The National Aeronautics of Space Administration (NASA) never fails to astound us with breathtaking images from space, offering glimpses into phenomena light years away from Earth. From dazzling nebulas to mesmerizing galaxies, here are NASA's top seven recent snapshots of the cosmos.
The US space agency shared a sparkling image from the universe which beautifully captured a view, which can be called an aftermath of mega merger between two galaxies. In the image shared by the US Space agency on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has posted the sparkling view of NGC 2005, a globular cluster, which is assumed to have come into existence because of a merger between two galaxies.
Messier 94 (M94), a spiral galaxy located 16 million light-years away in Canes Venatici. It belongs to the Messier catalog, a stargazing resource first compiled by the French astronomer Charles Messier in the 1700s. Astronomers suggest that the starburst ring in M94 was formed by a pressure wave moving outward from the galaxy’s center—reminiscent of the electrifying energy of fans in a packed arena.
NASA had recently shared video capturing pruple rain acoss Mars planet at night. The images showed how it magically covered the Red planet with purple hue. As descibed by NASA, The brighter the purple, the more auroras were present. Taken as waves of energetic particles from a solar storm were arriving at Mars, the sequence pauses at the end, when the wave of the most energetic particles arrived and overwhelmed the instrument with noise.NASA explained that the auroras on Mars differ from those on Earth due to the absence of a strong magnetic field like Earth's, which typically confines auroras to polar regions. Mars lost its internal magnetic field in ancient times, leaving it vulnerable to the direct impact of energetic particles from space.
NASA had released stunning video of Pencil Nebula which it described as "was created by a star that exploded thousands of years ago and is just one part of the huge Vela supernova remnant." NASA states that the Pencil Nebula resides about 815 light-years away in the constellation Vela. It informed that the nebula's linear, narrow shape earned it the nickname “Pencil Nebula".
The galaxy UGC 1810, a larger spiral has a distinctive rose-like shape. As per NASA, The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813.
The US space agency shared image of Neptune's south pole which was captured by Voyager 2 spacecraft. The Voyager 2 has been in operation since 1977 and is the only spacecraft to have ever visited Uranus and Neptune. During its travels through the outer solar system, Voyager 2 visited all four gas giant planets, and discovered and photographed many of the planets' moons, NASA states.
The image of the Dusty Spiral Galaxy NGC 4414 was captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as part of its HST Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale in 1995. The NGC 4414 galaxy is located 60 million light-years away from Earth. Speaking of the image shared by NSA Hubble, NGC 4414 is a spiral galaxy notable for its distinct stellar composition across its different regions. Within its central areas, there is an abundance of yellow and red stars, a characteristic often associated with older stellar populations commonly found in spiral galaxies.
