Astronomy and Stars
Discussions about astronomy and stars. As we look further out what can we find in the universe beyond Earth's atmosphere?
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The phrase "big fish eat little fish" may hold true when it comes to planets and stars. Perhaps as many as 100 million of the Sun-like stars in our galaxy harbor close-orbiting gas giant planets like Jupiter, or stillborn stars known as brown dwarfs, which are doomed to be gobbled up by their parent stars. Astronomers did not directly observe the planets, because their parent stars had already swallowed them. But the researchers did find significant telltale evidence that some giant stars once possessed giant planets that were then swallowed up. The devouring stars release excessive amounts of infrared light, spin rapidly, and are polluted with the element lithium. The …
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When 17th-century astronomers first turned their telescopes to Jupiter, they noted a conspicuous reddish spot on the giant planet. This Great Red Spot is still present in Jupiter's atmosphere, more than 300 years later. It is now known that it is a vast storm, spinning like a cyclone. Unlike a low-pressure hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, however, the Red Spot rotates in a counterclockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere, showing that it is a high-pressure system. Winds inside this Jovian storm reach speeds of about 270 mph. The Red Spot is the largest known storm in the solar system. With a diameter of 15,400 miles, it is almost twice the size of the entire Earth a…
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Exciting Hubble telescope images of more than a dozen very distant colliding galaxies indicate that, at least in some cases, big massive galaxies form through collisions between smaller ones, in a "generation after generation" story. Hubble studied 81 galaxies in the galaxy cluster MS1054-03 and found that 13 are remnants of recent collisions or pairs of colliding galaxies. The large picture on the left shows this galaxy cluster. The eight smaller images on the right are close-ups of some of the colliding galaxies. The snapshots show the paired galaxies very close together with streams of stars being pulled out of them. The colliding "parent" galaxies lose their shape a…
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This stellar swarm is M80 (NGC 6093), one of the densest of the 147 known globular star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. Located about 28,000 light-years from Earth, M80 contains hundreds of thousands of stars, all held together by their mutual gravitational attraction. Globular clusters are particularly useful for studying stellar evolution, since all of the stars in the cluster have the same age (about 15 billion years), but cover a range of stellar masses. Every star visible in this image is either more highly evolved than, or in a few rare cases more massive than, our own Sun. Especially obvious are the bright red giants, which are stars similar to the Sun in mass …
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Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using the Hubble telescope have taken the space-based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. NASA is releasing these images to commemorate the second anniversary of the Mars Pathfinder landing. The telescope snapped these pictures between April 27 and May 6, 1999, when Mars was 54 million miles (87 million kilometers) from Earth. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. The telescope obtained four images, which, together, show the entire planet. Each view depicts the planet as it completes one quarter of its daily ro…
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Here is a Hubble telescope view of a turbulent cauldron of star birth called N159, which is taking place 170,000 light-years away in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Torrential stellar winds from hot, newborn, massive stars within the nebula sculpt ridges, arcs, and filaments in the vast cloud, which is over 150 light-years across. A rare type of compact, illuminated "blob" is resolved for the first time to be a butterfly-shaped or "Papillon" (French for "butterfly") Nebula, buried in the center of the maelstrom of glowing gases and dark dust. The unprecedented details of the structure of the Papillon, itself less than 2 light-years in size, are seen in…
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The Key Project team used this Hubble telescope view of the magnificent spiral galaxy, NGC 4414, to help calculate the expansion rate of the universe. Based on their discovery and careful brightness measurements of variable stars in this galaxy, the Key Project astronomers were able to make an accurate determination of the distance to the galaxy. The resulting distance to NGC 4414, about 60 million light-years, along with similarly determined distances to other nearby galaxies, contributes to astronomers' overall knowledge of the expansion rate of the cosmos, and helps them determine the age of the universe. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has snapped a nearly face-on view of a swirling disk of dust and gas surrounding a developing star called AB Aurigae. The image, taken in visible light by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, shows unprecedented detail in the disk, including clumps of dust and gas that may be the seeds of planet formation. Normally, a young star's bright light prevents astronomers from seeing material closer to it. That's why astronomers used a coronograph in these two images of AB Aurigae to block most of the star's glare. The rest of the disk material is illuminated by light reflected from the gas and dust surrounding the star. The image on the left represent…
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In this stunning picture of the giant galactic nebula NGC 3603, the Hubble telescope's crisp resolution captures various stages of the life cycle of stars in one single view. This picture nicely illustrates the entire stellar life cycle of stars, starting with the Bok globules and giant gaseous pillars (evidence of embryonic stars), followed by circumstellar disks around young stars, and progressing to aging, massive stars in a young starburst cluster. The blue super-giant with its ring and bipolar outflow [upper left of center] marks the end of the life cycle. View the full article
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The Hubble Space Telescope Key Project team today announced that it has completed efforts to measure precise distances to far-flung galaxies, an essential ingredient needed to determine the age, size and fate of the universe. The team used the Hubble telescope to observe 19 galaxies out to 108 million light-years. They discovered almost 800 Cepheid variable stars, a special class of pulsating star used for accurate distance measurements. Here is a picture of one of those galaxies. It is the spiral galaxy NGC 4603, the most distant galaxy in which Cepheid variables have been found. It is associated with the Centaurus cluster, one of the most massive assemblages of galaxi…
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Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have discovered an enormous cyclonic storm system raging in the northern polar regions of the planet Mars. Nearly four times the size of the state of Texas, the storm is composed of water ice clouds like storm systems on Earth, rather than dust typically found in Martian storms. The system is similar to so-called "spiral" storms observed more than 20 years ago by NASA's Viking Orbiter spacecraft, but it is nearly three times as gigantic as the largest previously detected Martian spiral storm system. The storm is nearly 1,100 miles across in the east-west direction and 900 miles in the north-south direction. The eye of the storm is …
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A Hubble telescope survey of the sky has uncovered exotic patterns, rings, arcs, and crosses that are all mirages produced by a gravitational lens, nature's equivalent of having a giant magnifying glass in space. A gravitational lens is created when the gravity of a massive foreground object, such as a galaxy or a black hole, bends the light coming from a far more distant galaxy directly behind it. This "gravitational muscle" focuses the light to give multiple or distorted images of the background object as seen by the observer. Shown are 10 examples from the survey. View the full article
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Located about 130 million light-years away, NGC 4650A is one of only 100 known polar-ring galaxies. Their unusual disk-ring structure is not yet understood fully. One possibility is that polar rings are the remnants of colossal collisions between two galaxies sometime in the distant past, probably at least 1 billion years ago. What is left of one galaxy has become the rotating inner disk of old red stars in the center. Meanwhile, another smaller galaxy, which ventured too close, was probably severely damaged or destroyed. During the collision the gas from the smaller galaxy would have been stripped off and captured by the larger galaxy, forming a new ring of dust, gas, …
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While hunting for volcanic plumes on Io, the Hubble telescope captured these images of the volatile moon sweeping across the giant face of Jupiter. Only a few weeks before these dramatic pictures were taken, the orbiting telescope snapped a portrait of one of Io's volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide "snow." These stunning images of the planetary duo are being released to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Hubble telescope's launch on April 24, 1990. The three overlapping snapshots show in crisp detail Io passing above Jupiter's turbulent clouds. The close-up picture of Io [bottom right] reveal a 120-mile-high (200-kilometer) plume of sulfur dioxide "snow" emanating f…
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The Maryland Science Center's new Outer Space Place offers visitors a chance to explore the wonders of the universe as seen through the eyes of the Hubble telescope. In collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute, the latest findings from Hubble are colorfully showcased and explained in a permanent exhibit gallery and high-tech space information center. The Maryland Science Center first established a permanent Hubble exhibit in 1990. Hubble has made many discoveries since then, and the science center has now upgraded its Hubble exhibit to display and interpret the very latest Hubble telescope findings. View the full article
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In a change of venue from peering at the distant universe, the Hubble telescope has taken a look at Earth's closest neighbor in space, the Moon. Hubble was aimed at one of the Moon's most dramatic and photogenic targets, the 58-mile-wide (93-kilometer) impact crater Copernicus. The image was taken while the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph was aimed at a different part of the moon to measure the colors of sunlight reflected off the Moon. The picture at upper left is a full view of the moon taken by a terrestrial telescope. The wide, central image is Hubble's crisp, bird's-eye view, which clearly shows the ray pattern of bright dust ejected out of the crater over one…
