The Gamma Ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) is an astounding mission to explore the most extreme environments in the universe, search for signs of new laws of physics, what composes the mysterious dark matter, and secrets found in gamma ray explosions.
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http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080614.html

The Milky Way is a large place, and getting all the stars together, even from just the inner galaxy, for a family photo requires a big canvas. The imaging team from the Spitzer Space Telescope today unveiled the largest, highest resolution infrared picture ever taken of the Milky Way.
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Explanation: Uncomfortably close Typhoon Rammasun (right) and 25 million light-year distant galaxy M101 don’t seem to have much in common. For starters, Rammasun was only a thousand kilometers or so across while M101 (aka the Pinwheel Galaxy) spans about 170,000 light-years, making them vastly dissimilar in scale, not to mention the different physical environments that […]

Need more data …
Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding galaxies has been released from the several terabytes of archived raw images from the NASA/ESA Hubble […]

Profundis.
And this week Enrique Gaztanaga at the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC) in Spain and colleagues have used the MareNostrum, the most powerful (and beautiful) supercomputer in Europe, to do a similarly-sized simulation involving 1011 particles (pdf). The image (top, left) of the large-scale structure of a simulated universe comes from their data.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2007/11/mapping-universe.html

By mapping the distribution of X-rays in different energy bands, the Chandra image traces the distribution of chemical elements ejected in the supernova. The results imply that the explosion was not symmetrical. For example, blue (silicon and sulfur) and green (magnesium) are seen strongly in the upper right, while yellow and orange (oxygen) dominate the […]