even galaxies get bullied. here, a so-called "death star galaxy" blasts a nearby galaxy...

Even galaxies get bullied. Here, a so-called "death star galaxy" blasts a nearby galaxy with a jet of energy. Scientists said that if this happened in the Milky Way, it would likely destroy all life on Earth.

Feel like you are being watched? This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet notable for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

NASA / AP The Cassini spacecraft's 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion reveal its sponge-textured surface. This image was colored to bring out the surface's details. Hyperion has a notably reddish tint when viewed in natural color.

This star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, forming a cocoon around the star's remaining core. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, is the white dot in the center.

NASA / AFP / Getty Images Though Jupiter looks like it has a mild case of the measles, the five spots scattered across the upper half of the planet are actually a rare alignment of some of Jupiter's moons and the shadows they are casting.

ESA / NASA Here, bright blue newly formed stars are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming region and eroding the outer portions of the nebula, with numerous galaxies delivering a grand backdrop for the stellar newcomers.

ESA / NASA The small open star cluster lies in the core of the large emission nebula in Sagittarius, about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. Some of the stars in this cluster are extremely massive and emit intense ultraviolet radiation.

Keystone / ESA / NASA / HO / AP Radar data from NASA's Magellan craft helped scientists stitch together this image of Venus. A European probe recently detected evidence of lighting inside the clouds of sulfuric acid that compose Venus' dense atmosphere.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/sanddunes/Pictures of Mars sand dunes

This is one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras, a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of a star's birth and death is taking place.The Carina Nebula contains stars that are about 10 times as hot and 100 times as massive as the sun.

sand dunes proctor crater mars

ESA / NASA These are views of an unusual phenomenon called a light echo. Light from an erupted star continues outward through a cloud of dust surrounding the star. The light reflects or "echoes" off the dust and then travels to Earth.

NASA / AP This eerie-looking Eagle Nebula, a tall, dense tower of gas, is one of three-quarters of a million photos of the cosmos taken by the Hubble Telescope

Getty Images This image of the Whirlpool Galaxy is one of the sharpest Hubble has ever produced. The telescope has obited the Earth for 15 years and has taken more than 700,000 images of the cosmos.

Reuters / NASA A volcano on the north pole of Jupiter's fourth largest moon, Io, spews a giant plume of dust 200 miles into space.

Lapetus, a moon of Saturn. Notice the giant crater on the southern end.NASA photo taken by Cassini

The vast expanse of the crater Odysseus spreads out below Cassini in this mosaic view

of Saturn's moon Tethys. The crater (450 kilometers or 280 miles across) is a remarkably well-preserved

example of an ancient multi-ringed impact basin: The outer ring is defined by steep, cliff-

like walls that descend to generally broad internal terraces. The inner ring is formed by a prominent, crown-shaped, 140-kilometer (88-mile) diameter circular band of icy mountains. Multi-ring basins are seen on rocky bodies as

well as icy ones. The complex internal structure and multi-

ringed nature of these very large basins are believed to arise from the rebound of intense shock waves that penetrated the body at the

time of impact.

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/CassiniAnd lots more Saturn photos

JPL / NASA This is one of the universe's most photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero Galaxy. Its hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy.

ESA / NASA Resembling the fury of a raging sea, this is actually a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen gas and small amounts of other elements such as oxygen and sulfur within the Omega or Swan Nebula.

Johns Hopkins University / ESA / NASA This ghostly ring is strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can infer its existence by mapping the distorted shapes of the background galaxies.

JPL / NASA This dramatic shot of the Orion Nebula offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. More than 3,000 stars appear here, some of which have never been seen in visible light.

Jeff Hester, Arizona State University / ESA / NASA The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers witnessed this violent event in 1054.

Dan Bayer, The Hutchinson News / AP Comet Hale-Bopp passes over a rural Rice County, Kan., windmill, just north of Hutchinson, Kan., on Thursday, March 27, 1997.

NASA Astronomers used both the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes to identify one of the farthest and most massive galaxies that once inhabited the early universe.

STScI / ESA / NASA The Hubble Space Telescope "caught" the Boomerang Nebula, which is a reflecting cloud of dust and gas with two nearly symmetric lobes of matter that are being ejected from a central star.

NASA / AP Astronomers have confirmed the presence of two new moons around the distant dwarf planet Pluto. Here, Pluto is in the center and Charon is just below it. The moons are named, from far right, Hydra and Nix, respectively.

NASA This nebula is the glowing remains of a dying, sun-like star. This stellar relic is called the Eskimo Nebula because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka.

ST-ECF, ESA / NASA A pair of huge interstellar "twisters" -- eerie funnels reminiscent of terrestrial tornadoes -- are seen in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth.

Peter Tuthill, Palomar / Keck The Red Square is among the most symmetrical objects ever observed. It was created by a dying star spewing its innards from opposite poles into space.

JPL-Caltech, NASA / Reuters Cosmic nebulae usually look like disorganized blobs in space, but astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2006 found one twisted into a double helix, like DNA.

Mercury photos from NASA’s Messenger

An illustration shows the recently named Makemake, a dwarf planet discovered in 2005 and previously called 2005 FY9 or Easterbunny. It is slightly smaller than Pluto, and like Pluto, orbits beyond Neptune.

Arp 194This interacting group contains several galaxies along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas and dust that stretches over 100 000 light years. The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of newborn blue stars. This typically happens when two galaxies interact and gravitationally tug at each other gravitationally.The two nuclei of the colliding galaxies can be seen in the process of merging at the upper left. The bizarre blue bridge of material extending out from the northern component looks as if it connects to a third galaxy but in reality this galaxy is in the background and not connected at all.

A pair of spiral galaxies found in the constellation of Hercules meet in a head-on collision in this new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Fifty-nine new swirling galaxy images from the famed telescope were released on April 24 on the 18th anniversary of its launch.

http://hubblesite.org/news/2008/16

This is a composite, false-color image of the biggest known object in the early universe -- a gas blob with a mass equal to that of 40 billion suns. The object is 12.9 billion light-years away (the bar at lower right represents 10,000 light-years). The blob could be a relic of the earliest stages of galaxy formation. Scientists named it Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen.