It’s time again for one of my favorite holiday traditions: the 14th annual Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Every day until Saturday, December 25, this page will present one new incredible image of our universe from NASA’s Hubble telescope. Be sure to come back every day until Christmas, and follow us on Twitter or Facebook for daily updates. I hope you can enjoy these amazing and awe-inspiring images, as well as the continued efforts of the science teams that have brought them to Earth. It’s always such a joy to put this calendar together every December.
Wishing you all a merry Christmas, happy holidays, and peace on Earth.
1. A detail from inside the Monkey Head nebula (NGC 2174). This enormous swirl of dust and gas sits about 6,400 light-years away from us, in the constellation of Orion. The nebula is a violent stellar nursery, packed with the ingredients needed for star formation. However, the recipe for cooking up new stars isn't very efficient, and most of the ingredients are wasted as the cloud of gas and dust disperses. This process is accelerated by the presence of fiercely hot young stars, which trigger high-velocity winds that help to blow the gas outward.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
2. This image of the Helix Nebula shows a fine web of filamentary "bicycle-spoke" features embedded in a colorful red and blue gas ring. The portrait offers a dizzying look down what is actually a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases sitting about 650 light-years away. The fluorescing tube is pointed nearly directly at Earth, so it looks more like a bubble than a cylinder. A forest of thousands of comet-like filaments, embedded along the inner rim of the nebula, points back toward the central star, which is a small, super-hot white dwarf. The tentacles formed when a hot "stellar wind" of gas plowed into colder shells of dust and gas ejected previously by the doomed star.
NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner, STScI, and T.A. Rector, NRAO
3. NGC4826, often referred to as the “Black Eye” or “Evil Eye” galaxy, is a spiral galaxy located 17 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices. The dark swirls are made of dust that sweeps across one side of its bright nucleus. NGC4826 is known by astronomers for its strange internal motion. The gas in the outer regions of this galaxy and the gas in its inner regions are rotating in opposite directions, which might be related to a recent merger. New stars are forming in the region where the counter rotating gases collide.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
4. Galaxies Among the Stars. A detail from a closeup view of open star cluster NGC 6791, filled with stars estimated to be 8 billion years old. The cluster is in our own galaxy, some 13,000 light-years away. At upper left, two distant background galaxies can be seen through the spaces between the stars.
NASA, ESA, and L. Bedin (STScI)
5. A Colorful Veil. New processing techniques have been applied to an older image of the Veil Nebula, bringing out fine details of the nebula’s delicate threads and filaments of ionized gas. To create this image, observations taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 instrument through 5 different filters were processed to further enhance details of emissions from ionized oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (red). The Veil Nebula lies around 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, Z. Levay
6. The Molten Ring. This image shows GAL-CLUS-022058s, a galaxy that appears to wrap itself around a neighboring object. This is the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our Universe. First theorized to exist by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, this object’s unusual shape can be explained by a process called gravitational lensing, which causes light shining from far away to be bent and pulled by the gravity of an object between its source and the observer. In this case, the light from the background galaxy has been distorted and magnified into the curve we see by the gravity of the galaxy cluster sitting in front of it.
ESA / NASA / Saurabh Jha, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey
7. Peering into a Spiral. In this image the Hubble Space Telescope gazes into the spiral galaxy NGC 1317 in the constellation Fornax, more than 50 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy is one of a pair, but NGC 1317’s rowdy larger neighbor, NGC 1316, is offscreen. NGC 1317 is accompanied in this image by two objects (at lower left) from very different parts of the Universe. The bright point ringed with a criss-cross pattern is a single within our own galaxy, whereas the redder elongated smudge is a distant galaxy lying far beyond NGC 1317.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
8. Herbig-Haro Object 24. In the center of the image, partially obscured by dark clouds of dust, a newborn star shoots twin jets out into space as a sort of birth announcement to the universe. The scene lies deep inside a turbulent birthing ground for new stars known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located 1,350 light-years away. When stars form within giant clouds of cool molecular hydrogen, some of the surrounding material collapses under gravity to form a rotating, flattened disk encircling the newborn star. As gas rains down onto the protostar and engorges it, superheated material spills away and is shot outward from the star in opposite directions along the star's rotation axis. Shock fronts develop along the jets and heat the surrounding gas to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. The jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust and clear vast spaces. The shock fronts form tangled, knotted clumps and are collectively known as Herbig-Haro objects.
NASA and ESA
9. A Recent Snapshot of Jupiter. This September 4 photo of the planet Jupiter displays the ever-changing landscape of its turbulent atmosphere, where several new storms are making their mark, and the pace of color changes near the planet’s equator is continuing to surprise researchers. The planet’s equatorial zone has remained a deep orange hue for a much longer time, compared to previous darkening episodes. Just above the equator, researchers note the appearance of several new storms, nicknamed “barges” during the Voyager era. These elongated red cells can be defined as cyclonic vortexes, which vary in appearance.
