being born and dying, and peer billions of years into cosmic history.

But the pictures matter too.

Before Hubble, most people had never seen nebulae, galaxies and stellar remnants with anything approaching this level of detail. Hubble transformed many of those distant objects from abstract things described in astronomy books into actual places we could look at.

And after more than three decades in orbit, it can still occasionally produce an image that makes the appropriate scientific response something along the lines of:

Okay. That’s sick.

All images are credited individually above. High-resolution image links point directly to ESA/Hubble-hosted JPEG files.