Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
Mystery of the Universe's Expansion Rate Widens with New Hubble Data
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Hubble and Artificial Intelligence Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Snaps Galaxy Cluster’s Portrait
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy cluster Abell 209. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Postman, P. Kelly A massive, spacetime-warping cluster of galaxies is the setting of today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy cluster in question is Abell 209, located 2.8 billion light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Whale).
This Hubble image of Abell 209 shows more than a hundred galaxies, but there’s more to this cluster than even Hubble’s discerning eye can see. Abell 209’s galaxies are separated by millions of light-years, and the seemingly empty space between the galaxies is filled with hot, diffuse gas that is visible only at X-ray wavelengths. An even more elusive occupant of this galaxy cluster is dark matter: a form of matter that does not interact with light. Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, effectively making it invisible to us. Astronomers detect dark matter by its gravitational influence on normal matter. Astronomers surmise that the universe is comprised of 5% normal matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy.
Hubble observations, like the ones used to create this image, can help astronomers answer fundamental questions about our universe, including mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy. These investigations leverage the immense mass of a galaxy cluster, which can bend the fabric of spacetime itself and create warped and magnified images of background galaxies and stars in a process called gravitational lensing.
While this image lacks the dramatic rings that gravitational lensing can sometimes create, Abell 209 still shows subtle signs of lensing at work, in the form of streaky, slightly curved galaxies within the cluster’s golden glow. By measuring the distortion of these galaxies, astronomers can map the distribution of mass within the cluster, illuminating the underlying cloud of dark matter. This information, which Hubble’s fine resolution and sensitive instruments help to provide, is critical for testing theories of how our universe evolved.
Text Credit: ESA/Hubble
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Share
Details
Last Updated Jul 10, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Hubble Space Telescope Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Galaxies Galaxy clusters Goddard Space Flight Center Gravitational Lensing Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble Gravitational Lenses
Focusing in on Gravitational Lenses
Shining a Light on Dark Matter
View the full article
-
By NASA
The TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission will help scientists understand an explosive process called magnetic reconnection and its effects in Earth’s atmosphere. Credit: University of Iowa/Andy Kale NASA will hold a media teleconference at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, July 17, to share information about the agency’s upcoming Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS, mission, which is targeted to launch no earlier than late July.
The TRACERS mission is a pair of twin satellites that will study how Earth’s magnetic shield — the magnetosphere — protects our planet from the supersonic stream of material from the Sun called solar wind. As they fly pole to pole in a Sun-synchronous orbit, the two TRACERS spacecraft will measure how magnetic explosions send these solar wind particles zooming down into Earth’s atmosphere — and how these explosions shape the space weather that impacts our satellites, technology, and astronauts.
Also launching on this flight will be three additional NASA-funded payloads. The Athena EPIC (Economical Payload Integration Cost) SmallSat, led by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is designed to demonstrate an innovative, configurable way to put remote-sensing instruments into orbit faster and more affordably. The Polylingual Experimental Terminal technology demonstration, managed by the agency’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program, will showcase new technology that empowers missions to roam between communications networks in space, like cell phones roam between providers on Earth. Finally, the Relativistic Electron Atmospheric Loss (REAL) CubeSat, led by Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, will use space as a laboratory to understand how high-energy particles within the bands of radiation that surround Earth are naturally scattered into the atmosphere, aiding the development of methods for removing these damaging particles to better protect satellites and the critical ground systems they support.
Audio of the teleconference will stream live on the agency’s website at:
nasa.gov/live
Participants include:
Joe Westlake, division director, Heliophysics, NASA Headquarters Kory Priestley, principal investigator, Athena EPIC, NASA Langley Greg Heckler, deputy program manager for capability development, SCaN, NASA Headquarters David Miles, principal investigator for TRACERS, University of Iowa Robyn Millan, REAL principal investigator, Dartmouth College To participate in the media teleconference, media must RSVP no later than 10 a.m. on July 17 to Sarah Frazier at: sarah.frazier@nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
The TRACERS mission will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
This mission is led by David Miles at the University of Iowa with support from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. NASA’s Heliophysics Explorers Program Office at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the mission for the agency’s HeliophysicsDivision at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The University of Iowa, Southwest Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of California, Berkeley, all lead instruments on TRACERS that will study changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and electric field. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare contract.
