This video is the stereo 3D version of “Celestial Snow Angel: Star-forming Region Sharpless 2-106”... Read More

The star-forming region Sharpless 2-106 (S106) has a bi-polar shape that, in a December 2011 Hubble press release, was likened to a “celestial snow angel”. The “wings” of the nebula are actually bubbles of hot gas created by stellar winds and high energy radiation coming from a massive, hot, newborn star in the center. A ring of dense gas and dust encircles that star and forces the outflows into two oppositely directed lobes. The blue light in the S106 image represents hotter gas along the interior of the lobes, while the red light comes from cooler gas along the exterior.... Read More

This is the stereo 3D version of “A Horse of a Different Color”.... Read More

The Horsehead Nebula is a dark cloud of dense gas and dust located just below the belt of Orion on the sky. A visible light view shows a strong silhouette resembling the horse’s head used for a knight in chess. Infrared light, however, reveals a more complex scene, as shown in Hubble’s 2013 image. The warm parts of the clouds glow in infrared light, plus longer infrared wavelengths can penetrate deeper into the clouds. A dark and relatively featureless scene is revealed as a glowing gaseous landscape.... Read More

In 2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) provided a ground-breaking view of distant galaxies. In 2009, those data were augmented with new infrared observations to create the HUDF-IR. In 2012, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF) combined those images along with a complete census of archival datasets to see yet farther into the universe. The HXDF contains roughly 5500 galaxies stretching over 13 billion light-years of space, and represents astronomy’s deepest view into the cosmos.... Read More