Stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

This photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released Jan. 16, 1996, shows nebula NGC 7027 detailing the process by which a star like the sun dies. The nebula is a record of the star's final death throes.

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This picture made with the Hubble Space Telescope and released by NASA on Dec. 17, 1997, shows an example of a “butterfly” or a bipolar planetary nebula known as M2-9.

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This NASA image taken by the Hubble Telescope and released Oct. 21, 1998, shows an expanding shell of glowing gas surrounding a hot, massive star in our Milky Way galaxy.

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Frosty white ice clouds and swirling orange dust storms float above a vivid rusty landscape in this sharpest view ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope, on June 26, 2001. The Hubble Space Telescope made this photograph when Mars was approximately 43 million miles from Earth — its closest approach to our planet since 1988.

This image recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope shows two clusters of stars, called NGC 1850, located in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, on July 10, 2001. The photo's centerpiece is a young, “globular-like” star cluster — a type of object unknown in our own Milky Way galaxy.

NASA researchers have discovered a small distant galaxy located approximately 13.4 billion light-years away from our planet. This image was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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The 30 Doradus Nebula, a fertile star-forming region is seen in this panoramic mosaic portrait released by NASA on July 26, 2001, of a vast, sculpted landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born.

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A Hubble Space Telescope edge-on view of the ESO 510-G13 galaxy is seen in this undated NASA photograph. The image shows the galaxy's warped dusty disk and shows how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars.

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Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to peer into the center of a dense swarm of stars called Omega Centauri, a massive globular star cluster, containing several million stars swirling in locked orbits around a common center of gravity.

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This image shows NGC 4622 and its outer pair of winding arms full of new stars, shown in blue.

The Hubble Space Telescope took this image of a dying star named NGC 6369 on Nov. 7, 2002. The star, also known as the Little Ghost Nebula, is 2,000 to 5,000 light-years from Earth and is similar in mass to our sun. The ghostly halo surrounding the star is caused by the shedding of the stars outer layers during the final stages of its life cycle.

Oct. 4, 2004: Kepler's supernova remnant is produced by combining data from NASA's three Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Kepler's supernova was first seen 400 years ago by sky watchers, including famous astronomer Johannes Kepler. The combined image unveils a bubble-shaped shroud of gas and dust that is 14 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million mph.

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The Whirlpool Galaxy, on April 25, 2005.

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The Eagle Nebula is seen, on April 25, 2005.

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This mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab nebula, shows six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion, on Dec. 1, 2005.

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This undated image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows Pluto and its moons: Charon, Nix and Hydra.

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The Barred Spiral Galaxy (NGC 6217) in the Ursa Minor constellation, June/July 2009.

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The planet Jupiter, on July 23, 2009.

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A planetary nebula named NGC 6302, also known as, Butterfly Nebula and Bug Nebula, in the Scorpius constellation is seen, on July 27, 2009.

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Stephan's Quintet (HCG 92) in the Pegasus constellation in space, July/August 2009.

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A stellar jet in the Carina Nebula is seen, September 2009.

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The center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is framed by the tell-tale arcs that result from strong gravitational lensing, a striking astronomical phenomenon which can warp, magnify, or even duplicate the appearance of distant galaxies.

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