APOD: 2025 August 27 Б WISPIT 2b: Exoplanet Carves Gap in Birth Disk
27.08.2025

That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago.

Planetary Systems Now Forming in Orion
22.12.2009

How do planets form? To help find out, the Hubble Space Telescope was tasked to take a detailed look at one of the more interesting of all astronomical nebulae, the Great Nebula in Orion.

Degas Ray Crater on Mercury
8.12.1996

Like the Earth's Moon, Mercury is scarred with craters, testifying to an intense bombardment during the early history of the Solar System. In 1974, the Mariner 10 spacecraft surveyed this innermost planet up close, producing the only detailed images of its tortured surface.

Degas Ray Crater on Mercury
16.12.2000

Like the Earth's Moon, Mercury is scarred with craters testifying to an intense bombardment during the early history of the Solar System. In 1974, the Mariner 10 spacecraft surveyed this innermost planet up close, producing the only detailed images of its tortured surface.

Rembrandt Impact Basin on Mercury
4.05.2009

Why do portions of this huge crater on Mercury have so much iron? The unusual Rembrandt impact basin was discovered recently in images taken during the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft's 2008 October flyby of the Solar System's innermost planet.

Night in the Andes Ice Forest
7.09.2013

This forest of snow and ice penitentes reflects moonlight shinning across the Chajnantor plateau. The region lies in the Chilean Andes at an altitude of 5,000 meters, not far from one of planet Earth's major astronomical observatories, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

Galaxy Formation in a Magnetic Universe
19.02.2018

How did we get here? We know that we live on a planet orbiting a star orbiting a galaxy, but how did all of this form? To understand details better, astrophysicists upgraded the famous Illustris Simulation into IllustrisTNG -- now the most sophisticated computer model of how galaxies evolved in our universe.

West Of The Great Red Spot
26.12.1997

The turbulent region West of Jupiter's Great Red Spot is highlighted in this recent picture constructed from data recorded by the Galileo spacecraft. The image is color coded to show cloud height and thickness; white clouds are high and thick, light blue clouds are high and thin, and reddish clouds are low.

West Of The Great Red Spot
26.12.1999

The turbulent region West of Jupiter's Great Red Spot is highlighted in this picture constructed from data recorded by the Galileo spacecraft. The image is color coded to show cloud height and thickness; white clouds are high and thick, light blue clouds are high and thin, and reddish clouds are low.

Fomalhaut's Dusty Debris Disk
11.05.2023

Fomalhaut is a bright star, a 25 light-year voyage from planet Earth in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. Astronomers first noticed Fomalhaut's excess infrared emission in the 1980s. Space and ground-based...