Images

NASA has celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Chandra X-ray Observatory's orbital life with a collection of new images that reflect the beauty and scientific importance of the veteran space telescope's work.

Researchers have produced what may very well be the first pieces of art made using non-classical matter. The team has reproduced classic artworks like the Mona Lisa and Starry Night on a “quantum canvas” as small as a human hair, by projecting light onto Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs).

Hubble has been photographing the cosmos for 30 years now, but it still manages to surprise us with some absolutely breathtaking shots. Case in point, the latest image shows the two-faced galaxy NGC 4485, which still bears the stunning scars of a close call with another galaxy millions of years ago.

The Hubble Space Telescope has a knack for making us feel incredibly small. The latest image, named the Hubble Legacy Field, is a mosaic of thousands of exposures over the years and constitutes the largest and most comprehensive image ever put together by the Hubble science team.

​Astronomers have released what could be the historic first images of a supermassive black hole’s event horizon. The enormous black hole is located within the large galaxy M87, and was imaged by a network of powerful observatories that formed a single planet-sized virtual telescope.

The Red Planet is notoriously dry and dusty, but its scarred surface shows that that wasn’t always the case. A new set of photos from the ESA's Mars Express orbiter demonstrates some pretty clear evidence of an ancient river network that once wound across the Martian landscape.

Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have re-processed an old Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) image to find new details. The end result is the deepest image ever taken of the universe from space.

On January 1 the New Horizons probe whizzed past Ultima Thule, a tiny world on the fringe of the solar system. The latest image shows the object closer and in higher resolution than ever before. With that improved clarity comes some intriguing new landmarks on the rocky surface.

Astronomers have pieced together a massive mosaic of the nearby Triangulum Galaxy from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Vast spiral galaxy is located just three million light-years from Earth, and can be seen by the naked eye on a clear night in a dark sky area.

​You've no doubt seen string art before – it consists of images created by running thread between pins on a board. Well, scientists at Austria's Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have recently created an algorithm that allows a robot to recreate existing images in string-art form.

Astronomers have released one of the most comprehensive photos snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope, combining ultraviolet, infrared and visible light into one image that shows thousands of galaxies spread across space and time.

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most interesting bodies in the solar system – but at a glance it looks like a dull yellow ball, thanks to a soupy atmosphere. Now, using 13 years’ worth of infrared data from Cassini, astronomers have stitched together the clearest images yet of Titan’s surface.