To learn more about TRACERS, please visit:
nasa.gov/tracers
-end-
Abbey Interrante / Karen Fox
Headquarters, Washington
301-201-0124 / 202-358-1600
abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov / karen.c.fox@nasa.gov
Sarah Frazier
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
202-853-7191
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Jul 10, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Earth Heliophysics Science Mission Directorate Solar Wind TRACERS View the full article
-
By NASA
6 min read
Smarter Searching: NASA AI Makes Science Data Easier to Find
Image snapshot taken from NASA Worldview of NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission on March 15, 2025 showing heavy rain across the southeastern U.S. with an overlay of the GCMD Keyword Recommender for Earth Science, Atmosphere, Precipitation, Droplet Size. NASA Worldview Imagine shopping for a new pair of running shoes online. If each seller described them differently—one calling them “sneakers,” another “trainers,” and someone else “footwear for exercise”—you’d quickly feel lost in a sea of mismatched terminology. Fortunately, most online stores use standardized categories and filters, so you can click through a simple path: Women’s > Shoes > Running Shoes—and quickly find what you need.
Now, scale that problem to scientific research. Instead of sneakers, think “aerosol optical depth” or “sea surface temperature.” Instead of a handful of retailers, it is thousands of researchers, instruments, and data providers. Without a common language for describing data, finding relevant Earth science datasets would be like trying to locate a needle in a haystack, blindfolded.
That’s why NASA created the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), a standardized vocabulary that helps scientists tag their datasets in a consistent and searchable way. But as science evolves, so does the challenge of keeping metadata organized and discoverable.
To meet that challenge, NASA’s Office of Data Science and Informatics (ODSI) at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, developed the GCMD Keyword Recommender (GKR): a smart tool designed to help data providers and curators assign the right keywords, automatically.
Smarter Tagging, Accelerated Discovery
The upgraded GKR model isn’t just a technical improvement; it’s a leap forward in how we organize and access scientific knowledge. By automatically recommending precise, standardized keywords, the model reduces the burden on human curators while ensuring metadata quality remains high. This makes it easier for researchers, students, and the public to find exactly the datasets they need.
It also sets the stage for broader applications. The techniques used in GKR, like applying focal loss to rare-label classification problems and adapting pre-trained transformers to specialized domains, can benefit fields well beyond Earth science.
Metadata Matchmaker
The newly upgraded GKR model tackles a massive challenge in information science known as extreme multi-label classification. That’s a mouthful, but the concept is straightforward: Instead of predicting just one label, the model must choose many, sometimes dozens, from a set of thousands. Each dataset may need to be tagged with multiple, nuanced descriptors pulled from a controlled vocabulary.
Think of it like trying to identify all the animals in a photograph. If there’s just a dog, it’s easy. But if there’s a dog, a bird, a raccoon hiding behind a bush, and a unicorn that only shows up in 0.1% of your training photos, the task becomes far more difficult. That’s what GKR is up against: tagging complex datasets with precision, even when examples of some keywords are scarce.
And the problem is only growing. The new version of GKR now considers more than 3,200 keywords, up from about 430 in its earlier iteration. That’s a sevenfold increase in vocabulary complexity, and a major leap in what the model needs to learn and predict.
To handle this scale, the GKR team didn’t just add more data; they built a more capable model from the ground up. At the heart of the upgrade is INDUS, an advanced language model trained on a staggering 66 billion words drawn from scientific literature across disciplines—Earth science, biological sciences, astronomy, and more.
NASA ODSI’s GCMD Keyword Recommender AI model automatically tags scientific datasets with the help of INDUS, a large language model trained on NASA scientific publications across the disciplines of astrophysics, biological and physical sciences, Earth science, heliophysics, and planetary science. NASA “We’re at the frontier of cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning for science,” said Sajil Awale, a member of the NASA ODSI AI team at MSFC. “This problem domain is interesting, and challenging, because it’s an extreme classification problem where the model needs to differentiate even very similar keywords/tags based on small variations of context. It’s exciting to see how we have leveraged INDUS to build this GKR model because it is designed and trained for scientific domains. There are opportunities to improve INDUS for future uses.”
