This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photo features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray]

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture peers into the dusty recesses of the massive star-forming region nearest to Earth, the Orion Nebula. Just 1,300 light-years away, the Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye below the three stars that form the 'belt' in the constellation Orion. The nebula is home to hundreds of newborn stars including the subject of this image: the protostars HOPS 150 and HOPS 153. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Megeath]

This is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, situated 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble snapshots. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars -- a fraction of Andromeda's population -- spread across about 2.5 billion pixels. [NASA, ESA, B. Williams (University of Washington)]

Interesting regions of the Andromeda galaxy captured by the Hubble Space Telescope include (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206, the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, which may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; and (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars. [NASA, ESA, B. Williams (U. of Washington)]

'Blue Lurker' is a rare class of star that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope explored by looking deeply into the open star cluster M67, roughly 2,800 light-years away. Forensics with Hubble data show that the star has had a tumultuous life, mixing it up with two other stars gravitationally bound together in a remarkable triple-star system. An artist's impression shows Panel 1: A triple star system containing three sunlike stars. Two are very tightly orbiting. The third star has a much wider orbit. Panels 2–3: The close stellar pair spiral together and merge to form one more massive star. Panel 4: The merged star evolves into a giant star. As the huge photosphere expands, some of the material falls onto the outer companion, causing the companion to grow and its rotation rate to increase. Panel 5: The central merged star eventually burns out and forms a massive white dwarf, and the outer companion spirals in toward the white dwarf, leaving a binary star system with a tighter orbit. Panel 6: The surviving outer companion is much like our sun but nicknamed a 'blue lurker.' Although it is slightly brighter blue than expected because of the earlier mass-transfer from the central star and is now rotating very rapidly, these features are subtle. The star could easily be mistaken for a normal sun-like star despite its exotic evolutionary history. [NASA, ESA, E. Leiner (Illinois Institute of Technology), L. Hustak (STScI)]

Quasar J0742+2704 (center) became the subject of astronomers' interest after they discovered it to have a newborn jet blasting from the disk around its supermassive black hole in 2020 by using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory. This finding led to follow-up with other observatories in an effort to determine the properties of the galaxy and what may have triggered the jet. While the jet itself cannot be seen in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope infrared-light image, the spiral shape of J0742+2704 is clear, with faint but detectable arms branching above and below the galaxy center. [NASA, ESA, K. Nyland (United States Naval Research Laboratory), J. DePasquale (STScI)]

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a tiny patch of sky in the constellation Hydra. The stars and galaxies depicted here span a mind-bending range of distances. Nearest to us in this image are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, which are marked by diffraction spikes. The bright star that sits just at the edge of the prominent bluish galaxy is only 3,230 light-years away, as measured by ESA's Gaia space observatory. Behind this star is a galaxy named LEDA 803211. At 622 million light-years distant, this galaxy is close enough that its bright galactic nucleus is clearly visible, as are numerous star clusters scattered around its patchy disc. Many of the more distant galaxies in this frame appear star-like, with no discernible structure, but without the diffraction spikes of a star in our galaxy. Of all the galaxies in this frame, one pair stands out in particular: a smooth golden galaxy encircled by a nearly complete ring in the upper-right corner of the image. This curious configuration is the result of gravitational lensing, in which the light from a distant object is warped and magnified by the gravity of a massive foreground object, like a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies. The lensed galaxy, whose image we see as the ring, lies incredibly far away from Earth: we are seeing it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old. The galaxy acting as the gravitational lens itself is likely much closer. A nearly perfect alignment of the two galaxies is necessary to give us this rare kind of glimpse into galactic life in the early days of the Universe. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Erb]

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture shows a supernova-hosting galaxy situated about 600 million light-years away in the constellation Gemini. This picture was taken roughly two months after a supernova named SN 2022aajn was discovered in this galaxy. The supernova is visible as a blue dot at the center of the image, brightening the hazy body of the galaxy. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz)]

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photo features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray]

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photo features a dusty yet sparkling scene from one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray]