NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Stars Spring up Out of the Darkness

Brief History of the Universe

The Universe's First Fireworks

Chaos at the Heart of Orion

Where Galactic Snakes Live

Lighting Up a Dead Star's Layers

Order Amidst Chaos of Star's Explosion

Once an Onion, Always an Onion

Witness the Birth of a Star

In this artist's conception, observers peer through the dark dust of L1014 to witness the birth of a star. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected a faint, warm object inside the apparently starle...

Stellar Rubble May Be Planetary Building Blocks

This artist's concept depicts a pulsar, which is a type of dead star, as well as the surrounding disk of rubble discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The pulsar, called 4U 0142+61, was once a ...

Galactic Hearts of Glass

This artist's concept shows delicate green crystals sprinkled throughout the core of a pair of colliding galaxies. The white spots represent a thriving population of stars of all sizes and ages. NASA'...

Ingredients for Life

This artist's conception symbolically represents complex organic molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, seen in the early universe. These large molecules, comprised of carbon and hydrog...

Stellar Nursery

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured a glowing stellar nursery within a dark globule that reveals the birth of new protostars, or embryonic stars, and young stars never before seen.

Th...

Light from a Distant Solar System

Light emitted by a planet far beyond our Solar System has been identified for the first time. The planet, illustrated i...

Solar System in the Making

This artist's concept shows a brown dwarf surrounded by a swirling disk of planet-building dust. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted such a disk around a surprisingly low-mass brown dwarf, or "fail...

'Mini-Me' Solar System

This artist's conception shows the relative size of a hypothetical brown dwarf-planetary system compared to our own solar system. A brown dwarf is a cool or "failed" star, which lacks the mass to igni...

Collision Forms Rings Around Vega

This artist concept illustrates how a massive collision of objects perhaps as large as the planet Pluto smashed together to create the dust ring around the nearby star Vega. New observations from NASA...

Mystery Blobs

This artist's concept illustrates one possible answer to the puzzle of the "giant galactic blobs." These blobs (red), first identified about five years ago, are mammoth clouds of intensely glowing mat...

Distant Solar System

This artist's concept depicts a distant hypothetical solar system, similar in age to our own. Looking inward from the system's outer fringes, a ring of dusty debris can be seen, and within it, planets...

Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula is the shattered remnant of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova explosion. Nearly a thousand years old, the supernova was noted in the constellation of Taurus by Chinese ...