GALEX spotted an amazingly long comet-like tail behind the star Mira which is streaking through space at supersonic speeds.

This is a Spitzer image of the Helix Nebula, a cosmic starlet often photographed by amateur astronomers for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

This false-color composite image of the Orion Nebula was created from Hubble and Spitzer data. It exposes the chaos that baby stars are creating in this cosmic cloud.

WISE captured this view of a runaway star racing away from its original home.  Surrounded by a glowing cloud of gas and dust, the star AE Aurigae appears to be on fire.

These dainty butterfly wings were captured by Hubble. They are actually roiling cauldrons of gas, which are tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles per hour.

This colorful nebula is the supernova remnant IC 443, also known as the Jellyfish Nebula, as seen by WISE. The color differences in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared emission.

Generations of stars can be seen in this new portrait from Spitzer. This image provides some of the best evidence yet for the triggered star-formation theory.

This Chandra image gives the first clear view of the faint boundary of the Crab Nebula's X-ray-emitting pulsar wind nebula. The nebula is powered by a rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron star or pulsar.

Imaged by Hubble this pillar is composed of gas and dust. It resides in a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula. Scorching radiation and fast winds from these stars are sculpting the pillar and causing new stars to form within it.

This image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A is a composite of images taken by the three NASA Great Observatories. Each Great Observatory image highlights different characteristics of the remnant.

Thousands of sparkling young stars are nestled in this Hubble image of the giant nebula NGC 3603. The image reveals stages in the life cycle of stars.

The region around the center of our Milky Way galaxy glows colorfully in this Spitzer image. Astronomers have determined that these stars are orbiting a massive black hole at the very center of the galaxy.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is known as Sagittarius A*. This Chandra image also reveals supernova remnants and mysterious filaments.

Hubble uncovers a population of infant stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy of our Milky Way. The stars have not yet ignited their hydrogen fuel to sustain nuclear fusion.

This Swift ultraviolet portrait of the Andromeda Galaxy reveals about 20,000 ultraviolet sources. Dense clusters of hot, young, blue stars sparkle beyond the central bulge.

Edwin Hubble's observations of V1 back in the 1920's was the first critical step in uncovering a larger universe. Prior to the discovery of V1, astronomers thought nebulae, such as Andromeda, were part of our Milky Way galaxy.

This Chandra image of the galaxy Centaurus A provides one of the best views to date of the effects of an active supermassive black hole. Opposing jets of high-energy particles can be seen extending to the outer reaches of the galaxy.

This Hubble image of galaxy NGC 4710 is tilted nearly edge-on to our view from Earth. This perspective allows astronomers to easily distinguish the central bulge of stars from its pancake-flat disk of stars, dust, and gas.

Stephan's Quintet provides a rare opportunity to observe a galaxy group in the process of evolving from a system dominated by spiral galaxies to a more developed system dominated by elliptical galaxies.

As shown in this Hubble image, the larger spiral galaxy (UGC 1810) has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy (UGC 1813) below it.

One of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen is captured in this composite image from Chandra, Hubble and two ground telescopes.

Four separate galaxy clusters have been involved in a collision. Hot gas is shown in an image from Chandra and galaxies are shown in an optical image from Hubble.

A growing galactic metropolis is the most distant known massive proto-cluster of galaxies. The cluster was discovered by a suite of multi-wavelength telescopes including Spitzer, Chandra, Hubble and 2 ground telescopes.

Fermi has discovered more than 1000 gamma-ray sources as shown in the all sky map. Half are associated with active galaxies called blazars.

This image of the microwave sky was created by Planck using frequencies that cannot be seen with the human eye (30-857 gigahertz).

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is Hubble's deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. The smallest, reddest galaxies may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old.