This object is a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. 7,000 light-years distant from us, the soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 90 trillion kilometers tall.

Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighbourhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas. The tower may be a giant incubator for those newborn stars. The column is silhouetted against the background glow of more distant gas. The bumps and fingers of material in the center of the tower are examples of stellar birthing areas. These regions may look small but they are roughly the size of our solar system. The red color in the lower region is from glowing hydrogen, the blue colour at the top is from glowing oxygen,

Also around 55 million light-years distant, we see here the colliding Antennae Galaxies - a pair of interacting galaxies that lie in the constellation Corvus. A few hundred million years ago, the two spiral galaxies started to fuse together. The Antenna galaxies are the nearest and youngest example of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars.

A new Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. Billions of stars are born when two galaxies smash together, mainly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters.

Cassiopeia A: The tattered remains of the youngest known remnants from a supernova explosio in the Milky Way.

A new image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed look at the tattered remains of a supernova explosion known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A). It is the youngest known remnant from a supernova explosion in the Milky Way. The new Hubble image shows the complex and intricate structure of the star’s shattered fragments.

In this stunning picture of the giant galactic nebula NGC 3603, the crisp resolution of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures various stages of the life cycle of stars in one single view.

More fantastic space galaxy photos here: Spacetelescope.org

See similar stories on ultrafeel: Trip from Planet Earth to Endless Space (8. Sep 2009)