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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. Results from Hubble's new infrared camera, the Wide Field Camera 3, on the Ultra Deep Field (taken in August 2009) are being presented on Jan. 5-6, 2010, at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.

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Dr. John M. Grunsfeld has been appointed Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. effective January 4, 2010. He succeeds Dr. Michael Hauser, who stepped down in October. STScI is the science operations center for NASA's orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope planned to be launched in 2014.

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Mario Livio, senior astrophysicist and head of the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., has been elected as a new Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Livio is being recognized for his distinguished contributions to astrophysics through research on stars and galaxies and through communicating and interpreting science and mathematics to the public

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In a paper published in Nature, Hilke Schlichting of the California Institute of Technology is reporting that the telltale signature of a Kuiper Belt Object measuring only one-half mile across was extracted from Hubble's Fine Guidance Sensors engineering data, not direct observations.

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This Hubble picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood. The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides 170,000 light-years away in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009.

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NASA's Hubble Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The image was taken in late August 2009 with Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.

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A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA on Nov. 10. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609. In celebration of this International Year of Astronomy, NASA is releasing images of the galactic center region as seen by its Great Observatories to more than 150 planetariums, museums, nature centers, libraries, and schools across the country.

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Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 has captured the colorful and stunning detail of star birth in nearby galaxy M83.

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Dr. Rodger Doxsey, head of the Space Telescope Science Institute's (STScI) Hubble Mission Office, passed away on October 13 after a prolonged illness. The New York native was 62 years old. Doxsey oversaw Hubble science operations at STScI in Baltimore, Md., for nearly three decades. Astronomers credit Doxsey for being one of the key Hubble program people who had a working knowledge of the extremely complex Hubble Space Telescope from top to bottom. Doxsey dedicated his career to making Hubble a success, working closely with the scientists and engineers at the institute that operate the telescope, the engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the scientists from around the world who use the telescope.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made a series of observations immediately preceding and following the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) Centaur rocket stage and shepherding spacecraft impacts at the lunar south pole, on October 9 at 7:31 and 7:35 a.m. EDT.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision.

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Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy. They are whirling at a speed of one million miles per hour"”about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. The galaxies are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, and so may have evolved over billions of years into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the sharpest visible-light picture yet of atmospheric debris from an object that collided with Jupiter on July 19. NASA scientists interrupted the recently refurbished observatory's checkout and calibration to take the image of a new, expanding spot on the giant planet on July 23.

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The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., is partnering on a historic search for Earth-size planets around other stars. STScI is the data archive center for NASA's Kepler mission, a spacecraft that is undertaking a survey for Earth-size planets in our region of the galaxy. The spacecraft sent its first raw science data to STScI on June 19.

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The Hubble community bids farewell to the soon-to-be decommissioned Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In tribute to Hubble's longest-running optical camera, planetary nebula K 4-55 has been imaged as WFPC2's final "pretty picture."

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A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than five percent. The new value for the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, is 74.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec (error margin of ± 3.6). The results agree closely with an earlier measurement gleaned from Hubble of 72 ± 8 km/sec/megaparsec, but are now more than twice as precise.

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An analysis of archival images of small, or dwarf, galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests that starbursts, intense regions of star formation, sweep across the whole galaxy and last 100 times longer than astronomers thought. The longer duration may affect how dwarf galaxies change over time, and therefore may shed light on galaxy evolution.

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Adam Riess was among 72 scientists elected today to membership in the National Academy of Sciences at the organization's 146th annual meeting, held in Washington, D.C. Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, joins 20 other Johns Hopkins faculty members currently in the Academy, an honorary society that advises the government on scientific matters.

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To commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 19 years of historic, trailblazing science, the orbiting telescope has photographed a peculiar system of galaxies known as Arp 194. This interacting group contains several galaxies, along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years.

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The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all. Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers were able to determine the three-dimensional geometry and motion in the system MACS J0717.5+3745 (or MACS J0717, for short), located about 5.4 billion light-years from Earth.

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A flare-up in a jet of matter blasting from a monster black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is giving astronomers an incredible light show. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been following the surprising activity for seven years, providing the most detailed ultraviolet-light view of the event.

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On April 1-2, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed the winning target in the Space Telescope Science Institute's "You Decide" competition in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA). The winner is a group of galaxies called Arp 274. The striking object received 67,021 votes out of the nearly 140,000 votes cast for the six candidate targets.

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David Lafreniere of the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has successfully demonstrated this new strategy for planet hunting by identifying an exoplanet that went undetected in Hubble images taken in 1998 with its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

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Like a surveillance camera photographing the scene of a crime before it happened, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has a priceless archival photo of the galaxy that contains a picture of the supernova 2005gl progenitor star as it appeared eight years before the star exploded.

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Hubble photographed four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet on February 24, 2009.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strong new line of evidence that galaxies are embedded in halos of dark matter. Peering into the tumultuous heart of the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster, Hubble's sharp view resolved a large population of small galaxies that have remained intact while larger galaxies around them are being ripped apart by the gravitational tug of other galaxies. The dwarf elliptical galaxies' "invisible shield" is a robust halo of dark matter that keeps them intact despite a several-billion-year-long bumper-car game inside the massive galaxy cluster.

