Space Pictures: Fly Into 46 Real Telescope Photos in “Planetarium: Deep Space” 6+

Yes. All 46 are real photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, ESO, NOIRLab and the Event Horizon Telescope. The source is printed on each photo. If the colours were added — because the telescope was recording heat or X-rays your eyes cannot see — the card says so out loud.

A place where so much stuff is squeezed into so small a space that its gravity will not let go of anything, not even light. That is why it looks like a hole: nothing comes back out to be seen. It is not a vacuum cleaner — far away from it, gravity behaves normally, and the Earth would keep circling the Sun even if the Sun became one.

Like a dark circle inside a bright orange ring. The ring is glowing gas whipping around the hole; the dark part is the shadow of the hole itself. The first such photo was taken in 2019 of M87*, a black hole in the galaxy M87, and it is in the game — you are looking at the actual picture, not a painting.

The usual way: a star far heavier than the Sun runs out of fuel, and nothing is left to hold it up against its own weight, so its core falls inward and never stops. The giant black holes at the centres of galaxies are still being argued about — they may have grown by swallowing gas and each other for billions of years.

Honest answer: nobody knows what is at the very centre, because our physics stops working there. What we can measure is the mass and the edge — the line past which nothing returns, called the event horizon. M87* weighs as much as 6.5 billion Suns.

No one can tell you, and that is not a dodge — no signal can come back out to report. Physicists have maths for the edge and no agreed maths for the middle. “We do not know yet” is a real scientific answer, and this is one of the places it applies.

A huge cloud of gas and dust between the stars. Some are nurseries where new stars are switching on, like the Orion Nebula. Others are the leftovers of a star that died, like the Crab Nebula. Same word, opposite ends of a star’s life — which is why the game keeps them on two different shelves.

Three towers of cold gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years away, with baby stars growing inside them like chicks in eggs. Light takes about four years just to cross from the foot of one tower to its top. Hubble photographed them in 1995; Webb photographed them again in 2022.

Gravity pulls a cold cloud of gas together. As the clump shrinks it gets hotter and hotter in the middle, and when it is hot enough the middle starts fusing hydrogen — that is the moment a star switches on. Our Sun was born in a cloud like the ones in these pictures.

The explosion of a heavy star at the end of its life. For a few weeks it can outshine everything else in its galaxy. It scatters the atoms the star made — including the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones — back into space, where they end up in the next batch of stars and planets.

A galaxy is an enormous island of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity. Ours is the Milky Way. When people say “the galaxy” they usually mean ours, but there are other galaxies in every direction — seven of them are in this game, photographed one by one.

Our own galaxy — a flat spiral of a few hundred billion stars with our Sun sitting about two-thirds of the way out from the middle. The pale band you see on a dark night is that flat disc seen edge-on from inside it. At its centre is a black hole called Sagittarius A*, photographed in 2022.

Somewhere between about 100 and 400 billion. Nobody has counted them; astronomers weigh the galaxy and divide by the weight of a typical star, and the range is that wide because most stars are small, dim and hard to spot. Even the low end is more stars than every grain of sand on a long beach.

Very roughly 10²² — a 1 with 22 zeros after it — in the part we can see. That number comes from multiplying an estimated number of galaxies by an estimated number of stars each, so treat it as “more than anyone can picture” rather than a count.

The estimates genuinely disagree. A 2016 study of Hubble deep-field images argued for about 2 trillion; newer work using measurements from the New Horizons spacecraft, far from the Sun’s glare, suggests a few hundred billion. Either way the honest phrase is “hundreds of billions at least, and we keep finding more.”

The big spiral galaxy nearest to ours, and the farthest thing a person can see without a telescope — a faint smudge about six times wider than the full Moon. It is also heading our way: in roughly four billion years it and the Milky Way will merge.

About 2.5 million light-years. That means the light entering your eye tonight left Andromeda 2.5 million years ago, before our species existed. You are not looking at the galaxy — you are looking at a very old photograph of it that took 2.5 million years to arrive.

The record-holders are giant elliptical galaxies at the centres of big clusters, such as IC 1101, thought to span a few million light-years. The number keeps moving because a galaxy has no crisp edge — it just fades out, so where you stop measuring changes the answer.

Not a length of time — a distance: how far light travels in one year, about 9.5 trillion kilometres (6 trillion miles). Light crosses from the Moon to your eye in about one second, and takes eight minutes from the Sun. Everything in this game is measured in light-years because kilometres run out of room.

The part we can see is about 93 billion light-years across, because space itself has been stretching while the light travelled. Whether the whole universe is bigger than that — and by how much — nobody knows; it may have no edge at all. We only ever get to talk about the part whose light has had time to reach us.

About 13.8 billion years, worked out from how fast everything is flying apart and from the faint leftover glow of the hot early universe. The oldest galaxies in Webb’s deep-field photo in this game are seen as they were only a few hundred million years after that start.

As far as light has had time to travel since the universe began — so the limit is not a wall, it is a clock. That is what the game’s last shelf, “the edge of the visible,” is about: Webb’s deep field is a photo of a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, and it is full of galaxies.

The usual candidates — UY Scuti, Stephenson 2-18 and a few others — are red supergiants perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 times wider than the Sun. The list keeps changing, because these stars are swollen and fuzzy-edged and their distances are hard to pin down. Betelgeuse, which is in the game, is a smaller member of the same family.

A group of stars born from the same cloud at about the same time, still travelling together. Young open clusters like the Pleiades hold a few hundred loosely spaced stars; they drift apart over millions of years.

A tight ball of very old stars orbiting a galaxy — the “balls of stars” shelf in the game. Omega Centauri, the biggest one around the Milky Way, packs on the order of ten million stars into a sphere where the night sky would never get properly dark.

A young cluster about 440 light-years away, roughly 100 million years old — babies, as stars go. Most people can pick out six or seven of its stars with the naked eye, and a telescope shows hundreds still wrapped in the blue haze of dust they are ploughing through.

Something that has weight and pulls on stars and galaxies, but gives off no light at all, so we have never seen it — only its pull. Galaxies spin too fast for the stuff we can see to hold them together, so something invisible must be there. What it actually is remains an open question.

A telescope in orbit around the Earth, launched in 1990 and still working. Being above the air is the whole point: no atmosphere to blur or dim the view. Most of the sharp colour photos people recognise as “space pictures” came from Hubble, and many of them are in this game.

Hubble’s bigger successor, launched at the end of 2021 and parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. It sees heat rather than visible light, which lets it look straight through dust clouds and pick up galaxies so distant their light has stretched into infrared. Those james webb telescope images are the newest photos in this game.

No. There are no tasks, no points, no timer and no way to fail. It is a planetarium: you wander, look and listen, and the reward is the picture. Children who want a challenge should try our other space games; this one is for the child who wants to stare at something enormous.

Free, no ads, no account, no download — it runs in the browser on a computer or a tablet. The bigger the screen, the better, because the photos are 2560 pixels wide and full of detail worth hunting for.