Astronomy and Stars
Discussions about astronomy and stars. As we look further out what can we find in the universe beyond Earth's atmosphere?
2,077 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 527 views
Elliptical galaxies were once thought to be aging star cities whose star-making heyday was billions of years ago. But new observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are helping to show that elliptical galaxies still have some youthful vigor left, thanks to encounters with smaller galaxies. Images of the core of NGC 4150, taken in near-ultraviolet light with the sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), reveal streamers of dust and gas and clumps of young, blue stars that are significantly less than a billion years old. Evidence shows that the star birth was sparked by a merger with a dwarf galaxy. The new study helps bolster the emerging view that most elliptical gala…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 473 views
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope received a boost from a cosmic magnifying glass to construct one of the sharpest maps of dark matter in the universe. They used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to chart the invisible matter in the massive galaxy cluster Abell 1689, located 2.2 billion light-years away. The cluster contains about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass. Hubble cannot see the dark matter directly. Astronomers inferred its location by analyzing the effect of gravitational lensing, where light from galaxies behind Abell 1689 is distorted by intervening m…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 483 views
The globular star cluster Omega Centauri has caught the attention of sky watchers ever since the ancient astronomer Ptolemy first catalogued it 2,000 years ago. Ptolemy, however, thought Omega Centauri was a single star. He didn't know that the "star" was actually a beehive swarm of nearly 10 million stars, all orbiting a common center of gravity. The stars are so tightly crammed together that astronomers had to wait for the powerful vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to peer deep into the core of the "beehive" and resolve individual stars. Hubble's vision is so sharp it can even measure the motion of many of these stars, and over a relatively short span of time. A…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 464 views
This face-on spiral galaxy, called NGC 3982, is striking for its rich tapestry of star birth, along with its winding arms. The arms are lined with pink star-forming regions of glowing hydrogen, newborn blue star clusters, and obscuring dust lanes that provide the raw material for future generations of stars. The bright nucleus is home to an older population of stars, which grow ever more densely packed toward the center. NGC 3982 is located about 68 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The galaxy spans about 30,000 light-years, one-third of the size of our Milky Way galaxy. This color image is composed of exposures taken by the Hubble Space Telescop…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
Last January astronomers thought they had witnessed a fresh collision between two asteroids when images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed a bizarre X-shaped object. After using Hubble to track the oddball body for five months, astronomers were surprised to find that they had missed the suspected smashup by a year. The science results are reported in the October 14 issue of the science journal Nature. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 411 views
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the large asteroid Vesta that will help scientists refine plans for the Dawn spacecraft's rendezvous with Vesta in July 2011. Scientists have constructed a video from the images that will help improve pointing instructions for Dawn as it is placed in a polar orbit around Vesta. Analyses of Hubble images revealed a pole orientation, or tilt, of approximately four degrees more to the asteroid's east than scientists previously thought. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 563 views
If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent, well, universal warming. The consequence was that fierce blasts of radiation from voracious black holes stunted the growth of some small galaxies for a stretch of 500 million years. Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) to identify an era, from 11.7 to 11.3 billion years ago, when the universe burned off a fog of primeval helium. This heated intergalactic gas was inhibited from gravitationally collapsing to form new generations of stars in some small galaxies. The telltale helium spectral absorption lines were measured in the ultraviolet ligh…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 417 views
Hubble Space Telescope observations of comet 103P/Hartley 2, taken on September 25, are helping in the planning for a November 4 flyby of the comet by NASA's Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI) on NASA's Deep Impact Spacecraft performing the EPOXI mission. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 522 views
Enjoying a frozen treat on a hot summer day can leave a sticky mess as it melts in the Sun and deforms. In the cold vacuum of space, there is no edible ice cream, but there is radiation from massive stars that is carving away at cold molecular clouds, creating bizarre, fantasy-like structures. These one-light-year-tall pillars of cold hydrogen and dust, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, are located in the Carina Nebula. This image is a composite of Hubble observations taken of the Carina Nebula region in 2005 in hydrogen light (light emitted by hydrogen atoms) along with observations taken in oxygen light (light emitted by oxygen atoms) in 2010, both times with Hubb…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 502 views
This is an artist's concept of a craggy piece of solar system debris that belongs to a class of bodies called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Most TNOs are small and faint, making them difficult to spot. Generally, they are more than 100 million times fainter than objects visible to the unaided eye. The newfound TNOs range from 25 to 60 miles (40-100 km) across. In this illustration, the distant Sun is reduced to a bright star at a distance of over 3 billion miles. Astronomers culling the data archives of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have added 14 new TNOs to the catalog. Their search method promises to turn up hundreds more. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 476 views
An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope reports a significant brightening of the emissions from Supernova 1987A. The results, which appear in this week's Science magazine, are consistent with theoretical predictions about how supernovae interact with their immediate galactic environment. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 492 views
An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has devised a new method for measuring perhaps the greatest puzzle of our universe – dark energy. This mysterious phenomenon, discovered in 1998, is pushing our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds. The team's results appear in the August 20, 2010 issue of the journal Science. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 491 views
