NASA telescopes and probes have captured planets' secret rings, black holes, cosmic dust clouds full of baby stars, and galaxies near the beginning of time.
Let's start close to home. Even here, you can see that space is huge — bigger than you probably realize. That's Earth on the right, and the moon is the tiny speck on the left.
The planets in our solar system are even more fascinating and complex than you may think. Saturn isn't the only one with rings. See Uranus's rings below?Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck ObservatoryThe James Webb Space Telescope's image of Neptune and its rings. Neptune has 14 known satellites, and seven of them are visible in this image.Other planets have auroras, too, just like the aurora borealis and aurora australis here on Earth.
In this real image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, backlighting from the sun spectacularly illuminates Enceladus' jets of water ice.Those are just the worlds we know about. According to NASA, on average each star has at least one planet. You can see one orbiting the star in this image. The planet is a tiny dot on the right, within the disc of material surrounding the star.
Supernovas often collapse into black holes. You've probably seen the first photo ever taken of a black hole...Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via AP This image shows close-up and wide views of the two bright galactic nuclei, each housing a supermassive black hole, in NGC 7727, a galaxy located 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.There are a mind-bending number of galaxies out there — up to 200 billion, astronomers estimate. Each is filled with its own stars and planets.This long-exposure image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captures thousands of galaxies.
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