This supernova might be beautiful, but it’s also lazy. This composite x-ray image shows the remains of a supernova explosion called RCW 103 with a suspected magnetar star—aka “highly magnetized neutron star”—at its center. The magnetar has a mysteriously slow spin, rotating only once ever 6.67 hours, compared to the 10 seconds other magnetars typically take.

N159 is a star factory located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It spans 150 light-years across and is home to many young stars that give off powerful ultraviolet rays, as well as the Papillon Nebula, a butterfly-shaped High-Excitation Blob. This breathtaking image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

One trillion stars inhabit the spiral galaxy Messier 98, located in the constellation of Coma Berenices some 50 million light years from earth. That hot blue glow on the galaxy’s perimeter emanates from its youngest stars.

These two star-forming regions in the Milky Way bare an uncanny resemblance to two beloved spacecraft of 'Star Trek' fame. On the left, you have the saucer and hull of the James T. Kirk-commandeered USS Enterprise. On the right, Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise-D. Thank NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this glittery image of Terzan 5. An Italian-led team of astronomers have discovered the stellar cluster is a galactic fossil from the Milky Way’s earliest days.

Terzan 5 shines 19,000 light years from earth in the constellation of Sagittarius. Astronomers first discovered the globular cluster four decades ago. More recently, they found evidence for two distinct types of stars in the cluster, each with vastly different elements and an age gap of 7 billion years. That means Terzan 5—captured here by ESO’s Very Large Telescope and a few other telescopes—could be a galactic fossil from the Milky Way’s earliest days.

Long, linear dunes encircle the equator of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The dunes are made up of hydrocarbons that have settled from the earth’s atmosphere. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took this image from just 607 miles away during a flyby on July 25.