“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” ― Neil Armstrong
A star speeding through space
New ultraviolet images from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star that is leaving an enormous trail of "seeds" for new solar systems. The star, named Mira (pronounced my-rah) after the latin word for "wonderful," is shedding material that will be recycled into new stars, planets and possibly even life as it hurls through our galaxy.
Source: NASA / via: photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov
The Orion Nebula
The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.
Source: César Blanco González / via: apod.nasa.gov
A swirl of star formations
This is a starburst galaxy — a name given to galaxies that show unusually high rates of star formation. The regions where new stars are being born are highlighted by sparkling bright blue regions along the galactic arms.
Source: Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Hayes / via: nasa.gov
A bright superbubble
This composite image shows a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located about 160,000 light years from Earth. Massive stars in the cluster produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and explode relatively quickly as supernovas. Winds from the massive stars and shocks from the supernovas carve out "superbubbles" in the gas seen in X-rays by Chandra (blue).
Source: NASA / via: chandra.harvard.edu
