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Fireworks Galaxy
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Kennicutt (U. of Ariz./Inst. of Astr., U. of Cambridge) and the SINGS Team
NGC 6946, or "The Fireworks Galaxy," is a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy. It is located approximately 10 million light-years away in Cepheus. This image was captured with the Spitzer space telescope's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on June 23, 2008.
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Space Skyrocket
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Herbig-Haro 110 is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets off the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen. This image is a composite of data taken in 2004, 2005 and 2011, and was released July 3, 2012.
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The Rockets' Red Glare
Credit: NASA/Wallops Flight Facility
Four of five sounding rockets liftoff from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility (Virginia) in this time-lapse photograph of the ATREX mission. The experiment took place on March 27, 2012, producing white clouds to study fast-moving winds high in the thermosphere. The first rocket was launched at 4:58 am EDT, with following launches occurring at 80-second intervals.
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Dark Fireworks
Credit: NASA/SDO
This screen capture from the close-up view of the June 7, 2011 solar event shows the sunspot complex originating the flare and the coronal mass ejection plasma cloud falling back towards the sun, described as "dark fireworks."
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SN2006gy Supernova Super Explosion
Credit: NASA/CXC/GSFC/STScI
Eta Carinae is drawing closer to its ultimate explosive demise. When Eta Carinae explodes, it will be a spectacular fireworks display seen from Earth, perhaps rivaling the moon in brilliance. Its fate has been foreshadowed by the recent discovery of SN2006gy, a supernova in a nearby galaxy that was the brightest stellar explosion ever seen. This composite image shows optical light (blue) and X-ray light (orange and yellow).
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Wild Fireworks Spotted in Space
Credit: NAOJ/Subaru Telescope
The new near-infrared image of the Helix Nebula, showing comet-shaped knots within, was released July 2, 2009. Scientists noted that these features look like a fireworks display in space.
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Eta Carinae Fireworks
Credit: Gemini Observatory, Lynette Cook
Artist's conception of the fast blast wave from Eta Carinae's 1843 eruption, which today has caught up with a slow-moving shell ejected in a previous outburst about 1,000 years ago, producing a bright fireworks display that heats the older shell and makes it emit X-rays (orange). The well-known two-lobed "Homunculus" nebula, a slow-moving shell of gas and dust also produced in the 1843 eruption, is shown closer to the star, which is a hot blue supergiant.
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Fireworks in Nebula NGC 3603
Credit: NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), F. Paresce (National Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna, Italy), E. Young (Universities Space Research Association/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team
This nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars called NGC 3603. The Hubble Space Telescope image was captured in August 2009 and December 2009 with the Wide Field Camera 3.
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Hot Clumps Look Like Fireworks!
Credit: Yves Grosdidier (University of Montreal and Observatoire de Strasbourg), Anthony Moffat (Universitie de Montreal), Gilles Joncas (Universite Laval), Agnes Acker (Observatoire de Strasbourg), and NASA/ESA
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture of the energetic star WR124 reveals it is surrounded by hot clumps of gas being ejected into space at speeds of over 150,000 kilometres per hour, somewhat resembling an aerial fireworks explosion.
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Up in Smoke!
Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This supernova remnant, denoted LMC N 49, within the Large Magellanic Cloud, contains delicate filaments resembling puffs of smoke and sparks trailing from expoded fireworks. They are actually sheets of debris from a stellar explosion.
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Star Formation in Galaxy NGC 4214 Looks Like Fireworks
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
Newly released images obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in July 1997 reveal episodes of star formation that are occurring across the face of the nearby galaxy NGC 4214. Located some 13 million light-years from Earth, NGC 4214 is currently forming clusters of new stars from its interstellar gas and dust.
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Cosmic Explosion Like Fireworks!
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
In the wake of Independence Day festivities surrounding the U.S. July 4th holiday in 2006, astronomers and image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute released the Hubble Space Telescope image of a cosmic explosion that is quite similar to fireworks on Earth. In the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, a massive star has exploded as a supernova, and begun to dissipate its interior into a spectacular display of colorful filaments. The supernova remnant (SNR), known as "E0102" for short, is the greenish-blue shell of debris just below the center of the Hubble image.
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Like a Roman Candle
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Streaming out from the center of the galaxy M87 like a cosmic searchlight is a black-hole-powered jet of electrons and other sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. In this Hubble telescope image from 1998, the blue jet contrasts with the yellow glow from the combined light of billions of unseen stars and the yellow, point-like clusters of stars that make up this galaxy. Lying at the center of M87, the monstrous black hole has swallowed up matter equal to 2 billion times our Sun's mass. M87 is 50 million light-years from Earth.
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Orion Knows How to Turn on the FIreworks!
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Orion Nebula shows the spectacular region around an object known as Herbig-Haro 502, a very small part of the vast stellar nursery. The glow of the nebula fills the image and, just left of center, a star embedded in a pinkish glow can be also seen. This object, Herbig-Haro 502, is an example of a very young star surrounded by the cloud of gas from which it formed.
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Cassopeia A Lives On with Remnants Like Fireworks
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Remnants of supernova Cassiopeia A illuminate the heavens like Fourth of July fireworks. The colorful streamers float across the sky in this photo exposed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2000 and 2002. Cassiopeia A is the youngest known supernova remnant in our Milky Way Galaxy and resides 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia.
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Bombs Away on Ol' Comet 9P/Tempel 1!
Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Feldman (Johns Hopkins University) and H. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)
Early on July 4, 2005, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured the dramatic effects of a collision between an 820-pound projectile released by the Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 9P/Tempel 1.
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Red Stripe of SN 1006 Supernova Remnant Reminiscent of Fireworks
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago. This image is a composite of hydrogen-light observations taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006 and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 observations in blue, yellow-green, and near-infrared light taken in April 2008.
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Black Hole Lights Up the Sky Like Fireworks
Credit: John Hutchings (Dominion Astrophysical Observatory), Bruce Woodgate (GSFC/NASA/ESA), Mary Beth Kaiser (Johns Hopkins University), Steven Kraemer(Catholic University of America), and the STIS Team
The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) simultaneously records the velocities of hundreds of gas knots streaming at hundreds of thousands of miles (or kilometers) per hour from the nucleus of NGC 4151, thought to house a supermassive black hole. This is the first time the velocity structure in the heart of this object, or similar objects, has been mapped so vividly this close to its central black hole.
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Dwarves Shouldn't Play with Fireworks
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (STScI/ESA), and The Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
Nearly 12.5 million light-years away in the dwarf galaxy NGC 4449 stellar "fireworks" are going off all the time. The image was taken in November 2005 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
