Cosmic Wonders part 3

A red giant devours its own planet as the dying star expands.

The Pencil Nebula. This vibrant red and blue is part of a ring of wreckage resulting from a supernova explosion that occurred 11,000 years ago.

A dying red star.

Lagoon nebula

Helix nebula, the remains of a dying star. The star’s dusty outer layers glow from ultraviolet radiation. Taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

A supernova

In the centre of this image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, are two faint galaxies that seem to be smiling.
You can make out two orange eyes and a white button nose. In the case of this “happy face”, the two eyes are the galaxies SDSSCGB 8842.3 and SDSSCGB 8842.4 and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing. Further explanation includes “such a powerful gravitational pull that they can warp the spacetime”

A spiral galaxy with image taken directly from its edge, via Hubble telescope.

A rose made of a pair of interacting galaxies, released to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The distorted shape of the larger of the two galaxies shows signs of tidal interactions with the smaller of the two. It is thought that the smaller galaxy has actually passed through the larger one.

This psychedelic-looking composite image of the sun taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a series of significant solar eruptions that occurred over a period of three days in January of 2013. The photo was created using three wavelengths of light that have been colorized in red, green, and blue to better show the dynamics of each eruption.