I don’t know about you, but I think beavers are some of the cutest animals on the Planet.
Phil Plait has this difficult task every year: to pick the best or most astonishing astronomy pictures of the last 12 months. This year he couldn’t cut them down to just 10, so we have 21 beautiful photographs documenting the universe of 2012. Most of these were taken with the Hubble telescope, but not all. Here they are:
When a 30-Octillion-Ton Baby Throws an Epic Fit
This is Sharpless 2-106, a baby star just getting its start. It has a disk of material swirling around it (too small to see here), and this can focus twin beams of matter and energy which blast away from it like the beams of a lighthouse. This picture was taken by the Hubble.
