Gallery: Space Photos of the Week: New Stars Get All Dark and Dusty
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This is a richly detailed view of the star formation region Messier 78 in the Orion constellation. The blue region is reflected light from hot young stars, and streams of dark dust and red jets emerge from forming stars.
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This image of Mars has been altered to show what we would see with ultraviolet vision: the Valles Marineris appears as a blue cut across the middle, and an ozone build-up at the south pole shows as magenta.
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In this image of the NGC 247 spiral galaxy, the nucleus is a patch of bright white, surrounded by dark patches of dust and brighter patches of gas.
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In the infrared images in the lower row, dust around this star-forming complex in Orion is much more transparent than in the visible light photos above.
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This photo of Saturn’s rings shows two tiny moons, in the lower right and upper left.
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A wandering black hole with 100,000 times the Sun’s mass has been found about 4.5 billion light years from Earth.
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Crew members took this photo of the Aurora Borealis from the International Space Station.
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