This means that the new GKR isn’t just guessing based on word similarities; it understands the context in which keywords appear. It’s the difference between a model knowing that “precipitation” might relate to weather versus recognizing when it means a climate variable in satellite data.
And while the older model was trained on only 2,000 metadata records, the new version had access to a much richer dataset of more than 43,000 records from NASA’s Common Metadata Repository. That increased exposure helps the model make more accurate predictions.
The Common Metadata Repository is the backend behind the following data search and discovery services:
Earthdata Search International Data Network Learning to Love Rare Words
One of the biggest hurdles in a task like this is class imbalance. Some keywords appear frequently; others might show up just a handful of times. Traditional machine learning approaches, like cross-entropy loss, which was used initially to train the model, tend to favor the easy, common labels, and neglect the rare ones.
To solve this, NASA’s team turned to focal loss, a strategy that reduces the model’s attention to obvious examples and shifts focus toward the harder, underrepresented cases.
The result? A model that performs better across the board, especially on the keywords that matter most to specialists searching for niche datasets.
From Metadata to Mission
Ultimately, science depends not only on collecting data, but on making that data usable and discoverable. The updated GKR tool is a quiet but critical part of that mission. By bringing powerful AI to the task of metadata tagging, it helps ensure that the flood of Earth observation data pouring in from satellites and instruments around the globe doesn’t get lost in translation.
In a world awash with data, tools like GKR help researchers find the signal in the noise and turn information into insight.
Beyond powering GKR, the INDUS large language model is also enabling innovation across other NASA SMD projects. For example, INDUS supports the Science Discovery Engine by helping automate metadata curation and improving the relevancy ranking of search results.The diverse applications reflect INDUS’s growing role as a foundational AI capability for SMD.
The INDUS large language model is funded by the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The Office of the Chief Science Data Officer advances scientific discovery through innovative applications and partnerships in data science, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence.
Share
Details
Last Updated Jul 09, 2025 Related Terms
Science & Research Artificial Intelligence (AI) Explore More
2 min read Polar Tourists Give Positive Reviews to NASA Citizen Science in Antarctica
Article
6 hours ago
2 min read Hubble Observations Give “Missing” Globular Cluster Time to Shine
Article
6 days ago
5 min read How NASA’s SPHEREx Mission Will Share Its All-Sky Map With the World
Article
7 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
As Hubble marks three and a half decades of scientific breakthroughs and technical resilience, the “Hubble at 35 Years” symposium offers a platform to reflect on the mission’s historical, operational, and scientific legacy. Hubble’s trajectory—from early challenges to becoming a symbol of American scientific ingenuity—presents valuable lessons in innovation, collaboration, and crisis response. Bringing together scientists, engineers, and historians at NASA Headquarters ensures that this legacy informs current and future mission planning, including operations for the James Webb Space Telescope, Roman Space Telescope, and other next-generation observatories. The symposium not only honors Hubble’s transformative contributions but also reinforces NASA’s commitment to learning from the past to shape a more effective and ambitious future for space science.
Hubble at 35 Years
Lessons Learned in Scientific Discovery and NASA Flagship Mission Operations
October 16–17, 2025
James Webb Auditorium, NASA HQ, Washington, D.C.
The giant Hubble Space Telescope (HST) can be seen as it is suspended in space by Discovery’s Remote Manipulator System (RMS) following the deployment of part of its solar panels and antennae on April 25, 1990.NASA The story of the Hubble Space Telescope confirms its place as the most transformative and significant astronomical observatory in history. Once called “the eighth wonder of the world” by a former NASA administrator, Hubble’s development since its genesis in the early 1970s and its launch, repair, and ultimate impact since 1990 provide ample opportunity to apply insights from its legacy. Scientists and engineers associated with groundbreaking discoveries have always operated within contexts shaped by forces including the government, private industry, the military, and the public at large. The purpose of this symposium is to explore the insights from Hubble’s past and draw connections that can inform the development of mission work today and for the future.
Contact the Organizer Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Hubble’s 35th Anniversary
Universe
Humans In Space
NASA History
View the full article
-
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.