Our Place in the Universe: Cosmic Picture Album |
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Our home: Planet Earth |
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Our home star: the Sun |
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The Moon: Earth's satellite |
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Lining up of the planets in the Solar System |
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The inner planets |
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The outer planets |
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Planet Mars (where water may exist in liquid form) |
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Jupiter's ice-covered moon, Europa |
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Star-birth clouds in M16: stellar "eggs" emerge from molecular cloud |
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Star cluster: globular cluster NGC 6397 |
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Crab nebula: a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054. |
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Our home galaxy: the Milky Way |
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Our nearest major neighbor galaxy: the Andromeda Galaxy |
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Spiral galaxy NGC 4414 |
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Spiral galaxy M101 |
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A grazing encounter between two spiral galaxies (NGC 2207 and IC2163) |
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A group of galaxies: the Hickson compact group 87 |
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A zoo of galaxies |
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Hubble Deep Field North image: a very deep view of space reveals lots of galaxies (thousands in this picture) |
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Hubble Deep Field South image |
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Baby Universe The imprint of primordial seeds (matter density fluctuations) in the cosmic microwave background as seen by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). |