You Won't Believe Your Eyes | Hubble Images SHOCK Astronomers

 the hubble space telescope remains one of humanity's greatest inventions orbiting the earth 340 miles overhead it has been continuously capturing mind-blowing images of the cosmos for over 30 years and has greatly influenced our understanding of the universe we find ourselves in welcome to fact nominal today we'll be looking through the lens of the hubble space telescope at some mind-blowing discoveries that you'll have to see to believe the pillars of creation the pillars of creation are one of the hubble space telescopes most famous photos and it's easy to see why this surreal picture depicts a gargantuan nebula with three distinct pillars which sits in front of a brilliant background of color and stars although the structure is a whopping 4 light years high it is located 7 000 light years from earth which makes seeing it rather difficult to say the least as is true of all nebulae the pillars of creation are made out of cosmic dust and gas with the majority of this gas being hydrogen it will eventually give birth to the next generation of stars the southern crab nebula the southern crab nebula is another great photo captured by the hubble space telescope that really shows just how natural formations in the cosmos can resemble objects back here on earth to an almost unsettling extent this picture depicts an almost perfectly symmetrical nebula with a bright center and four arms that stretch out from it such that the entire structure resembles an hourglass this symmetry was created by an uneven binary star system of two stars orbiting each other one of those stars has already reached the end of its life and is now a white dwarf which is what our own sun will eventually turn into in a few billion years the tadpole galaxy this absolutely mind-blowing picture from the hubble space telescope really challenges the classic view of what galaxies look like while most galaxies have quite a neat structure this galaxy has an unusually long tale of stars which makes the galaxy resemble a tadpole this has likely happened as a result of

 collisions with other galaxies or even

 supernova explosions within the galaxy which could have ejected masses of stars resulting in a warped galaxy which really highlights just how weird and wacky the universe can get another small but cool feature of this

 picture is the sheer number of galaxies

 that appear in the background of this image which further enhances this astonishing picture the mice galaxies sticking with the theme of odd galaxies the mice galaxies in the coma berenices constellation get their name from the long tail sticking out the back of the smaller galaxy on the right side this great capture from the hubble space telescope shows two side-by-side spiral galaxies locked in a dance to the death the larger of the two galaxies ngc 4676b appears to be stripping material from the smaller ngc 4676a this is due to the massive gravitational pull the larger galaxy enjoys as a result of its heavier mass the sheer proximity of the mice galaxies in unequal size means the locked pair will eventually violently crash into each other grab your popcorn and get ready for the light show the retina nebula if you didn't know this was a photo of space you could be fooled into thinking this

 was an abstract painting of the human eye aptly named the retina nebula the hubble space telescope captured this breathtaking image of the aftermath of a dying star a hot white dwarf sits behind this dense cloud of symmetrical gas illuminating the various elements in specific colors there is oxygen which is blue hydrogen which is green and nitrogen which is red together these elements make an absolutely stunning eye-like structure which is both awe-inspiring and creepy at the same time it just seems odd that such a familiar

 object could appear naturally in space

 veil nebula the veil nebula could quite easily win a competition for the best-looking nebula in space located in the cygnus loop the veil nebula is the remnants of a supernova that occurred between 10 and 20 000 years ago the nebula consists of a double helix structure of heated space gas and dust with an unusually vast and beautiful mix of colors including blue red green and violet it looks eerily similar to a wormhole

 you might see in modern science fiction

 as gorgeous as it is this nebula will

 never look the same as in this photo

 the cloud is expanding at a velocity of

 about 1.5 million kilometers per hour

 a space ghost who doesn't love a good ghost story this next image consists of two large galaxies surrounded by a circle of blue light emitted from various nearby stars the circle of blue light closely resembles the outline of a head while the two galaxies look unnaturally similar to eyes the result is what looks like a creepy human face staring at us from deep within the cosmos if that isn't enough to send shivers down your spine i don't know what is luckily for us this ghastly being is located many many light years away and can hurt us for now a thousand worlds at first glance this unassuming image from the hubble space telescope might not seem that impressive but it's actually quite mind-blowing when you take a closer look the many small bright objects might look like stars at first until you realize that they are actually galaxies there are actually over ten thousand of galaxies contained in this one tiny image with each galaxy able to hold trillions of stars it's truly hard to comprehend the sheer scale of these objects as many of them are a magnitude bigger than our own solar system this image is completely mind-blowing and a perfect way of highlighting just how tiny we are in comparison to the rest of the universe cat's eye nebula it turns out cats beat us into space and they've been there for a while the katsine nebula is another fascinating cosmic structure that is both beautiful in appearance and thought-provoking due to its crazy structure this nebula depicts a small white dot at the center of the image surrounded by more than 11 circular shells of blue and orange the white dot is actually a sun-like star which has pulsed every 1500 years giving off dust shells of ejected matter each of which contain as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined the result of this natural process is a

 complex structure that resembles a cat's eye where the star is the pupil and the first shell is the iris this beautiful photo from the hubble space telescope really emphasizes the variety of fascinating structures that can be found throughout the universe whirlpool galaxy another funky looking galaxy captured by the hubble space telescope is the whirlpool galaxy hubble took a few snaps of this impressive structure first in 1996 then again in 2001 2005 and again in 2011.

 the appropriately named whirlpool galaxy is a spiral galaxy with many distinct tones of red and blue gurgling towards the galactic center this is another great example of an object found deep in the cosmos that resembles something back on earth one thing that is easy to overlook in

 this image is ngc 5195 the small galaxy

 in the top right hand corner which looks like it's being hugged by the main galaxy these celestial neighbors are in fact passing each other by too far away to collide or merge earth 2.0 for the final entry on our list we have an object that resembles the entire earth itself this image taken by the hubble space telescope depicts a large round blue cloud of gas and dust with some patches of yellow first discovered in 1787 by william herschel a prominent british astronomer the bubble nebula looks like

 an asymmetrical translucent copy of earth the star forming this nebula is 45 times more massive than our sun the gas on this star gets so hot that it blows off into space as a stellar wind traveling at over 4 million miles per hour sweeping up the cold interstellar gas in front of it this creates the growing spherical outer edge of the bubble much like a plow piles up snow in front of it as it moves forward well which nebula was your favorite tell us in the comments and if you learned something new hit the like button and subscribe to fact nominal for more awesome space articles like this