Space Hubble Telescope News

Arrested Development: Hubble Finds Relic Galaxy Close to Home

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The adventuring cinema archeologist Indiana Jones would be delighted to find a long-sought relic in his own backyard. Astronomers have gotten lucky enough to achieve such a quest. They identified a very rare and odd assemblage of stars that has remained essentially unchanged for the past 10 billion years. The diffuse stellar island provides valuable new insights into the origin and evolution of galaxies billions of years ago.

As far as galaxy evolution goes, this object is clearly a case of “arrested development.” The galaxy, NGC 1277, started its life with a bang long ago, ferociously churning out stars 1,000 times faster than seen in our own Milky Way today. But it abruptly went quiescent as the baby boomer stars aged and grew ever redder. Though Hubble has seen such “red and dead” galaxies in the early universe, one has never been conclusively found nearby. Where the early galaxies are so distant, they are just red dots in Hubble deep-sky images. NGC 1277 offers a unique opportunity to see one up close and personal.

The telltale sign of the galaxy’s state lies in the ancient globular clusters that swarm around it. Massive galaxies tend to have both metal-poor (appearing blue) and metal-rich (appearing red) globular clusters. The red clusters are believed to form as the galaxy forms, while the blue clusters are later brought in as smaller satellites are swallowed by the central galaxy. However, NGC 1277 is almost entirely lacking in blue globular clusters. The red clusters are the strongest evidence that the galaxy went out of the star-making business long ago. However, the lack of blue clusters suggests that NGC 1277 never grew further by gobbling up surrounding galaxies.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Uncovers the Farthest Star Ever Seen

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Through a quirk of nature called “gravitational lensing,” a natural lens in space amplified a very distant star’s light. Astronomers using Hubble took advantage of this phenomenon to pinpoint the faraway star and set a new distance record for the farthest individual star ever seen. They also used the distant star to test one theory of dark matter, and to probe the make-up of a galaxy cluster. The team dubbed the star “Icarus,” after the Greek mythological character who flew too near the Sun on wings of feathers and wax that melted. Its official name is MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble 28th Anniversary Image Captures Roiling Heart of Vast Stellar Nursery

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For 28 years, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been delivering breathtaking views of the universe. Although the telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations of over 40,000 space objects, it is still uncovering stunning celestial gems.

The latest offering is this image of the Lagoon Nebula to celebrate the telescope’s anniversary. Hubble shows this vast stellar nursery in stunning unprecedented detail.

At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Stellar Thief Is the Surviving Companion to a Supernova

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In the fading afterglow of a supernova explosion, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have photographed the first image of a surviving companion to a supernova. This is the most compelling evidence that some supernovas originate in double-star systems. The companion to supernova 2001ig’s progenitor star was no innocent bystander to the explosion—it siphoned off almost all of the hydrogen from the doomed star’s stellar envelope. SN 2001ig is categorized as a Type IIb stripped-envelope supernova, which is a relatively rare type of supernova in which most, but not all, of the hydrogen is gone prior to the explosion. Perhaps as many as half of all stripped-envelope supernovas have companions—the other half lose their outer envelopes via stellar winds.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Astronomers Release Most Complete Ultraviolet-Light Survey of Nearby Galaxies

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Much of the light in the universe comes from stars, and yet, star formation is still a vexing question in astronomy.

To piece together a more complete picture of star birth, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at star formation among galaxies in our own cosmic back yard. The survey of 50 galaxies in the local universe, called the Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS), is the sharpest, most comprehensive ultraviolet-light look at nearby star-forming galaxies.

The LEGUS survey combines new Hubble observations with archival Hubble images for star-forming spiral and dwarf galaxies, offering a valuable resource for understanding the complexities of star formation and galaxy evolution. Astronomers are releasing the star catalogs for each of the LEGUS galaxies and cluster catalogs for 30 of the galaxies, as well as images of the galaxies themselves. The catalogs provide detailed information on young, massive stars and star clusters, and how their environment affects their development.