NASA, ESA, Amy Simon, NASA-GSFC, Michael H. Wong, UC Berkeley
10. A New View of the Pillars of Creation. This image, taken in near-infrared light, transforms the famous pillars into eerie, wispy silhouettes, which are seen against a background of myriad stars. The near-infrared light can penetrate much of the gas and dust, revealing stars behind the nebula as well as hidden away inside the pillars. New stars embedded in the tops of the pillars, however, are apparent as bright sources that are unseen in the visible image. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up by the intense ultraviolet radiation from a cluster of young, massive stars and evaporating away into space.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team, STScI / AURA
11. A Carbon Star. The red giant star CW Leonis is seen among dusty clouds of sooty carbon that engulf the dying star. The clouds were created from the outer layers of CW Leonis being thrown out into the inky black void. Blasting the carbon back into space provides raw material for the formation of future stars and planets. At a distance of 300 light-years from Earth, CW Leonis is the closest carbon star. This gives astronomers the chance to understand the interplay between the star and its surrounding, turbulent envelope.
ESA / Hubble, NASA, Toshiya Ueta, University of Denver & Hyosun Kim, KASI
12. A Lopsided Spiral. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left. In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right, (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy's normal fried-egg appearance. NGC 2276 lies 120 million light-years away, in the northern constellation Cepheus.
NASA, ESA, STScI, Paul Sell, University of Florida
13. A Cloudy Stellar Nursery. This image features AFGL 5180, a stellar nursery located in the constellation of Gemini. At the center of the image, a massive star is forming and blasting cavities through the clouds with a pair of powerful jets, extending to the top right and bottom left of the image. Light from this star is mostly escaping and reaching us by illuminating these cavities, like a lighthouse piercing through the storm clouds.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, J. C. Tan, Chalmers University & University of Virginia
14. Distortions in Space. This image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2813 spectacularly demonstrates the concept of gravitational lensing. Among the tiny dots, spirals and ovals that are the galaxies that belong to the cluster, there are several curved arcs of light, strong examples of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The curved crescents and s-shapes in this image are made of light from galaxies that actually lie beyond Abell 2813, twisted on their long journey to Hubble's camera.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, D. Coe
15. A Halo of Gas and Dust. This giant star is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The star, called AG Carinae, is surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust about five light-years across. The huge structure was created from one or more giant eruptions about 10,000 years ago. The star’s outer layers were blown into space in outbursts that are typical of a rare breed of star called a luminous blue variable. AG Carinae is a few million years old and sits 20,000 light-years away, inside our Milky Way galaxy.
NASA, ESA, STScI
16. Gazing into the Lagoon. This close-up shot of the center of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) clearly shows the delicate structures formed when the powerful radiation of young stars interacts with the hydrogen cloud they formed from. The nebula is about 110 light-years across, and lies about 4,000 light-years from Earth.
NASA, ESA
17. A Beautiful Spiral. This image features the spiral galaxy NGC 691, part of a group of gravitationally bound galaxies that lie about 120 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy, first discovered in 1786, is about 130,000 light years across.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.
18. The Rotten Egg Nebula. More than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation of Puppis, the Calabash Nebula is a spectacular example of the death of a low-mass star like our Sun. It is seen here going through a rapid transformation from a red giant to a planetary nebula, during which it blows its outer layers of gas and dust out into the surrounding space. The "Rotten Egg" nickname is due to the fact that contains a large amount of sulphur.
ESA / Hubble & NASA
19. A Galactic Collision. The spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163, about 80 million light-years away, are a colliding pair, seen here in the early stages of a merger that will eventually result in a larger, chaotic galaxy.
NASA / ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
20. A Wider View of the Lagoon. The Lagoon Nebula is an incredible 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, which lies about 4,000 light-years away. The image, made by Hubble in 2018, shows a region full of intense activity, with fierce winds from hot stars, swirling chimneys of gas, and energetic star formation, embedded within a hazy labyrinth of gas and dust.
NASA, ESA, STScI
21. The Edge of the Sombrero. The Hubble space telescope imaged the Sombrero galaxy (M104), seen here in 2004. The galaxy's hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. The Sombrero is 50,000 light-years across, and is located 30 million light-years from Earth, at the edge of the Virgo cluster of galaxies.
NASA / ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
22. A Sea of Stars. This view of more than 100,000 stars is seen in the crowded core of the globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars in total. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are almost as old as our Milky Way galaxy. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth.
NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
23. A Shrouded Star. This image shows the star RS Puppis, about 6,000 light-years away. RS Puppis is a type of star known as a Cepheid variable, and is shrouded by thick, dark clouds of dust which enable a phenomenon known as a light echo to be shown with stunning clarity. Cepheid variable stars pulsate—temporarily change brightness—at regular intervals, and RS Puppis does so every 41.5 days.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
24. Cosmic Pillars. These one-light-year-tall pillars of cold hydrogen and dust are located in the Carina Nebula, about 7,500 light-years away. Violent stellar winds and powerful radiation from massive stars are sculpting the surrounding nebula. Inside the dense structures, new stars may be born.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Project (STScI/AURA)
25. A Full House. This image showcases the galaxy cluster ACO S 295, as well as a jostling crowd of background galaxies and foreground stars. Galaxies of all shapes and sizes populate this image, ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals. As well as a range of sizes, this galactic menagerie boasts a range of orientations, with spiral galaxies such as the one at the center of this image appearing almost face on, and some edge-on spiral galaxies visible only as thin slivers of light. The cluster dominates the center of this image, both visually and physically. The huge mass of the galaxy cluster has gravitationally lensed some of the background galaxies, distorting and smearing their shapes. At a time of year meant for wonder, it's incredible to imagine the billions of worlds and systems that exist in even this one small slice of the Universe.
ESA / Hubble & NASA, F. Pacaud, D. Coe