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In the most active starburst region in the local universe resides a cluster of brilliant, massive stars, known to astronomers as Hodge 301. Hodge 301, seen in the lower right hand corner of this image, lives inside the Tarantula Nebula, which resides in our galactic neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Many of the stars in Hodge 301 are so old that they have exploded as supernovae. These exploded stars are blasting material into the surrounding region at speeds of almost 200 miles per second. The high-speed matter is plowing into the surrounding Tarantula Nebula, shocking and compressing the gas into a multitude of sheets and filaments, seen in the upper left portion o…
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If springtime on Earth were anything like it will be on Uranus, we would be experiencing waves of massive storms, each one covering the country from Kansas to New York, with temperatures of 300 degrees below zero. A dramatic new time-lapse movie by the Hubble telescope shows for the first time seasonal changes on the planet. Once considered one of the blander-looking planets, Uranus is now revealed as a dynamic world with the brightest clouds in the outer solar system and a fragile ring system that wobbles like an unbalanced wagon wheel. The clouds are probably made of crystals of methane, which condense as warm bubbles of gas well up from deep in the planet's atmospher…
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Astronomers have used the Hubble telescope to produce an infrared "photo essay" of spiral galaxies. By penetrating the dust clouds swirling around the centers of these galaxies, the telescope's infrared vision is offering fresh views of star birth. These six images, taken with Hubble's infrared camera, showcase different views of spiral galaxies, from a face-on picture of an entire galaxy to a close-up of a core. The top row shows spirals at diverse angles, from face-on, [left]; to slightly tilted, [center]; to edge-on, [right]. The bottom row shows close-ups of the hubs of three galaxies. View the full article
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Here are Hubble telescope views of the rapidly fading visible-light fireball from the most powerful cosmic explosion recorded to date. For a brief moment the light from the blast was equal to the radiance of 100 million billion stars. The initial explosion began as an intense burst of gamma rays, which happened on Jan. 23, 1999. The blast had already faded to one four-millionth of its original brightness when Hubble made observations on February 8 and 9 [image on left]. Hubble captured the fading fireball embedded in a galaxy located two-thirds of the way to the horizon of the observable universe. The picture on the right is a close-up view of the galaxy, the finger-lik…
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The Hubble telescope image is a typical Milky Way star field in the constellation Centaurus. Such snapshots can be used to study the evolution of stars that make up our galaxy. Most of the stars in this image lie near the center of our galaxy some 25,000 light-years distant. But one object, the blue curved streak [top right], is something much closer. An uncatalogued, mile-wide bit of rocky debris - an asteroid - orbiting the Sun only light-minutes away strayed into Hubble's field of view. An analysis of this asteroid indicates this asteroid's orbit could cross Mars's path. View the full article
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Hubble telescope images of Mars detail a rich geologic history and provide further evidence for water-bearing minerals on the planet's surface. These pictures showcase the planet in both visible and infrared light. In the image on the left, taken in visible light, Mars appears in natural color or as we would see it close-up. The multicolor picture on the right was taken in infrared light, which is invisible to the eye. Therefore, astronomers have assigned false colors to highlight important features that cannot be seen in visible light. Hubble's unique infrared view illustrates variations in the abundance and distribution of unknown water-bearing minerals on the planet.…
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This beautiful, eerie silhouette of dark dust clouds against the glowing nucleus of the elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 may represent the aftermath of a 100-million-year-old cosmic collision between the elliptical and a smaller companion galaxy. Hubble's superb resolution has enabled the identification of a class of small and very faint star clusters in this galaxy's central region. Many of these clusters are so small that they are barely held together by the mutual gravity of their constituent stars. Though such clusters are common in spiral galaxies like our Milky Way, they have rarely been seen in elliptical galaxies. The astronomers conclude that these clusters are among…
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Dramatic pictures of eerie disks of dust encircling young stars are giving astronomers a new look at what may be the early formative stages of planetary systems. Although these pictures from the Hubble telescope don't show planets, the edge-on disks seen by the telescope provide some of the clearest views to date of potential planetary construction zones, say researchers. The images also offer a peek at what happened 4.5 billion years ago when the Earth and other planets in our solar system began to condense out of a pancake-shaped disk of dust and gas centered on the young Sun. These images were taken by Hubble's infrared camera. All of the objects in these pictures ar…
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Glittering stars and wisps of gas create a breathtaking backdrop for the self-destruction of a massive star, called supernova 1987A, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy. Astronomers in the Southern Hemisphere witnessed the brilliant explosion of this star on Feb. 23, 1987. Shown in this Hubble telescope image, the supernova remnant, surrounded by inner and outer rings of material, is set in a forest of ethereal, diffuse clouds of gas. View the full article
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