Our planet Earth is part of a solar system located in the Milky Way Galaxy. Many other galaxies are situated millions of light years away from our home. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shared several images of our neighbouring galaxies and those located far beyond our reach.
Catch a glimpse of a few galaxies out of one hundred billion galaxies in our Universe with these NASA images.
The image of nearby galaxy Messier 81 was captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The galaxy is located in the northern constellation of Ursa Major (which also includes the Big Dipper). Skygazers who wish to enjoy the sight of this galaxy can spot this neighbour with the help of binoculars or a small telescope.
M81 is located at a distance of 12 million light-years. It was one of the first publicly released datasets soon after Spitzer's launch in August 2003.
The image was formed with the help of the data collected by the European Southern Observatory and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment. Thousands of lines shown in the image are the magnetic fields observed by NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).
These magnetic fields are shown as streamlines over an image of the galaxy taken at visible and submillimeter wavelengths by the European Southern Observatory and Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (orange).
The spectacular image of Cartwheel Galaxy is the result of intricate details captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The image reveals star formation and the galaxy’s central black hole.
Webb’s powerful infrared gaze produced this detailed image of the Cartwheel and two smaller companion galaxies against a backdrop of many other galaxies.
The NASA image unveils a spectacular view of the neighbouring spiral galaxy Andromeda, also known as M31, in ultraviolet light. Scientists have formed this image with the inputs of 330 images from Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. Some 20,000 ultraviolet sources are visible in the image, including M32, a small galaxy in orbit around M31.
The photo captures the view of multiple galaxies, visible in the form of blue dots. This field of galaxies is known as COSMOS field. Most of these galaxies contain supermassive black holes emitting high-energy X-rays. The black holes were detected by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Array, or NuSTAR, which spotted 32 such black holes in this field and has observed hundreds across the whole sky so far. Apart from the blue dots, other coloured dots are galaxies that host black holes emitting lower-energy X-rays.
