geekosystem

The Orion Nebula is a massive cloud of gas and particles out in space, and like most things out in space it is stunningly beautiful. Just look at it in this new image pieced together from photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. There is some heavy image editing going on here to highlight different features and types of gas, but that doesn't make this astrophotograph any less gorgeous.

Personally, I think it looks more like Black Manta's helmet than a Space Invader, but this image of a spiral galaxy taken with the Hubble Space Telescope sure looks like something other than a spiral galaxy. That's because the light from the "Space Invader" galaxy is being bent around a galaxy cluster called Abell 68. The process by which this happens helps astronomers see much further into deep space, but often results in distortions, though this is the first time it's resulted in a video game reference that we know of.

2012 is over, and it was a pretty great year for all sorts of entertainment, as we pointed out earlier today. Sometimes, though, we're in a more ruminative mood, and in those moments, we like nothing more than looking at pictures of space, wishing and hoping that one day, we'll even get to visit. Until then, though, photos will have to do -- it turns out that 2012 was one heck of a year for those, too, though. We welcome you to 2013 with a retrospective of the best images of some of our new favorite places in the universe that last year had to offer, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope, Cassini probe, International Space Station, and more. Have a very happy new year, everyone, and be sure to check back with us for the best images from space from 2013 -- we couldn't be more excited to bring them to you as they happen.

One of the most impressive things about the Hubble Space Telescope is the insight it has offered astronomers and physicists on the varieties of galactic design. The telescope has spotted elliptical and spiral galaxies; bulging, thick galaxies and galaxies so thing they are nearly two-dimensional; galaxies that are actively forming brand new stars and even galaxies where old stars are going supernova like firecrackers on a cosmic string. Pictured above, NGC 1097 is the last kind of galaxy, a nova factory that has seen at least three stars explode in just the last few years that researchers have had it under observation.

As a special Christmas gift to those of us who are still watching the skies on federally mandated holidays, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped this great photo of galaxy IC 2233, one of the flattest galaxies known to astronomers. Where most spiral galaxies have a thick bulge of material towards their center, IC 2233 is instead a super-thin galaxy, looking almost like a flat plane of stars when viewed from the side.

It's the time of year when even the normally staid scientists at NASA get into the holiday spirit. Last year, the space agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer imaged a cosmic christmas wreath for the holiday season. Not be outdone, the venerable Hubble Space Telescope is getting in on the action this year, offering up a dose of holiday cheer in the form of this image of NGC 5189, a nebula that -- if you're brimming over with holiday cheer or just squinting a little -- resembles a very merry Christmas ornament wrapped in a festive ribbon. You can take a trip through the cosmos to zoom in on the nebula just like the Hubble did in the short video below.

The Ultra Deep Field project of  Hubble Space Telescope just keeps making discoveries. Last month, it was the most distant galaxy in the universe, while today it is the discovery of no less than seven primitive galaxies that researchers think date back to the dawn of the universe itself. Which makes them, for those of you playing at home, pretty darn old.

We meager humans are now capable of travelling great distances or viewing a great many things once considered out of reach. From the deepest regions of space, to landing rovers on Mars, the brilliant machines we've created only continue to get faster, better, and more thorough. Thanks to these advances, we're able to spot a good many details of our galaxy that have gone previously unnoticed or unexplored, and we've collected some of our favorite recent space exploration news for your perusal. Hit the jump to check them all out!

We suspect a lot of you kind of enjoy looking at pictures of space on the Internet. That's a reasonable thing to enjoy, and if you do, we've got a project for you that's more enjoyable than whatever you're doing at work and also offers a helping hand to further scientific research. A group of astronomers from the University of Washington, University of Utah, and several other institutions wants your help identifying star clusters in the Andromeda galaxy in your spare time using their new database -- The Andromeda Project.

Back holes are pretty massive as a rule, but this one in galaxy NGC 1277 might be the most massive one ever measured. Astronomers at the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas have measured a super-sized black hole with a mass equal to 17 billion Suns. The black hole takes up a never-before-seen percentage of the galaxy's total mass, and gives us all a new gold standard against which to compare a friend's mother when telling "yo momma" jokes.

The Universe is crazy big, everybody. How big? So big that the Hubble Telescope just found a new candidate for the title of Most Distant Object in the Universe. That object is MACS0647-JD, a galaxy far, far away. It's so far away from us, in fact,  that we can't even measure the distance in lightyears. Instead, we have to measure it in redshift, and this galaxy's redshift goes all the way up to 11.

That's right, folks! Everyone's favorite trans-Neptunian object has a new moon! I'm not talking about the Stephenie Meyer book, here; I'm talking about a newly-discovered moon known as P5 orbiting that icy far away ex-planet. Chalk another one up to the Hubble Space Telescope for the discovery of Pluto's fifth moon.

On Thursday, NASA scientists announced that after scouring reams of data from the Hubble Space Telescope they can say with certainty that our Milky Way is destined to eventually collide with our neighbor the Andromeda galaxy. Of course, it won't happen for about 4 billion years, but it can't hurt to be prepared.

When Voyager 2 made its flyby of the strangely tilted planet Uranus, scientists got their first glimpse of what an aurora looked like on the icy blue planet. However, such lights have never been observed on Uranus from Earth, until last year when a team of scientists used careful planning and the Hubble Telescope to watch the lights on the distant planet.

Discovered back in 2009, exoplanet GJ 1214b has been the focus of interest from the start. One of the first planets discovered to have an atmosphere, there's been a lot of guessing as to exactly what kind it actually has. In 2010, tests showed that the atmosphere was primarily composed of water, and now infrared spectra taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed that it is in fact a waterworld and a planet unlike any other that has been previously discovered.