Astronomers have found a spiral galaxy that may be spinning to the beat of a different cosmic drummer. To the surprise of astronomers, the galaxy, called NGC 4622, appears to be rotating in the opposite direction to what they expected. Pictures from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope helped astronomers determine that the galaxy may be spinning clockwise by showing which side of the galaxy is closer to Earth. This Hubble telescope photo of the oddball galaxy is presented by the Hubble Heritage team. The image shows NGC 4622 and its outer pair of winding arms full of new stars [shown in blue].
Hubble Uncovers Smallest Moons Yet Seen Around Uranus
Astronomers have discovered two of the smallest moons yet found around Uranus. The new moons, uncovered by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, are about 8 to 10 miles across (12 to 16 km) - about the size of San Francisco. The two moons are so faint they eluded detection by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which discovered 10 small satellites when it flew by the gas giant planet in 1986. The newly detected moons are orbiting even closer to the planet than the five major Uranian satellites, which are several hundred miles wide. The two new satellites are the first inner moons of Uranus discovered from an Earth-based telescope in more than 50 years. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) will announce the finding today. The Hubble telescope observations also helped astronomers confirm the discovery of another tiny moon that had originally been spotted in Voyager pictures.
Heritage Project Celebrates Five Years of Harvesting the Best Images from Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Heritage team of astronomers, who assemble many of the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's most stunning pictures, is celebrating its five-year anniversary with the release of the picturesque Sombrero galaxy. One of the largest Hubble mosaics ever assembled, this magnificent galaxy has an apparent diameter that is nearly one-fifth the diameter of the full moon. The team used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to take six pictures of the galaxy and then stitched them together to create the final composite image. The photo reveals a swarm of stars in a pancake-shaped disk as well as a glowing central halo of stars.
Hubble Photographs Turbulent Neighborhood Near Eruptive Star
Dramatic dark dust knots and complex structures are sculpted by the high-velocity stellar winds and high-energy radiation from the ultra-luminous variable star called Eta Carinae. This image shows a region in the Carina Nebula between two large clusters of some of the most massive and hottest known stars. This NASA Hubble Space Telescope close-up view shows only a three light-year-wide portion of the entire Carina Nebula, which has a diameter of over 200 light-years. Taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in July 2002, this color image is a composite of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared filters that have been assigned the colors blue, green, and red, respectively.
NASA's Hubble Sees Martian Moon Orbiting the Red Planet
While photographing Mars, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet. Discovered in 1877, the diminutive, potato-shaped moon is so small that it appears star-like in the Hubble pictures. Phobos orbits Mars in just 7 hours and 39 minutes, which is faster than Mars rotates. The moon’s orbit is very slowly shrinking, meaning it will eventually shatter under Mars’ gravitational pull, or crash into the planet. Hubble took 13 separate exposures over 22 minutes to create a time-lapse video showing the moon’s orbital path.
NASA's Upcoming Webb Telescope Will Survey Saturn and Titan
Among the most intriguing solar-system targets Webb will study after its launch in 2021 are Saturn and its moon, Titan. Saturn’s weather undergoes seasons like Earth, except that they last 7-1/2 years. Occasionally, storms encircle the planet, making Saturnian weather an active field of study. Titan also experiences weather, since it is the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Methane rain fills surface seas that then evaporate and fuel more storms, much like the water cycle on Earth. Webb will investigate seasonal changes on both Saturn and Titan over the duration of its mission.
Finding common table salt — sodium chloride — on the surface of a moon is more than just a scientific curiosity when that moon is Europa, a potential abode of life.
If the salt came from the briny subsurface ocean of Europa, a satellite of Jupiter, that ocean may chemically resemble Earth's oceans more than previously thought. Because Europa's solid, icy crust is geologically young it has been suspected that whatever salts exist on the surface may come from the ocean below, which might host microorganisms.
Using visible-light spectral analysis, planetary scientists at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that the yellow color visible on portions of the surface of Europa is sodium chloride. They reached this conclusion with spectroscopic data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Researchers were able to identify a distinct absorption in the visible spectrum which matches how salt would look when irradiated by the Sun.
Tara Regio is the yellowish area to left of center, in this NASA Galileo image of Europa’s surface. This region of geologic chaos is the area researchers identified an abundance of sodium chloride.
The finding was published in Science Advances on June 12.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Resolves a Dark "x" Across the Nucleus of M51
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with what may be their first direct view of an immense ring of dust which fuels a massive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy M51, located 20 million light-years away. Surprisingly, they found that the ring is standing almost perpendicularly to the relatively flat spiral galaxy, like a top spinning on its side with respect to the floor. Even more surprising is the discovery of a secondary ring or dust lane which is contrary to all expectations.
A NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a region of the Great Nebula in Orion, as imaged by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
This is one of the nearest regions of very recent star formation (300,000 years ago). The nebula is a giant gas cloud illuminated by the brightest of the young hot stars at the top of the picture. Many of the fainter young stars are surrounded by disks of dust and gas, that are slightly more than twice the diameter of the solar system (or 100 Astronomical Units in diameter).
Hubble Confirms Abundance of Protoplanetary Disks around Newborn Stars
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.
