APOD: 2025 June 9 Б Between Scylla and Charybdis: A Double Cosmic Discovery
9.06.2025

Can you identify this celestial object? Likely not Б because this is a discovery image. Massive stars forge heavy elements in their cores and, after a few million years, end their lives in powerful supernova explosions. These remnants cool relatively quickly and fade, making them difficult to detect.

APOD: 2025 October 1 Б NGC 6960: The Witchs Broom Nebula
1.10.2025

Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the expanding debris cloud as the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant.

Carving Ma adim Vallis
27.06.2002

Just as erosion from the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon on Earth, a river of flood water may have carved Ma'adim Vallis, one of the largest canyons on Mars. Researchers have presented...

Rumors of a Strange Universe
27.02.2004

Only a few short years ago, when the APOD editors were in graduate school, the pervasive, cosmic Dark Energy was not even seriously discussed. Of course, it now appears that this strange energy dominates the cosmos (as well as lectures on cosmology) and provides a repulsive force accelerating the large scale expansion of the Universe.

Charon Flyover from New Horizons
14.08.2017

What if you could fly over Pluto's moon Charon -- what might you see? The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July as it zipped past Pluto and Charon with cameras blazing.

Ice Moon Tethys from Saturn Orbiting Cassini
8.12.2009

What processes formed the unusual surface of Saturn's moon Tethys? To help find out, NASA sent the robotic Cassini spacecraft right past the enigmatic ice moon in 2005. Pictured above is one of the highest resolution images of an entire face of Tethys yet created.

APOD: 2023 February 20 Б NGC 1850: Not Found in the Milky Way
20.02.2023

There is nothing like this ball of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. This is surprising because, at first glance, this featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that star cluster NGC 1850...

Where a Black Hole Roams
21.09.2001

Black hole candidate XTE J1118+480 is known to roam the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy. This exotic system - thought to be a stellar mass black hole consuming matter from a companion star - was discovered only last year as a flaring celestial x-ray source.

NGC 922: Collisional Ring Galaxy
17.12.2012

Why does this galaxy have so many big black holes? No one is sure. What is sure is that NGC 922 is a ring galaxy created by the collision of a large and small galaxy about 300 million years ago.

Globular Star Cluster NGC 6752
23.01.2020

Some 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo, the globular star cluster NGC 6752 roams the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752 follows clusters Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae as the third brightest globular in planet Earth's night sky.