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| Hubble images remarkable double cluster
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| Like dust bunnies that lurk in corners and under beds, surprisingly complex loops and blobs of cosmic dust lie hidden in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316. This image reveals the dust lanes and star clusters of this giant galaxy that give evidence that it was formed from a past merger of two gas-rich galaxies.
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| NGC 1300 is considered to be prototypical of barred spiral galaxies. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center.
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| Nebula NGC 2080, nicknamed the Ghost Head Nebula.The Ghost Head Nebula is one of a chain of star-forming regions lying south of the 30 Doradus nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Two bright regions (the eyes of the ghost), named A1 (left) and A2 (right), are very hot, glowing blobs of hydrogen and oxygen.
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| This image shows one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. At the centre of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. A dramatic structure of arched, ragged filaments with a distinct ridge surrounds the cluster.
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| NGC 6397 is a globular cluster in the Ara constellation. It is located about 7,200 light years from Earth, making it one of the two nearest globular clusters to Earth (the other one being Messier Object 4).The artists impression shows the pulsar (seen in blue with two radiation beams) and its bloated red companion star.Scientists believe that the best explanation for seeing a bloated red star instead of a quiet white dwarf in the system is that the pulsar only recently has been spun up to its current rotation speed of 274 times per second by the gases transferred by the red star.
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| The Hubble Space Telescope, has captured a spectacular pair of galaxies engaged in a celestial dance of cat and mouse or, in this case, mouse and mouse.Located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, the colliding galaxies have been nicknamed "The Mice" because of the long tails of stars and gas emanating from each galaxy. Otherwise known as NGC 4676, the pair will eventually merge into a single giant galaxy.
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| M17, also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula, is located about 5500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation.The image shows a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur gas in the extremely massive and luminous molecular nebula Messier 17.
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| The Crab Nebula (also known as Messier Object 1, M1 or NGC 1952)is one of the most intricately structured and highly dynamical objects ever observed. It is also one of the most studied, in all of astronomy.It is a gaseous diffuse nebula in the constellation Taurus. It is the remnant of a supernova .Located at a distance of about 6500 light years from Earth, it has a diameter of 6 light years and is expanding at a rate of 1000 km per second. A neutron star called Crab Pulsar in the center of the nebula rotates 30 times per second.
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| The Tarantula is situated 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the Southern sky and is clearly visible to the naked eye as a large milky patch. It is orbiting around the Milky Way and has had several close encounters with it. It is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of galaxies. Just above the centre of the image there is a huge cluster of very hot stars called R136. The stars in R136 are also among the most massive stars we know.
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