Hubble Reveals Huge Crater on the Surface of the Asteroid Vesta
Astronomers have used the Hubble Space telescope to discover a giant impact crater on the asteroid Vesta. The crater is a link in a chain of events thought responsible for forming a distinctive class of tiny asteroids as well as some meteorites that have reached the Earth.
The giant crater is 285 miles across, which is nearly equal to Vesta's 330-mile diameter. If Earth had a crater of proportional size, it would fill the Pacific Ocean basin. Astronomers had predicted the existence of one or more large craters, reasoning that if Vesta is the true "parent body" of some smaller asteroids then it should have the wound of a major impact that was catastrophic enough to knock off big chunks. In this Hubble picture of Vesta, a "nub" at the bottom of the asteroid is suggestive of a catastrophic impact.
Using the Hubble telescope's visible-light camera, astronomers for the first time this century have detected clouds in the Northern Hemisphere of Uranus. The snapshots show banded structure and multiple clouds. Using these images, astronomers plan to measure the wind speeds in the Northern Hemisphere for the first time.
The clouds can be seen along the planet's right edge [the bright dots]. Another cloud [faint white dot] is barely visible near the bottom of the blue band. The clouds are almost as large as continents on Earth, such as Europe.
Astronomers Discover an Infrared Background Glow in the Universe
Astronomers have assembled the first definitive detection of a background infrared glow across the sky produced by dust warmed by all the stars that have existed since the beginning of time. For scientists, the discovery of this "fossil radiation" is akin to turning out all the lights in a bedroom only to find the walls, floor, and ceiling aglow with an eerie luminescence.
The telltale infrared radiation puts a limit on the total amount of energy released by all the stars in the universe. Astronomers say this will greatly improve development of models explaining how stars and galaxies were born and evolved after the Big Bang. These three pictures are maps of the full sky as seen in infrared light. The top picture represents the brightness of the full sky as seen in infrared light. The middle picture is a view of the sky after the foreground glow of the solar system dust has been extracted. After the infrared light from our solar system and galaxy has been removed, what remains is a uniform, cosmic, infrared background.
A vibrant celestial photo album of some of NASA Hubble Space Telescope's most stunning views of the universe is being unveiled today on the Internet. Called the Hubble Heritage Program, this technicolor gallery is being assembled by a team of astronomers at Hubble's science operations center, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. The four images released today are (top row, left to right) spiral galaxy NGC 7742, Saturn, and (bottom row, left to right) the Sagittarius Star Cloud and the Bubble Nebula.
A star 40 times more massive than the Sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble telescope has captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble's surface is not smooth like a soap bubble's. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.
NASA's Hubble Discovers New Rings and Moons Around Uranus
Even though the Voyager 2 spacecraft paid a close-up visit to Uranus in 1986, the distant planet continues revealing surprises to the eye of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble's high sensitivity and sharp view has uncovered a pair of giant rings girdling the planet. The largest is twice the diameter of the planet's previously known ring system, first discovered in the late 1970s. Hubble also spied two small satellites, named Mab and Cupid. One of the satellites shares an orbit with the outermost of the new rings. The satellite is probably the source of fresh dust that keeps replenishing the ring with new material knocked off the satellite from meteoroid impacts. Without such replenishment, the dust in the ring would slowly spiral in toward Uranus. Collectively, these new discoveries mean that Uranus has a youthful and dynamic system of rings and moons. Because of the extreme tilt of Uranus's axis, the ring system appears nearly perpendicular relative to rings around other gas giant planets like Saturn. Also, unlike Saturn, the rings are very dark and dim because they are mostly dust rather than ice.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of two new moons around the distant planet Pluto. The moons were first discovered by Hubble in May 2005, but the Pluto Companion Search team probed even deeper into the Pluto system with Hubble on Feb. 15 to look for additional satellites and to characterize the orbits of the moons. In the image, Pluto is in the center and Charon is just below it. The moons, provisionally designated S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2, are located to the right of Pluto and Charon.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image is a never-before-seen astronomical alignment of a moon traversing the face of Uranus, and its accompanying shadow. The white dot near the center of Uranus' blue-green disk is the icy moon Ariel. The 700-mile-diameter satellite is casting a shadow onto the cloud tops of Uranus. To an observer on Uranus, this would appear as a solar eclipse, where the moon briefly blocks out the Sun as its shadow races across Uranus's cloud tops. Though such "transits" by moons across the disks of their parents are commonplace for some other gas giant planets, such as Jupiter, the satellites of Uranus orbit the planet in such a way that they rarely cast shadows on the planet's surface. Uranus is tilted so that its spin axis lies nearly in its orbital plane. The planet is essentially tipped over on its side. The moons of Uranus orbit the planet above the equator, so their paths align edge-on to the Sun only every 42 years. This color composite image was created from images at three wavelengths in near infrared light obtained with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on July 26, 2006.
Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web of "Clumpy" Dark Matter in 3-D
An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created a three-dimensional map that provides the first direct look at the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe.
In celebration of the 17th anniversary of the launch and deployment of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers is releasing one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras. It is a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of star birth - and death - is taking place. This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of neutral hydrogen during March and July 2005. Color information was added with data taken in December 2001 and March 2003 at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.
