Top 5 photos taken by NASA of nebulae, protostars, Mercury’s surface and more | View Photos | Mint

NASA ImagesOur planet Earth is part of a huge solar system, located in a massive galaxy called the Milky Way. Our home galaxy is a large spiral galaxy with a star disk spanning more than 1,00,000 light years. Surprisingly, our galaxy is not alone, as there are many galaxies in space containing thousands of planets and stars.

Space agencies like NASA and ESA keep sharing pictures of nebulae, our neighbouring galaxies and planets.

This photo of the Crab Nebula by NASA Hubble shows the eerie glow of a dead star that exploded in a supernova long ago. But don’t be fooled: This eerie-looking object still has a heartbeat. Hidden in the center is the star’s heart, which beats with rhythmic precision.

The “heart” is the crushed core of the exploded star. Known as a neutron star, it is about the same mass as the sun, but compressed into a super-dense shell that’s only a few miles wide. This little powerhouse is the bright star-like body at the center of the image.

The cosmic mix-up that NASA Webb observed here is a nebula in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, located about 960 light-years away.

Webb’s sensitive scopes can reveal cosmic objects with extremely low masses. Some of the dimmest “stars” in the picture are, in fact, newborn free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to giant planets. The gas and dust around these young stars are part of the ingredients that can eventually form planetary systems.

On October 12, 2012, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft made targeted observations of a small region of Mercury’s surface where two small craters on the edge of a larger crater resemble a pair of eyes.

MESSENGER was the first spacecraft to visit Mercury in 30 years, and the first to orbit it. The spacecraft mapped the entire planet, discovered abundant water ice in shadows at the poles, and gathered information about Mercury’s geology and magnetic field.

MESSENGER’s mission ended on 30 April 2015.

This light-year-long clump of interstellar gas and dust, which looks a bit like a caterpillar, is a newborn star – a protostar.

Stars form in large clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds. These giant clouds cool and turn into clumps. Eventually, gravity causes some of these clumps to collapse. When this happens, the friction causes the material to heat up, eventually leading to the formation of a protostar.

The protostar has not yet developed the ability to generate energy like a star like the Sun, which fuses hydrogen into helium at its core. Instead, the protostar’s energy comes from the heat generated by that initial collapse. Over time, the protostar will develop the ability to generate energy like other Sun-like stars.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the closest galaxies to our Milky Way: it’s “only” 210,000 light-years away. Nestled within the Small Magellanic Cloud is this spectacular star cluster, releasing light and energy into the surrounding nebula.

This image from NASA’s Hubble telescope combines observations of the star cluster in ultraviolet and visible light; these glowing blue stars are emitting ultraviolet rays that are captured by Hubble’s delicate instruments. Studying this star cluster in the ultraviolet is helping scientists learn how the birth of stars shapes the interstellar space around them.