New images from a rejuvenated Hubble space telescope



Despite it resemblance to a dainty butterfly,
this image actually shows roiling cauldrons of superheated gas
tearing across space at almost a million kilometres an hour –
the death throes of a star, planetary nebula NGC 6302


Hundreds and thousands:
Colourful stars inside globular star cluster Omega Centauri.
The image is just a small region inside the cluster,
which contains nearly 10 million stars between 10 billion and 12 billion years old


Rings of brilliant blue stars encircle the bright, active core of this spiral galaxy.
The galaxy, called Markarian 817, shows intense star-forming regions
and dark bands of interstellar dust along its spiral arms.
Observations by the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
captured the powerful outflow of material


Stephan's Quintet:
A group of five galaxies containing stars across a wide colour range,
from young blue stars to ageing red stars.
This image was captured by the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble.
'Stephan’s Quintet' is a bit of a misnomer ...
galaxy NGC 7320, upper left,
is actually about seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group


These two images of the stellar nursery that is the Carina Nebula
demonstrate how observations in visible and infrared light
reveal dramatically different views of an object.
The pictures show the broad wavelength range
of Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3,
extending from ultraviolet to visible to infrared.
Details not seen at visible wavelengths
are uncovered in near-infrared light


The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217
was the first celestial object snapped
by the newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard Hubble.
The galaxy lies 6 million light-years away
in the north circumpolar constellation Ursa Major


Hubble's newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys
has peered nearly 5 billion light-years away
to resolve intricate details in the galaxy cluster Abell 370.
This was one of the first galaxy clusters
in which astronomers observed 'gravitational lensing',
where the warping of space by the cluster’s gravitational field
distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it.
This is seen as arcs and streaks in the picture –
the stretched images of more distant galaxies


Another image highlighting the phenomenon
of gravitational lensing in galaxy cluster Abell 370.
Gravitational lensing is a vital tool for measuring the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters,
because its position can be deduced from its gravitational effects


This picture, taken on 23 July,
is the first full-disc, natural-colour image of Jupiter
made with Hubble's spanking new Wide Field Camera 3.
It is the sharpest visible-light picture of Jupiter
since the New Horizons spacecraft flew by the gas giant in 2007.
The dark smudge, bottom right,
is debris from a comet or asteroid
that plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere and disintegrated