The local universe, stretching across the gulf of space between us and the great Virgo cluster of galaxies, is ideal for study because astronomers can amass a big enough sample of galaxies, and yet, the galaxies are close enough to Earth that Hubble can resolve individual stars. The survey will also help astronomers understand galaxies in the distant universe, where rapid star formation took place.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Galaxy Blazes with New Stars Born from Close Encounter

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One doesn't need a Ph.D. in astrophysics to recognize there is something odd-looking about this otherwise beautiful galaxy, NCG 4485. Like the Batman character Two-Face, one side looks normal, but the other side looks contorted with a firestorm of star formation going on. Why the colorful asymmetry in an island star city many thousands of light-years across? The clue is off the edge of the photo. It's another galaxy, NGC 4490, that swept by NGC 4485 millions of years ago. The gravitational taffy pull between the two galaxies compressed interstellar gas to trigger a flurry of new star birth as seen in the abundance of young blue stars and pinkish nebulas. So, out of a near-collision between two galaxies comes stellar renewal and birth. It's a trademark of our compulsive universe where even things as big as galaxies can go bump in the night.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Views Major Storm On Saturn

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The accompanying movie shows the Saturn white spot, a great storm in the equatorial region of Saturn, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field/Planetary Camera in November 1990. The white spot was discovered by amateur astronomers in September, 1990. Such storms are rare: the last one in the equatorial region occurred in 1933. The movie contains one complete rotation of Saturn. The storm extends completely around the planet, in some places it appears as great masses of clouds and in others as well organized turbulence.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 "Gang Of Four"

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This is a composite HST image taken in visible light showing the temporal evolution of the brightest region of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9. In this false-color representation, different shades of red color are used to display different intensities of light.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Confirms Abundance of Protoplanetary Disks around Newborn Stars

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Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that the planet-making process is common in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Observations clearly reveal that great disks of dust – the raw material for planet formation – are swirling around at least half and probably many more of the stars in the Orion Nebula, a star-forming region only 1,500 light-years from Earth.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Space Telescope Measures Precise Distance to the Most Remote Galaxy Yet

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Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have announced the most accurate distance measurement yet to the remote galaxy M100, located in the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

This measurement will help provide a precise calculation of the expansion rate of the universe, called the Hubble Constant, which is crucial to determining the age and size of the universe. They calculated the distance - 56 million light-years - by measuring the brightness of several Cepheid variable stars in the galaxy. Cepheid variables are a class of pulsating star used as "milepost markers" to calculate the distance to nearby galaxies. The bottom image shows a region of M100. This Hubble telescope image is a close-up of a region of the galaxy M100. The top three frames, taken over several weeks, reveal the rhythmic changes in brightness of a Cepheid variable.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Finds Oxygen Atmosphere on Jupiter's Moon, Europa

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Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have identified the presence of an extremely tenuous atmosphere of molecular oxygen around Jupiter's moon, Europa. This makes Europa the first satellite ever found to have an oxygen atmosphere and only the third such solar system object beyond Earth to possess this gaseous element.

If all the oxygen on Europa were compressed to the surface pressure of Earth's atmosphere, it would fill only about a dozen Astrodome-sized stadiums.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Monitors Weather on Neighboring Planets

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What's the weather for Mars and Venus? The Hubble telescope has given astronomers a peek. The telescope is serving as an interplanetary weather satellite for studying the climate on Earth's neighboring worlds, Mars and Venus.

To the surprise of researchers, Hubble is showing that the Martian climate has changed considerably since the unmanned Viking spacecraft visited the Red Planet in the mid-1970s. The Hubble pictures indicate that the planet is cooler, clearer, and drier than a couple of decades ago. In striking contrast, Hubble's observations of Venus show that the atmosphere continues to recover from an intense bout of sulfuric "acid rain," triggered by the suspected eruption of a volcano in the late 1970s.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Asteroid or Mini-Planet? Hubble Maps the Ancient Surface of Vesta

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Hubble telescope images of the asteroid Vesta are providing astronomers with a glimpse of the oldest terrain ever seen in the solar system and a peek into a broken-off section of the "mini-planet," which exposes its interior.

