Hubble has photographed a majestic spiral galaxy, UGC 2885, located 232 million light-years away. The galaxy is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars. Astronomers want to know how it got so big.
Astronomers and visualization specialists have combined the visible, infrared and X-ray vision of NASA's Great Observatories to create a 3D representation of the dynamic Crab Nebula—the tattered remains of an exploded star.
NASA’s upcoming Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), scheduled for launch in the mid-2020s, will have the power to survey the sky 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope, with Hubble-quality detail, in the near-infrared.
Astronomers using Hubble have studied a unique class of young, migratory exoplanets that have the density of cotton candy. Nothing like them exists in our solar system. They orbit the star Kepler 51, located 2,600 light-years away. Hubble spectroscopic observations allowed researchers to refine mass estimates for these worlds—independently confirming their “puffy” nature.
A nearby stellar nursery will be the subject of study with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers will peer into the stellar cluster NGC 1333 to examine its tiniest, faintest residents, including the smallest brown dwarfs and "rogue planets."
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Council has elected Kathryn Flanagan and Colin Norman of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, and 441 other AAAS members as Fellows of the AAAS.
Hubble captured interstellar comet 2I/Borisov streaking past the Sun in a pair of images taken on November 16 and December 9. It is the first confirmed interstellar comet known to have passed through the solar system.
A team of astronomers proposes a new method of using Webb to determine whether a rocky exoplanet has an atmosphere. The technique, which involves measuring the planet’s temperature as it passes behind its star and then comes back into view, is significantly faster than more traditional methods of atmospheric detection.
In two separate studies using NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers will observe dwarf galaxy companions to the Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda galaxy. Studying these small companions will help scientists learn about galaxy formation and the properties of dark matter.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the location of the most energetic outburst ever seen in the universe—a blast of gamma-rays a trillion times more powerful than visible light. That’s because in a few seconds the gamma-ray burst (GRB) emitted more energy than the Sun will provide over its entire 10-billion year life.
This recent picture from Hubble shows a galaxy nicknamed the "Sunburst Arc" that has been split into a kaleidoscope illusion of no fewer than 12 images formed by a massive foreground cluster of galaxies 4.6 billion light-years away.
This Hubble snapshot reveals what looks like an uncanny pair of glowing eyes glaring menacingly in our direction. The piercing "eyes" are the most prominent feature of what resembles the face of an otherworldly creature. This frightening object is actually the result of a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies.
Stars in the outer reaches of the Milky Way, including our Sun, orbit at an average speed of 130 miles per second. But that’s nothing compared to the most massive spiral galaxies. “Super spirals,” which are larger, brighter, and more massive than the Milky Way, spin even faster than expected for their mass, at speeds up to 350 miles per second.
Hubble has taken the sharpest view to date of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov whose speed and trajectory indicate it has come from beyond our solar system. The image, taken October 12, 2019, reveals a central concentration of dust around the comet's nucleus.
A new Hubble study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal reports the best measurements yet for how much and how fast gas flows in and out of the Milky Way. Astronomers were surprised to find a surplus of incoming gas, leaving them with new questions to answer about how our galaxy works.
After its 2021 launch, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will gather infrared light that has penetrated the dusty veil, revealing the galactic center in unprecedented detail.
Shortly after its launch in 2021, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will observe three different types of comets to learn more about them and about the early solar system.
Saturn's signature rings are still as stunning as ever. The second in the yearly series, this Hubble Space Telescope image taken on June 20, 2019, is part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project.
Though our Milky Way galaxy continues to churn out the equivalent of one Sun every year, in the past, that rate was up to one hundred times greater. To understand how stars like our Sun formed, we need to look back billions of years into the past. The Webb telescope will act as a time machine to peer back into the early universe. To look back even further, astronomers will also take advantage of natural, cosmic telescopes called gravitational lenses, which magnify the light from distant galaxies that are at or near the peak of star formation. The effect allows researchers to study the details of early galaxies too far away to be seen with even the most powerful telescopes alone.
This new Hubble Space Telescope view of Jupiter, taken on June 27, 2019, reveals the giant planet's trademark Great Red Spot, and a more intense color palette in the clouds swirling in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere than seen in previous years.
Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph observations reveal magnesium and iron gas streaming from WASP-121b. These Hubble PanCET survey findings represent the first time that so-called heavy-metals--elements heavier than hydrogen and helium--have been spotted actively escaping from a "hot Jupiter," a large, gaseous exoplanet in orbit very close to its star.
In a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, University of Chicago astronomer Wendy Freedman and her team announced a new measurement of the Hubble constant using a kind of star known as a red giant. Their new observations, made using the Hubble telescope, indicate that the expansion rate for the nearby universe is 69.8 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/sec/Mpc), which straddle the values derived by the ESA Planck satellite (67.4 km/sec/Mpc) and the Hubble SHOES (74 km/sec/Mpc) teams.
Peering deep into the heart of the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 3147, Hubble researchers uncovered a swirling gas disk precariously close to a black hole weighing about 250 million times the mass of our Sun. The surprise is that they thought the black hole was so malnourished, it shouldn’t have such a structure around it.
What can turn a seemingly perfect ocean-rich planet into an uninhabitable desert wasteland? Two future space explorers aim to find out in "The Habitable Zone: Scorched Earth Enigma," a science-grounded sci-fi video from the NASA's Universe of Learning project. While the story is a work of fiction, the ideas are pulled directly from current exoplanet science and vetted by astronomers and education specialists.
NASA has awarded a contract to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, for the Science Operations Center (SOC) of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission. WFIRST is a NASA observatory designed to settle essential questions in a wide-range of science areas, including dark energy and dark matter, and planets outside our solar system.
