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"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler", Albert Einstein
Browsing All posts tagged under »Hubble Space Telescope«
Hubble Tells a Tale of Galactic Collisions
When we look into the distant cosmos, the great majority of the objects we see are galaxies: immense gatherings of stars, planets, gas, dust, and dark matter, showing up in all kind of shapes. This Hubble picture registers several, but the galaxy catalogued as 2MASX J05210136-2521450 stands out at a glance due to its interesting […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Finds Dead Stars …
May 10, 2013
… ‘Polluted with Planet Debris NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place– the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs. These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster […]
The distant cosmos as seen in the infrared
April 12, 2013
At some stage after its birth in the big bang, the universe began to make galaxies. No one knows exactly when, or how, this occurred. For that matter, astronomers do not know how the lineages of our own Milky Way galaxy and its stars trace back to those first galaxies and their first stars, but […]
Hubble Sees Light and Dust in a Nearby Starburst Galaxy
April 6, 2013
Visible as a small, sparkling hook in the dark sky, this beautiful object is known as J082354.96+280621.6, or J082354.96 for short. It is a starburst galaxy, so named because of the incredibly (and unusually) high rate of star formation occurring within it. One way in which astronomers probe the nature and structure of galaxies like […]
Hubble Spotted a Supernova in NGC 5806
August 31, 2012
A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 5806, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Virgin). It lies around 80 million light years from Earth. Also visible in this image is a supernova explosion called SN 2004dg. The exposures that are combined into this image were carried out in early […]
Hubble Spots Rare Gravitational Arc from Distant, Hefty Galaxy Cluster
June 26, 2012
Seeing is believing, except when you don’t believe what you see. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed when the universe was roughly a quarter of […]
Hubble Views the Globular Cluster M10
June 22, 2012
Like many of the most famous objects in the sky, globular cluster Messier 10 was of little interest to its discoverer. Charles Messier, the 18th century French astronomer, cataloged over 100 galaxies and clusters, but was primarily interested in comets. Through the telescopes available at the time, comets, nebulae, globular clusters and galaxies appeared just […]
A New View of the Tarantula Nebula
April 23, 2012
To celebrate its 22nd anniversary in orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope released a dramatic new image of the star-forming region 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula because its glowing filaments resemble spider legs. A new image from all three of NASA’s Great Observatories–Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer–has also been created to mark the event. […]
Hubble Sees Messier 70: Tight and Bright
April 15, 2012
In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the brilliance of the compact center of Messier 70, a globular cluster. Quarters are always tight in globular clusters, where the mutual hold of gravity binds together hundreds of thousands of stars in a small region of space. Having this many shining stars piled on […]
Hubble Spies a Spiral Galaxy Edge-on
March 30, 2012
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the “UFO Galaxy.” NGC 2683 is a spiral galaxy seen almost edge-on, giving it the shape of a classic science fiction spaceship. This is why the astronomers at the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium and Observatory, Cocoa, Fla., gave it this attention-grabbing nickname. While a bird’s eye view lets us […]
Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation
March 2, 2012
This composite image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, formed from a violent collision of massive galaxy clusters. The natural-color image of the galaxies was taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. Superimposed on the […]
Preview of a Forthcoming Supernova
February 24, 2012
NASA’s Hubble Telescope captured an image of Eta Carinae. This image consists of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The field of view is approximately 30 arcseconds across. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star […]
Transforming Galaxies
February 10, 2012
Many of the Universe’s galaxies are like our own, displaying beautiful spiral arms wrapping around a bright nucleus. Examples in this stunning image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, include the tilted galaxy at the bottom of the frame, shining behind a Milky Way star, and the small […]
Hubble Zooms in on Double Nucleus in Andromeda Galaxy
January 12, 2012
A new Hubble Space Telescope image centers on the 100-million-solar-mass black hole at the hub of the neighboring spiral galaxy M31, or the Andromeda galaxy, the only galaxy outside the Milky Way visible to the naked eye and the only other giant galaxy in the local group This is a Hubble image of the 100-million-solar-mass […]
Hubble Breaks New Ground with Discovery of Distant Exploding Star
January 11, 2012
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has looked deep into the distant universe and detected the feeble glow of a star that exploded more than 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of an ambitious survey that will help astronomers place better constraints on the nature of dark energy, the mysterious repulsive […]
A Horseshoe Einstein Ring from Hubble
December 22, 2011
 Explanation: What’s large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above, the gravity of a luminous red galaxy (LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here […]
Distant Galaxy Bursts with Stars
December 22, 2011
This image shows one of the most distant galaxies known, called GN-108036, dating back to 750 million years after the Big Bang that created our universe. The galaxy’s light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. The galaxy was discovered and confirmed using the Subaru telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, respectively, both located atop […]
New evidence for complex molecules on Pluto’s surface
December 20, 2011
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) The new and highly sensitive Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a strong ultraviolet-wavelength absorber on Pluto’s surface, providing new evidence that points to the possibility of complex hydrocarbon and/or nitrile molecules lying on the surface, according to a paper recently published in the Astronomical Journal by […]
Ancient White Dwarf Stars
November 2, 2011
Pushing the limits of its powerful vision, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered the oldest burned-out stars in our Milky Way Galaxy in this image from 2002. These extremely old, dim “clockwork stars” provide a completely independent reading on the age of the universe without relying on measurements of the expansion of the universe. The ancient […]
Astronomers Find Elusive Planets in Decade-Old Hubble Data
October 6, 2011
In a painstaking re-analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images from 1998, astronomers have found visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then. Finding these hidden gems in the Hubble archive gives astronomers an invaluable time machine for comparing much earlier planet orbital motion data to more recent observations. It also demonstrates a […]
Hubble Space Telescope Contributes to Nobel Prize in Physics
October 4, 2011
Observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of a special type of supernovae contributed to research on the expansion of the universe that today was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Krieger-Eisenhower professor in physics and astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University […]
Space Telescopes Reveal Secrets of Turbulent Black Hole
September 29, 2011
A fleet of spacecraft including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered unprecedented details in the surroundings of a supermassive black hole. Observations reveal huge bullets of gas being driven away from the gravitational monster and a corona of very hot gas hovering above the disk of matter that is falling into the black hole. A […]
Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of Post-Starburst Quasars
September 1, 2011
Read more: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1108/1108.6281v1.pdf
Milky Way stars born from intergalactic gas
August 27, 2011
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope may have solved the mystery of how the Milky Way continues to spawn new stars at a consistent rate despite its diminishing gas reserves. They say the galaxy is being supplied by clouds of gas originating from outside of the Milky Way, and that these findings could help refine […]
Hubble Offers a Dazzling ‘Necklace’
August 12, 2011
A giant cosmic necklace glows brightly in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. The object, aptly named the Necklace Nebula, is a recently discovered planetary nebula, the glowing remains of an ordinary, Sun-like star. The nebula consists of a bright ring, measuring 12 trillion miles wide, dotted with dense, bright knots of gas that resemble […]
NASA’s Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto
July 20, 2011
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 — was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to […]
May 13, 2013
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