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Astronomers will meet from March 30 to April 1 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., during the "Observational Signatures of Black Hole Mergers" conference, to look into the future, where our understanding of gravity waves will transition from a theoretical physics to a breakthrough observational science. Attending scientists will participate in a media telecon from 12:30-2:00 p.m. on March 30 to give an overview of the top science topics explored in the meeting.

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Though they are the largest and most widely scattered objects in the universe, galaxies do go bump in the night. The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed many pairs of galaxies colliding. Like snowflakes, no two examples look exactly alike. This is one of the most arresting galaxy smash-up images to date.

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The public has voted on where they want to aim their favorite space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope. And the winner is--drum roll please--a pair of close-knit galaxies that look like they are shaking hands--or rather spiral arms.

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NASA has selected fellows in three areas of astronomy and astrophysics for its Einstein, Hubble, and Sagan Fellowships. The recipients of this year's post-doctoral fellowships will conduct independent research at institutions around the country.

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Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609, marking the dawn of modern astronomy. In conjunction with Galileo's birthday on Feb. 15, NASA is releasing images of spiral galaxy M101 from its Great Observatories -- the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to more than 100 planetariums, museums, nature centers, and schools across the country.

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NASA is giving everyone the opportunity to use the world's most celebrated telescope to explore the heavens and boldly look where the Hubble Space Telescope has never looked before.

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The unique planetary nebula NGC 2818 is nested inside the open star cluster NGC 2818A. Both the cluster and the nebula reside over 10,000 light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis (the Compass). NGC 2818 is one of very few planetary nebulae in our galaxy located within an open cluster.

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Galileo Galilei/The Starry Messenger, as portrayed by actor/educator Michael T. Francis, will be the featured speaker at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. from 12:30-5pm on Saturday, January 24, 2009. "Starry Messenger" is part of the Institute's Youth for Astronomy and Engineering (YAE) program celebrating the International Year of Astronomy. The workshop registration fee is $10.

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Resembling comets streaking across the sky, these four speedy stars are plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas and creating brilliant arrowhead structures and trailing tails of glowing gas. The stars in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images are among 14 young runaway stars spotted by the Advanced Camera for Surveys between October 2005 and July 2006. The images will be presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif.

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This pair of NASA Hubble Space Telescope pictures shows the appearance of a mysterious burst of light that was detected on February 21, 2006, brightened over 100 days, and then faded into oblivion after another 100 days. The source of the outburst remains unidentified. The event was detected serendipitously in a Hubble search for supernovae in a distant cluster of galaxies. The light-signature of this event does not match the behavior of a supernova or any previously observed astronomical transient phenomenon in the universe.

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This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This sweeping Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core.

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Brown dwarfs, objects that are less massive than stars but larger than planets, just got more elusive, based on studies of nearby multiple-star systems by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble found only two brown dwarfs as companions to normal stars. This means the so-called "brown dwarf desert" (the absence of brown dwarfs around solar-type stars) extends to the smallest stars in the universe. The results are being reported today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught Jupiter's moon Ganymede playing a game of "peek-a-boo." In this crisp Hubble image, Ganymede is shown just before it ducks behind the giant planet. This color photo was made from three images taken on April 9, 2007, with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This is an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life, as we know it. The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars.

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Like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, Hubble catches an instantaneous glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest and best-known globular clusters in the northern sky.

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Astronomers have long puzzled over why a small, nearby, isolated galaxy is pumping out new stars faster than any galaxy in our local neighborhood. Now NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers solve the mystery of the loner starburst galaxy, called NGC 1569, by showing that it is one and a half times farther away than astronomers thought.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star. The images show the planet, named Fomalhaut b, as a tiny point source of light orbiting the nearby, bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. An immense debris disk about 21.5 billion miles across surrounds the star. Fomalhaut b is orbiting 1.8 billion miles inside the disk's sharp inner edge.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a "perfect 10" both for performance and beauty.

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The landmark 10th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's Hubble Heritage Project is being celebrated with a 'landscape' image from the cosmos.

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There's an old saying in astronomy: "Galaxies are like people. They're only normal until you get to know them." That view is supported by a group of astronomers after using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study a large number of galaxies in our cosmic backyard.

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The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today named Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University among 25 new MacArthur Fellows for 2008. Riess is the leader of the seminal study for a team that in 1998 co-discovered "dark energy," a mysterious repulsive force in the universe.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare alignment between two spiral galaxies. The outer rim of a small, foreground galaxy is silhouetted in front of a larger background galaxy. Skeletal tentacles of dust can be seen extending beyond the small galaxy's disk of starlight. From ground-based telescopes, the two galaxies look like a single blob.

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A powerful collision of galaxy clusters has been captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The observations of the cluster known as MACS J0025.4-1222 indicate that a titanic collision has separated the dark from ordinary matter and provide an independent confirmation of a similar effect detected previously in a target dubbed the Bullet Cluster. These new results show that the Bullet Cluster is not an anomalous case.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found an answer to a long-standing puzzle by resolving giant but delicate filaments shaped by a strong magnetic field around the active galaxy NGC 1275. It is the most striking example of the influence of the immense tentacles of extragalactic magnetic fields.