Imagine what it would be like to get booted out of your galaxy. Based on observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers report that a pair of binary stars have been flung from their home. When a massive star turns into a supernova, its core can collapse in on itself, creating a neutron star. Sometimes that collapse is so strong, though, that it not only ejects what’s left of the star completely, but also it manages to drag along a companion as well.

Ever look out the window and watch the clouds go by? NASA’s Curiosity rover, hanging out on Mars, does the same thing. Scientists believe these clouds are mostly water ice, but they also go by another name—“noctilucent” clouds. That means they hover so high above the surface that the Sun illuminates them, even during Martian nighttime. Consider them Curiosity’s night-light.

The OSIRIS REx spacecraft, orbiting the asteroid Bennu, has a mandate to collect some samples from this ancient rock to bring back to Earth. As it turns out, this space rock is covered in um, a lot of rocks—so NASA is enlisting the help of the public to help count the boulders and map the surface. To get a sense of the scale, the light-colored hunk in the upper left corner is 24 feet wide, way too bulky for the trip home.

Here on Earth we think the cameras in our pockets are fancy, but nothing comes close to Hubble in space. Take this photo of disc spiral galaxy NGC 2903. Astronomers study such spirals to learn about the large clumps of gas and dust that linger at their centers. This bunching often happens where supermassive black holes begin to form, leading to answers about how black holes are born in the first place. Try doing anything like that on your dual-camera phone.

More Hubble eye candy: We’re seeing the stunning beauty of Messier 90 in an image combining visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light, captured by the space telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. M90 is some 60 million light years away, which means that when the light first left this galaxy when the dinosaurs (if you believe in that sort of thing) had just gone extinct.

Near the northern ice cap on Mars, sits the Inuvik Crater, named after a Canadian town. It’s an impact crater, seen here in false color; scientists apply different image filters to draw out features that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example, note the contrast between the smooth sediment and the crater’s center rippling dunes.