Astronomers enlisted the combined multi-wavelength capabilities of NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to assemble for the first time a "fingerprint" of the chemical composition of exoplanet GJ 3470 b's atmosphere, and found it to be mostly hydrogen and helium, and surprisingly, largely lacking heavier elements.
The giant star Eta Carinae has been prone to violent outbursts, including an episode in the 1840s when ejected material formed the bipolar bubbles seen here. This new ultraviolet- and visible-light view from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the star’s hot, expanding gases glowing in red, white, and blue.
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.
Astronomers have directly imaged two exoplanets that are gravitationally carving out a wide gap within a planet-forming disk surrounding a young star. This is only the second multi-planet system to be photographed.
One of the Webb telescope’s first observation programs is to look at young, newly formed exoplanets and the systems they inhabit. Scientists will use all four of Webb’s instruments to observe three carefully selected targets.
This Hubble Space Telescope image of the irregular galaxy NGC 4485 shows all signs of the galaxy having been involved in a hit-and-run accident with its larger galactic neighbor.
Astronomers have assembled an image containing about 265,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time. Called the Hubble Legacy Field, the snapshot represents the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies ever made. Astronomers assembled the wide portrait from 7,500 individual exposures taken from 16 years' worth of Hubble observations in ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths, capturing the key features of galaxy assembly over time.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say they have crossed an important threshold in revealing a discrepancy between the two key techniques for measuring the universe's expansion rate. The recent study strengthens the case that new theories may be needed to explain the forces that have shaped the cosmos.
In celebration of the 29th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers captured this festive, colorful look at the tentacled Southern Crab Nebula.
As the spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 plunges into a galaxy cluster, gas is being pulled off of it as though it faced a cosmic headwind. Within that gas, stars are forming to create the appearance of giant, blue tentacle-like streamers. Astronomers, puzzled that stars could form within such tumult, plan to use Webb to study this galaxy and its stellar offspring.
NASA has selected 24 new Fellows for its prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP). The program enables outstanding postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research in any area of NASA Astrophysics, using theory, observation, experimentation, or instrument development. Each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, all-sky surveys, and several other ground- and space-based telescopes, an international team of astronomers watching asteroid (6478) Gault say it has spun up so fast that its ejected dusty material formed two long, thin, comet-like tails. Each tail represents an episode in which the asteroid gently shed its material — key evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart.
How did the first galaxies in the universe form, and did they make the universe transparent to light? How did later galaxies produce and disperse into the universe the heavier elements that are the building blocks of stars, planets, and even humans? These are questions astronomers will address in some of the first observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Astronomers using Hubble and Gaia have made a precise measurement of the total mass of our Milky Way galaxy, which weighs in at 1.5 trillion times the mass of our Sun.
A team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, and older Voyager 2 spacecraft data, have studied the origin of the smallest known moon orbiting the planet Neptune. The moon, which was discovered in 2013 and has now received the official name Hippocamp, may actually be a fragment broken from its larger neighboring moon Proteus.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured a pair of storms on the solar-system ice giants Uranus (left) and Neptune (right). The dark vortex on Neptune, seen at top center, is the fourth storm spotted by Hubble since 1993. The snapshot of Uranus, like the image of Neptune, reveals a dominant feature: a vast bright stormy cloud cap across the north pole. The images are part of a Hubble program that annually monitors the outer solar-system planets.
An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered an unusually isolated dwarf galaxy that was hidden behind a forest of foreground stars in the nearby globular star cluster NGC 6752. A fraction of the size of our Milky Way, the diminutive galaxy is a largely unchanged living fossil from the universe's early days.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted galaxy D100 being stripped of its gas as the wayward spiral plunges towards the center of the giant Coma cluster containing more than 1,000 galaxies. Gas is the lifeblood of a galaxy, fueling the birth of new stars. Once it is stripped of all of its gas, D100 will enter retirement and shine only by the feeble glow of its aging, red stars (such as galaxy D99 -- just below and to the left of D100) in this image.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the brightest object ever seen at a time when the universe was less than one billion years old. The brilliant beacon is a quasar, the core of a galaxy with a black hole ravenously eating material surrounding it. The quasar would have gone undetected without its light being turbo-boosted by the gravitational field of a closer galaxy that is bending and amplifying the distant quasar’s light.
Rocky planets orbiting red dwarf stars may be dry and lifeless, according to astronomers using the Hubble telescope to study an eroding debris disk encircling the nearby star AU Microscopii. Life-nurturing ingredients, including water, may be blown away before they can reach young planets.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has produced this detailed portrait of the Triangulum galaxy (M33), displaying a full spiral face aglow with the light of nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. It is the largest high-resolution mosaic image of Triangulum ever assembled, composed of 54 Hubble fields of view spanning an area more than 19,000 light-years across.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed comet 46P/Wirtanen on December 13, when the comet was 7.4 million miles (12 million kilometers) from Earth.
A new method of tracking dark matter using the faint “intracluster” glow within massive galaxy clusters could shed light on the elusive nature of dark matter -- a major mystery of modern astrophysics.
To date, astronomers have discovered two warm Neptunes that are leaking their atmospheres into space. The most recent finding using Hubble, a planet cataloged as GJ 3470b, is losing its atmosphere at a rate 100 times faster than that of the previously discovered evaporating warm Neptune, GJ 436b.
Astronomers will use the upcoming NASA James Webb Space Telescope to study star birth in the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy, which contains some of the same conditions that existed in galaxies during the universe’s peak star-formation epoch.
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