Hubble's pictures provide the best view yet of Vesta's complex surface, which has geologic features similar to those of terrestrial worlds such as Earth or Mars. The asteroid's ancient surface, battered by collisions eons ago, allows astronomers to peer below the asteroid's crust and into its past. These images trace the asteroid through a full rotation.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Embryonic Stars Emerge from Interstellar "Eggs"

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Eerie, dramatic pictures from the Hubble telescope show newborn stars emerging from "eggs" – not the barnyard variety – but rather, dense, compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs). Hubble found the "EGGs," appropriately enough, in the Eagle nebula, a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.

These striking pictures resolve the EGGs at the tip of finger-like features protruding from monstrous columns of cold gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (also called M16). The columns – dubbed "elephant trunks" – protrude from the wall of a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen, like stalagmites rising above the floor of a cavern. Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow as they accumulate more and more mass from their surroundings.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Panoramic Hubble Picture Surveys Star Birth, Proto-Planetary Systems in the Great Orion Nebula

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This spectacular color panorama of the center of the Orion Nebula is one of the largest pictures ever assembled from individual images taken with the Hubble telescope.

The seemingly infinite tapestry of rich detail revealed by Hubble shows a churning, turbulent star factory set within a maelstrom of flowing, luminescent gas. Though this 2.5-light-year-wide view is a small portion of the entire nebula, it includes a star cluster and almost all of the light from the bright glowing clouds of gas that make up the nebula.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble's Deepest View of the Universe Unveils Bewildering Galaxies across Billions of Years

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One peek into a small part of the sky, one giant leap back in time. The Hubble telescope has provided mankind's deepest, most detailed visible view of the universe.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space, because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500galaxies at various stages of evolution.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Disk around Star May Be Warped by Unseen Planet

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The Hubble telescope has provided strong evidence for the existence of a roughly Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris.

Detailed Hubble snapshots of the inner region of the 200-billion-mile-wide dust disk encircling the star reveal an unexpected warp. Researchers say the warp can be best explained as caused by the tug of an unseen planet. This is a visible-light image of the disk, which looks like a spindle because it is tilted nearly edge-on to our view. The bright star, which lies at the center of the disk, is blocked out in this image.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Reveals Surface of Pluto for First Time

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For the first time since Pluto's discovery 66 years ago, astronomers have at last directly seen details on the surface of the solar system's farthest known planet.

The Hubble telescope's snapshots of nearly the entire surface of Pluto, taken as the planet rotated through a 6.4-day period, show that Pluto is a complex object, with more large-scale contrast than any planet, except Earth. Topographic features such as basins, or fresh impact craters may cause some of the variations across Pluto's surface.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Probes Inner Region of Comet Hyakutake

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The Hubble telescope snapped pictures of comet Hyakutake March 25, 1996, when the comet was just 9.3 million miles from Earth.

Unlike most of the published images of Hyakutake, the Hubble pictures focus on a very small region near the heart of the comet, the icy, solid nucleus. The images provide an exceptionally clear view of the near-nucleus region of comet Hyakutake. The image above is a complete view of the 2,070-mile-wide (3,340-kilometer-wide) comet. This picture shows that most of the dust is being produced on the comet's sunward-facing hemisphere. Also at upper left are three small pieces that have broken off the comet and are forming their own tails.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
Hubble Finds Thousands of Gaseous Fragments Surrounding a Dying Star

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Resembling a bizarre setting from a science fiction movie, dramatic images sent back by the Hubble telescope have surprised astronomers by uncovering thousands of gigantic, tadpole-shaped objects surrounding a dying star.

Dubbed "cometary knots" because their glowing heads and gossamer tails superficially resemble comets, they are probably the result of a dying star's final outbursts. Though ground-based telescopic observations have hinted at such objects, they have not previously been seen in such abundance, say researchers. Hubble captured thousands of these knots from a doomed star in the Helix Nebula, the closest planetary nebula to Earth - 450 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.

(More at HubbleSite.com)
 
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