the ultimate cosmic “beauty and the beast” portrait.

Insane how you made that contrast pop with just 10 hours, Trevor Jones.

3/3

All the light you see there is just the star’s own glow bouncing off the dust — no emission, pure reflection.

So while the Boogeyman himself is pure darkness swallowing every photon, there’s literally a newborn star right next to his shoulder calmly painting a soft halo with its own light:

2/3

This view of Tarantula remains one of the nicest and instructive ever taken.

It’s a short masterclass in astrophysics, revealing how different wavelengths together uncover the whole wild life cycle of the universe’s mightiest stars—from birth to furious prime to sculpting their surroundings.

5/5

The Hubble data (green) reveals the light from the mentioned massive stars together with different stages of star birth.

Spitzer infrared emission data (red) shows cooler gas and dust having giant bubbles carved into them.

4/5

Massive stars in the center of 30 Doradus are producing intense radiation and powerful winds as they blow off material.

Million-degree gas detected in X-rays (blue) by Chandra comes from shock fronts, formed by these stellar winds and supernova explosions.

3/5

The Tarantula Nebula is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group, and is also one of the largest H II regions close to our galaxy.

It resides on the leading edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), some 160,000 light-years away.

2/5

🌺🪐

Totally agree – the Voyagers are just unreal. Every time I see a new engineering update from the JPL team I’m in awe of what they keep pulling off. And no shade to Apollo at all – putting boots on the Moon was heroic – but there’s something almost poetic about these two silent travelers.

Yours was the most polite mic drop I’ve ever seen in astronomy.🎤

The Voyager missions are still managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

5/5

Between them you can see small, bright convective clouds rising in the atmosphere — a sign that this part of Saturn is quite turbulent.

Even the tiniest features we can make out in this image are around 270 kilometres across, about the distance from Paris to Brussels.

4/

A prominent yellow band crosses the planet, and right at its southern edge there is a greenish oval that would look brown to our eyes.

A little higher and to the left, a brighter yellow feature is drifting eastward.

It moves fast enough to lap the green-brown oval roughly once every 50 days.

3/

If you look closely, Saturn’s north is toward the upper-right corner of the planet’s disk.

Above the globe, two moons stand out clearly: Dione on the right and Enceladus on the left.

The photograph uses false colors to bring out details that are harder to see in ordinary light.

2/

Yes!!! A thousand times yes! Can’t wait to hear about it.💛