Goddard's Astrophysics Gallery

This gallery gathers together visualizations and narrated videos about black holes. A black hole is a celestial object whose gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape it. Astronomers observe two main types of black holes. Stellar-mass black holes contain three to dozens of times the mass of our Sun. They form when the cores of very massive stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight, compressing large amounts of matter into a tiny space. Supermassive black holes, with masses up to billions of times the Sun’s, can be found at the centers of most big galaxies. Although a black hole does not emit light, matter falling toward it collects in a hot, glowing accretion disk that astronomers can detect.

An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun. Of particular interest are planets that may orbit in their star’s habitable zone, the distance from a star where temperatures allow liquid water to persist on a planet’s surface, given a suitable atmosphere. Since water is necessary for life as we know it, its presence is required for worlds to be considered capable of supporting life. Exoplanets can also teach us more about planets in the universe, such as the diversity of planets in the galaxy, how they interact with their host stars and with each other, and how common solar systems like ours really are. Using a wide variety of methods, astronomers have discovered more than 3,700 exoplanets to date, largely thanks to NASA's Kepler/K2 mission. Other NASA missions also play a key role in detecting exoplanets. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which launched in April 2018, will monitor 200,000 of the brightest dwarf stars for transiting exoplanets. Future missions like the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study these discovered planets in greater detail, helping determine their composition. Researchers in NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration are leveraging work across disciplines to better understand exoplanets. Areas like planet-star interactions, planetary formation, and even study of the Earth itself enable researchers to develop tools to learn more about how exoplanets evolve, and what ingredients are necessary to support life.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has completed its primary mission, and it will continue to explore the high-energy cosmos in unprecedented detail. These pages gather together media products associated with Fermi news releases from before its 2008 launch, when it was known as GLAST, to the start of its extended mission in August 2013.

Watch the video below for a quick look at science highlights from Fermi's first five years in space.

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Fermi detects gamma rays, the most powerful form of light, with energies thousands to billions of times greater than the visible spectrum.

The mission has discovered pulsars, proved that supernova remnants can accelerate particles to near the speed of light, monitored eruptions of black holes in distant galaxies, and found giant bubbles linked to the central black hole in our own galaxy.

For more information about the Fermi mission, visit its NASA webpage.

NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer continues to provide astronomers with a unique tool for exploring many different classes of astronomical phenomena, from gamma-ray bursts and supernovae to spinning neutron stars, outbursts from black holes, and even comets and asteroids. These pages gather together media products associated with Swift news releases from before its 2004 launch to its 10th anniversary in 2014.

For more information about the Swift mission, visit its NASA webpage.

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