The Universe

This image of Jupiter was taken when the planet was closest to Earth in 2017. The Great Red Spot appears on the left side, along with a smaller, reddish storm in the lower right dubbed "Red Spot Jr."

This image shows a pair of galaxies called NGC 3314. Through a chance alignment, a face-on spiral galaxy lies precisely in front of another, larger spiral. This provides a view of dark material within the front galaxy, seen because it is silhouetted against the galaxy behind it.

This infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a population of massive stars and complex structures in the hot ionized gas that swirls around the galactic core.

Usually, when a spiral galaxy appears edge-on, its dust and spiral arms appear flat. The warping of the disk in ESO 510-G13 suggests this galaxy has recently undergone a collision with a nearby galaxy and is in the process of swallowing it.

This is a close-up view of a star-birth region called the 30 Doradus Nebula. The giant stellar factory lies 170,000 light-years away inside a nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. The image reveals glowing clouds of hydrogen and dark filamentary structures of dust.

About 130 million light-years away, NGC 4650A is one of only 100 known polar-ring galaxies, which feature a ring of stars encircling a disk. Polar rings might form when two galaxies collide, with one galaxy becoming the inner disk and the other forming the ring.

This image shows Jupiter and its large moon Ganymede as the moon peeks out from behind the planet. Composed of rock and ice, Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system.

Resembling a swirling witch's cauldron of glowing vapors, the black-hole-powered core of the Circinus galaxy appears in this image. Much of the gas in the spiral galaxy's disk is concentrated in two rings.

This infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a population of massive stars and complex structures in the hot ionized gas that swirls around the galactic core. Some Hubble images use data acquired over several days of observations.

This image shows a ghostly green blob of gas that appears to float near a normal-looking spiral galaxy. The bizarre object, dubbed Hanny's Voorwerp, is the visible part of a 300,000-light-year-long streamer of gas stretching around the galaxy, called IC 2497.

The giant elliptical galaxy in the center of this image is the most massive and brightest member of galaxy cluster Abell 2261. More than a million light-years wide, the galaxy is about 10 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy. Some Hubble images use data acquired over several days of observations.

ESO 99-4 is a galaxy with a highly peculiar shape. It is probably the remnant of an earlier merger process that has deformed it, leaving the main body largely obscured by dark bands of dust.