The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has appointed Dr. Kathryn Flanagan as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Mission Head. Flanagan will be responsible for the development and operations of the JWST Science and Operations Center at the STScI. The largest space observatory ever developed, the JWST is scheduled for launch in June 2013.
The sharpest image ever taken of the large "grand design" spiral galaxy M81 is being released today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Hubble Space Telescope data was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 through 2006. This color composite was assembled from images taken in blue, visible, and infrared light.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. Dark matter makes up most of the universe's material. Ordinary matter, which makes up stars and planets, comprises only a small percent of the universe's matter. The ring's discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists.
Queen Elizabeth II will learn about NASA education tomorrow, May 8, when she visits NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Bonnie Eisenhamer, the Hubble Space Telescope Formal Education Manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., will lead an education workshop for local middle school students during the Queen's visit to Goddard.
Astronomers have long thought that globular star clusters had a single "baby boom" of stars early in their lives and then settled into a quiet existence. But new observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the massive globular cluster NGC 2808 provide evidence that star birth went "boom, boom, boom," with three generations of stars forming very early in the cluster's life.
The Webby Awards, the leading international honor for the Internet, has selected HubbleSite.org for the Best Science Website of 2007. HubbleSite also won the accompanying People's Voice Award, where the public can vote for their favorite website.
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.
Girls in grades 6-12 are invited to participate in a Youth for Astronomy (YAE)/ Women in Science 2007 event at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. on Saturday, May 12. The girls will interact with a variety of scientists, astronauts, and engineers; work on hands on astronomical projects; talk to a panel of professionals; participate in solar observation; and more. The featured speaker is Dr. Carol Christian. The honorary guest is Dr. Mary Cleave.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope view of the nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672 unveils details in the galaxy's star-forming clouds and dark bands of interstellar dust. NGC 1672 is more than 60 million light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado. These observations of NGC 1672 were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in August of 2005.
Astronomers have woven NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of Saturn, its rings, and several of its moons into three movies. Each movie highlights unique times in the planet's 30-year waltz around the Sun.
Several hundred images taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have been woven together into a rich tapestry of at least 50,000 galaxies. The Hubble view is yielding new clues about the universe's youth, from its "pre-teen" years to young adulthood.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with several other ground- and space-based telescopes, has captured a galaxy being ripped apart by a galaxy cluster's gravitational field and harsh environment.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has recently taken images of Jupiter in support of the New Horizons Mission. The images were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys from Feb. 17-21. Hubble will continue to photograph Jupiter, as well as its volcanically active moon, Io, over the next month as the New Horizons spacecraft flies past Jupiter.
Join us for a dinner reception, a lecture, and a chance to learn about the many areas of research and study available in the field of astronomy. Middle and high school-aged boys and their parents will have an opportunity to ask questions and interact with astronomical professionals at the Space Telescope Science Institute at 6pm on March 23.
Twenty years ago, astronomers witnessed one of the brightest stellar explosions in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called SN 1987A, blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery on Feb. 23, 1987.
This image shows the colorful "last hurrah" of a star like our Sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star's remaining core. The Milky Way Galaxy is littered with these stellar relics, called planetary nebulae. This image of planetary nebula NGC 2440 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on Feb. 6, 2007.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the diverse collection of galaxies in a galaxy cluster called Abell S0740, located more than 450 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus.
The powerful vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to study for the first time the layer-cake structure of the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. Hubble discovered a dense upper layer of hot hydrogen gas where the super-hot planet's atmosphere is bleeding off into space.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found that young stellar nurseries, called open star clusters, have very short lives. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys gleaned these new observations during a "Where's Waldo" search for blue stars tossed out of their open cluster "nest" in the nearby galaxy known as NGC 1313.
Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, Kameula, Hawaii, astronomers have learned that the gaseous outflow from one of the brightest super-sized stars in the sky is more complex than originally thought. The outbursts are from the red supergiant star VY Canis Majoris.
This new image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope depicts bright, blue, newly formed stars that are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
New observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have begun to fill gaps in the early stages of planet birth. Hubble observed a "blizzard" of particles in a disk around a young star, revealing the process by which planets grow from tiny dust grains. The particles are as fluffy as snowflakes and are roughly ten times larger than typical interstellar dust grains.
An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe.
Swirls of gas and dust reside in this ethereal-looking region of star formation imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This majestic view of LH 95, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, reveals a region where low-mass, infant stars and their much more massive stellar neighbors reside. A shroud of blue haze gently lingers amid the stars.
NASA Hubble Space Telescope high-resolution images of a star previously believed to be amongst the heaviest known in our Milky Way show that it is really two stars orbiting one another. Originally, the mass of the star was thought to be an incredible 200-300 solar masses, but the mass is now found to be only 100 solar masses.
Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that dark energy is not a new constituent of space, but rather has been present for most of the universe's history. Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate. Investigators used Hubble to find that dark energy was already boosting the expansion rate of the universe as long as nine billion years ago.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the best observational evidence to date that globular clusters sort out stars according to their mass, governed by a gravitational billiard ball game between stars. Heavier stars slow down and sink to the cluster's core, while lighter stars pick up speed and move across the cluster to its periphery.
A class of especially hardy microbes that live in some of the harshest Earthly environments could flourish on cold Mars and other chilly planets, according to a research team of astronomers and microbiologists. In a two-year laboratory study, the researchers discovered that some cold-adapted microorganisms not only survived but reproduced at 30 degrees Fahrenheit, just below the freezing point of water.
On Friday, Nov. 17 from 6-9pm, the Space Telescope Science Institute's Youth for Astronomy & Engineering program will host a "Parent and Daughter Evening Under the Stars."
This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters. The new image allows astronomers to better distinguish between the stars and super star clusters created in the collision of two spiral galaxies.
Images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have provided a dramatic glimpse of a large and massive galaxy under assembly by the merging of smaller, lighter galaxies. Astrophysicists believe that this is the way galaxies grew in the young universe. Now, Hubble observations of the radio galaxy MRC 1138-262, nicknamed the "Spiderweb Galaxy" show dozens of star-forming satellite galaxies as individual clumpy features in the process of merging. Because the galaxy is 10.6 billion light-years away, astronomers are seeing it as it looked in the universe's early formative years, only 3 billion years after the Big Bang. This result was published in the October 10, 2006 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observations, has provided definitive evidence for the existence of the nearest extrasolar planet to our solar system. The Jupiter-sized world orbits the Sun-like star Epsilon Eridani, which is only 10.5 light years away. The results are being presented today at the 38th Annual Division of Planetary Sciences Meeting in Pasadena, Calif.
Hubble Space Telescope images accompany music performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's second Explorer Series on Nov. 10-12. Guest Conductor: Peter Oundjian; Narrator: Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Mario Livio.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. The planet bonanza was uncovered during a Hubble survey, called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). Hubble looked farther than has ever successfully been searched for extrasolar planets. (VIDEO EMBEDDED)
Astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the first definitive images of a dark spot on Uranus. The elongated feature measures 1,100 miles by 1,900 miles (1,700 kilometers by 3,000 kilometers). This three-wavelength composite image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on August 23, 2006.
Astronomers analyzing two of the deepest views of the cosmos made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a gold mine of galaxies, more than 500 that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early universe, researchers said.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The conundrum is that it's also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star.
This 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.
A new image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed look at the tattered remains of a supernova explosion known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A). It is the youngest known remnant from a supernova explosion in the Milky Way. The new Hubble image shows the complex and intricate structure of the star's shattered fragments.
This active region of star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), as photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, unveils wispy clouds of hydrogen and oxygen that swirl and mix with dust on a canvas of astronomical size. The LMC is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This particular region within the LMC, referred to as N 180B, contains some of the brightest known star clusters.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered what astronomers are reporting as the dimmest stars ever seen in any globular star cluster. Globular clusters are spherical concentrations of hundreds of thousands of stars. These clusters formed early in the 13.7-billion-year-old universe. The cluster NGC 6397 is one of the closest globular star clusters to Earth.
Astrophysicist Michael G. Hauser (Space Telescope Science Institute deputy director and adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.) is a member of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) science team sharing the Peter Gruber Foundation's 2006 Cosmology Prize.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has for the first time identified the characteristics of the parent star of a distant planet discovered through gravitational microlensing.
Detailed images of the nearby star Beta Pictoris, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the existence of not one but two dust disks encircling the star. The images offer tantalizing new evidence for at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting Beta Pictoris.
Staring into the crowded, dusty core of two merging galaxies, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a region where star formation has gone wild.
This is a unique view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight. Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first-ever picture of a group of five star-like images of a single distant quasar. The multiple-image effect seen in the Hubble picture is produced by a process called gravitational lensing, in which the gravitational field of a massive object -- in this case, a cluster of galaxies -- bends and amplifies light from an object -- in this case, a quasar -- farther behind it.
An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, using simple off-the-shelf equipment to trawl the skies for planets outside our solar system, has hauled in its first "catch." The astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corona Borealis.
Explore the world of black holes in an award-winning Web site created by a team led by Roeland van der Marel, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. The interactive Web site, called "Black Holes: Gravity's Relentless Pull" rescues black holes from the realm of science fiction and puts them back into the domain of science.
Homeowners may have to worry about floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes destroying their homes, but at least they can remove long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) from their list of potential natural disasters, according to recent findings by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Long-duration gamma-ray bursts are powerful flashes of high-energy radiation that are sometimes seen coming from certain types of supernovae (the explosions of extremely massive stars).
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