A long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image shows a majestic face-on spiral galaxy located deep within the Coma Cluster of galaxies, which lies 320 million light-years away in the northern constellation Coma Berenices. The galaxy, known as NGC 4911, contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its center. These are silhouetted against glowing newborn star clusters and iridescent pink clouds of hydrogen, the existence of which indicates ongoing star formation. Hubble has also captured the outer spiral arms of NGC 4911, along with thousands of other galaxies of varying sizes. The high resolution of Hubble's cameras, paired with considerably long exposures, made it possible to …
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 564 views
A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The imaging data were taken in 1999, 2003, 2004, and 2005. The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms," seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 397 views
A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star. This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It is blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million …
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 418 views
As if the debate over what is and what is not a planet hasn't gotten confusing enough, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have now confirmed the existence of a tortured, baked object that could be called a "cometary planet." The gas giant planet, dubbed HD 209458b, is orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping away into space. Now, observations by the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) aboard NASA's Hubble suggest that powerful stellar winds are sweeping the castoff material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail. This artist's illustration shows a view of HD 209458b, as seen from the surface of a hypothetical nearb…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 511 views
NASA astronaut John Grunsfeld has walked in space eight times and logged more than 800 hours floating in that deep, dark void over the course of five space flights, including three to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, he is about to explore a new frontier: The Johns Hopkins University. On July 1, the man nicknamed "the Hubble Repairman" became a research professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. While at Johns Hopkins, Grunsfeld, who is deputy director at the Space Telescope Science Institute, will continue his research in astrophysics and the development of new technology and systems for spa…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 419 views
Like a July 4 fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust—the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. Star clusters like NGC 3603 provide important clues to understanding the origin of massive star formation in the early, distant universe. This Hubble Space Telescope image was captured in August 2009 and December 2009 with the Wide Field Camera 3 in both visible and infrared light, which trace the glow of sulfur, hydrogen, and iron.…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 395 views
Detailed observations made by the Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an answer to the flash of light seen June 3 on Jupiter. It came from a giant meteor burning up high above Jupiter's cloud tops. The space visitor did not plunge deep enough into the atmosphere to explode and leave behind any telltale cloud of debris, as seen in previous Jupiter collisions. View the full article
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 440 views
Without warning, a mystery object struck Jupiter on July 19, 2009, leaving a dark bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. The spot first caught the eye of an amateur astronomer in Australia, and soon, observatories around the world, including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, were zeroing in on the unexpected blemish. Astronomers had witnessed this kind of cosmic event before. Similar scars had been left behind during the course of a week in July 1994, when more than 20 pieces of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere. The 2009 impact occurred during the same week, 15 years later. This Hubble image of Jupiter's full disk, taken July 23, 2009, reveal…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 445 views
A team of astronomy researchers at Florida Institute of Technology and Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States and University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, find that the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the most massive local galaxy (M87) is not where it was expected. Their research, conducted using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), concludes that the SMBH in M87 is displaced from the galaxy center. The most likely cause for this SMBH to be off center is a previous merger between two older, less massive, SMBHs. The iconic M87 jet may have pushed the SMBH away from the galaxy center, say researchers. The research is being presented today at…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 420 views
For just over a decade, astronomers have known that three Jupiter-type planets orbit the yellow-white star Upsilon Andromedae. But to their surprise it's now been discovered that not all planets orbit this star in the same plane, as the major planets in our solar system orbit the Sun. The orbits of two of the planets are inclined by 30 degrees with respect to each other. Such a strange orientation has never before been seen in any other planetary system. This surprising finding will impact theories of how planetary systems form and evolve, say researchers. It suggests that some violent events can happen to disrupt planets' orbits after a planetary system forms. The discov…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 406 views
"The Star That Ate My Planet" may sound like a B-grade science fiction movie title, but this is really happening 600 light-years away. Like a moth in a candle flame, a doomed Jupiter-sized planet has moved so close to its sunlike parent star that it is spilling its atmosphere onto the star. This happens because the planet gets so hot that its atmosphere puffs up to the point where the star's gravity pulls it in. The planet will likely be completely devoured in 10 million years. Observations by Hubble's new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph measured a variety of elements in the planet's bloated atmosphere as the planet passed in front of its star. The planet, called WASP-12b, is…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 473 views
A blue-hot star, 90 times more massive than our Sun, is hurtling across space fast enough to make a round trip from Earth to the Moon in merely two hours. Though the speed is not a record-breaker, it is unique to find a homeless star that has traveled so far from its nest. The only way the star could have been ejected from the star cluster where it was born is through a tussle with a rogue star that entered the binary system where the star lived, which ejected the star through a dynamical game of stellar pinball. This is strong circumstantial evidence for stars as massive as 150 times our Sun's mass living in the cluster. Only a very massive star would have the gravitatio…
Last reply by HubbleSite, -
- 0 replies
- 438 views
NASA's best-recognized, longest-lived, and most prolific space observatory zooms past a threshold of 20 years of operation this month. On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age. Hubble's unprecedented capabilities made it one of the most powerful science instruments ever conceived by humans, and certainly the one most embraced by the public. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research, from planetary science to cosmology. And, its pictures were unmistakably out of this world. Th…
Last reply by HubbleSite,