Astronomers using Hubble and radio telescopes have found increasing evidence that the black hole near the center of our Milky Way galaxy periodically awakens, captures a star or gas cloud that falls into it, and then releases powerful beams of radiation and particles.
The Hubble Space Telescope is taking us on the scenic route through the outer Solar System with crisp new images of the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Hubble celebrates Halloween with a striking view of the aging red giant star CW Leonis. The orange-red cobweb-like shells are dusty clouds of sooty carbon engulfing the dying star. Bright searchlight beams poke through the dust.
In its first year of operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will join forces with a global collaborative effort to create an image of the area directly surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
Hubble delivered a ringside seat to a supernova in the very earliest stage of exploding, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of the first moments of a star’s spectacular death.
Hubble Space Telescope observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa have revealed the presence of persistent water vapor — but mysteriously, only in one hemisphere.
Hubble astronomers have uncovered what appears to be a pair of identical objects that look so weird it took years to determine what they are.
The innermost lane may typically be favored to win a race, but in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the winds in its outermost “lane” are taking the lead! Only Hubble can spot these trends: The observatory acts like a storm tracker for the giant planets in our solar system every year.
In this image, a remote galaxy is greatly magnified and distorted by the effects of gravitationally warped space. After its public release, astronomers used the picture to measure the galaxy's distance of 9.4 billion light-years. This places the galaxy at the peak epoch of star formation in cosmic evolution.
Fast and furious—that’s how six massive galaxies in the early universe lived before they literally ran out of gas, shut down star formation, and died. These images are composites from Hubble and ALMA.
What was our Solar System like as it was forming billions of years ago? We have some basic understanding of planet formation, but we don’t know the details – especially details about the solar system’s early chemical composition, and how it may have changed with time. And how did water make its way to Earth? While we can’t time travel to get the answers, we can detail how other planetary systems are forming right now.
Galaxies change over time, but those changes take millions or billions of years – far longer than the human lifetime. To understand how galaxies evolve, astronomers therefore need to study large numbers of galaxies at various stages. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will revolutionize galaxy studies since it can survey the sky up to thousands of times faster than can be done with Hubble at similar image sharpness (resolution). It will reveal how galaxies assembled and transformed over the history of the universe.
Hubble astronomers are predicting that the fading light from a distant supernova will be rebroadcast in 16 years. This future appearance will be the fourth known view of the same exploded star, dubbed Supernova Requiem.
Astronomers using Hubble have uncovered burned-out stars that look younger than they really are. After the nuclear furnaces at their cores shut down, the stars continue burning leftover hydrogen on their surface.
Astronomers who used the Hubble telescope to watch comet ATLAS disintegrate into a cascade of icy fragments in mid-2020, now believe it came from a parent comet that swung by the Sun 5,000 years ago.
Peering deeply into a huge patch of sky the size of three full Moons, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will undertake an ambitious program to study half a million galaxies. Called COSMOS-Webb, this survey is the largest project Webb will undertake during its first year. With more than 200 hours of observing time, it will build upon previous discoveries to make advances in three particular areas of study. These include revolutionizing our understanding of the Reionization Era; looking for early, fully evolved galaxies; and learning how dark matter evolved with galaxies’ stellar content. With its rapid public release of the data, this survey will be a primary legacy dataset from Webb for scientists worldwide studying galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has just successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. This means the plan for science operations has met all of the design, schedule, and budget requirements. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data.
Located ½-billion miles from the Sun, the water ice on Ganymede's surface is frozen solid in frigid temperatures as low as minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. This makes the ice as hard as rock. Still, a rain of charged particles from the Sun is enough to turn the ice into water vapor at high noon on Ganymede. This is the first time such evidence has been found, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope's spectroscopic observations of aurora on Ganymede spanning two decades. The auroras are used to trace the presence of oxygen, which then is linked to the presence of water molecules sputtering off the surface. Ganymede has a deep ocean located an estimated 100 miles below the surface.
Planetary systems are very busy places. In addition to the planets orbiting their host star, planetary systems are chock full of dust and other fragments left over from planet formation – a debris disk. Our own solar system includes the Kuiper Belt, which begins beyond Neptune. Younger systems, though, are a bit less “organized.” Take Beta Pictoris, a planetary system only 63 light-years away with a mature star, at least two planets, and the first comets discovered outside our solar system. Although researchers have observed it with powerful space- and ground-based telescopes since the 1980s, there’s still a lot we don’t yet know about its overall makeup. That’s why researchers will study the dusty disk of Beta Pictoris with Webb to better map out its dusty contents.
These early snapshots demonstrate Hubble's return to full science operations, following correction of a computer anomaly aboard the spacecraft. Normal science observations were restarted on July 17, at 1:18 pm EDT.
Outshining all the stars in their host galaxies combined, quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe. These brilliant, distant and active supermassive black holes shape the galaxies in which they reside. Shortly after its launch, scientists will use Webb to study six of the most far-flung and luminous quasars, along with their host galaxies, in the very young universe. They will examine what part quasars play in galaxy evolution during these early times. The team will also use the quasars to study the gas in the space between galaxies in the infant universe. Only with Webb’s extreme sensitivity to low levels of light and its superb angular resolution will this be possible. Shortly after its launch later this year, a team of scientists will train NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on six of the most distant and luminous quasars. They will study the properties of these quasars and their host galaxies, and how they are interconnected during the first stages of galaxy evolutio
Hubble astronomers say they confirmed that an oddball galaxy mysteriously lacks dark matter—the glue that holds stars and gas together in galaxies. This confirmation challenges the standard ideas of how researchers think galaxies work.
Researchers used the giant W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to observe a nearby brown dwarf in infrared light. They found that the dwarf’s atmosphere has a layer-cake structure with clouds of different composition at different altitudes.
The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.
Astronomers are on the trail of one of the universe's most enigmatic events: powerful bursts of radio waves that disappear in the blink of an eye. Using Hubble, they have traced the radio bursts to the spiral arms of distant galaxies.
The Orion Bar is a ridge-like feature of gas and dust that is being sculpted by the intense radiation from neighboring, hot, young stars. In reality, the Orion Bar is not really a “bar” at all. Instead, it contains a lot of structure and several distinct zones. For the first time, Webb will be able to separate and study these different zones’ physical conditions.
Researchers using Hubble directly measured the mass growth rate of PDS 70b for the first time by using the observatory’s unique ultraviolet sensitivities to capture radiation from extremely hot gas falling onto the planet.
Hubble is marking its 31st anniversary in orbit with this image of a "celebrity star." AG Carinae is one of the brightest stars seen in our Milky Way galaxy, encircled by a glowing halo of gas and dust.
Webb will probe the atmospheres of nearby known exoplanets, such as HR 8799 and 51 Eridani b, at infrared wavelengths. Webb also will hunt for other distant worlds—possibly down to Saturn-size—on the outskirts of planetary systems that cannot be detected with ground-based telescopes.
The Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The institute is home of science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope, and mission and science operations for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right
