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Astronomers Find Elusive Planets in Decade-Old Hubble Data
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By NASA
ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Windhorst, W. Keel This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a spiral galaxy, named UGC 10043. We don’t see the galaxy’s spiral arms because we are seeing it from the side. Located roughly 150 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens, UGC 10043 is one of the somewhat rare spiral galaxies that we see edge-on.
This edge-on viewpoint makes the galaxy’s disk appear as a sharp line through space, with its prominent dust lanes forming thick bands of clouds that obscure our view of the galaxy’s glow. If we could fly above the galaxy, viewing it from the top down, we would see this dust scattered across UGC 10043, possibly outlining its spiral arms. Despite the dust’s obscuring nature, some active star-forming regions shine out from behind the dark clouds. We can also see that the galaxy’s center sports a glowing, almost egg-shaped ‘bulge’, rising far above and below the disk. All spiral galaxies have a bulge similar to this one as part of their structure. These bulges hold stars that orbit the galactic center on paths above and below the whirling disk; it’s a feature that isn’t normally obvious in pictures of galaxies. The unusually large size of this bulge compared to the galaxy’s disk is possibly due to UGC 10043 siphoning material from a nearby dwarf galaxy. This may also be why its disk appears warped, bending up at one end and down at the other.
Like most full-color Hubble images, this image is a composite, made up of several individual snapshots taken by Hubble at different times, each capturing different wavelengths of light. One notable aspect of this image is that the two sets of data that comprise this image were collected 23 years apart, in 2000 and 2023! Hubble’s longevity doesn’t just afford us the ability to produce new and better images of old targets; it also provides a long-term archive of data which only becomes more and more useful to astronomers.
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By NASA
At Goddard Space Flight Center, the GSFC Data Science Group has completed the testing for their SatVision Top-of-Atmosphere (TOA) Foundation Model, a geospatial foundation model for coarse-resolution all-sky remote sensing imagery. The team, comprised of Mark Carroll, Caleb Spradlin, Jordan Caraballo-Vega, Jian Li, Jie Gong, and Paul Montesano, has now released their model for wide application in science investigations.
Foundation models can transform the landscape of remote sensing (RS) data analysis by enabling the pre-training of large computer-vision models on vast amounts of remote sensing data. These models can be fine-tuned with small amounts of labeled training and applied to various mapping and monitoring applications. Because most existing foundation models are trained solely on cloud-free satellite imagery, they are limited to applications of land surface or require atmospheric corrections. SatVision-TOA is trained on all-sky conditions which enables applications involving atmospheric variables (e.g., cloud or aerosol).
SatVision TOA is a 3 billion parameter model trained on 100 million images from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). This is, to our knowledge, the largest foundation model trained solely on satellite remote sensing imagery. By including “all-sky” conditions during pre-training, the team incorporated a range of cloud conditions often excluded in traditional modeling. This enables 3D cloud reconstruction and cloud modeling in support of Earth and climate science, offering significant enhancement for large-scale earth observation workflows.
With an adaptable and scalable model design, SatVision-TOA can unify diverse Earth observation datasets and reduce dependency on task-specific models. SatVision-TOA leverages one of the largest public datasets to capture global contexts and robust features. The model could have broad applications for investigating spectrometer data, including MODIS, VIIRS, and GOES-ABI. The team believes this will enable transformative advancements in atmospheric science, cloud structure analysis, and Earth system modeling.
The model architecture and model weights are available on GitHub and Hugging Face, respectively. For more information, including a detailed user guide, see the associated white paper: SatVision-TOA: A Geospatial Foundation Model for Coarse-Resolution All-Sky Remote Sensing Imagery.
Examples of image reconstruction by SatVision-TOA. Left: MOD021KM v6.1 cropped image chip using MODIS bands [1, 3, 2]. Middle: The same images with randomly applied 8×8 mask patches, masking 60% of the original image. Right: The reconstructed images produced by the model, along with their respective Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) scores. These examples illustrate the model’s ability to preserve structural detail and reconstruct heterogeneous features, such as cloud textures and land-cover transitions, with high fidelity.NASAView the full article
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By European Space Agency
Launched in May 2024, ESA’s EarthCARE satellite is nearing the end of its commissioning phase with the release of its first data on clouds and aerosols expected early next year. In the meantime, an international team of scientists has found an innovative way of applying artificial intelligence to other satellite data to yield 3D profiles of clouds.
This is particularly news for those eagerly awaiting data from EarthCARE in their quest to advance climate science.
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By NASA
NASA/Joel Kowsky On Dec. 4, 2024, NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, left, and Jasmin Moghbeli spent a moment in part of the Earth Information Center, an immersive experience combining live NASA data sets with innovative data visualization and storytelling at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
O’Hara and Moghbeli spent six months in space as part of Expedition 70 aboard the International Space Station. On Nov. 1, 2023, they performed a spacewalk together that lasted 6 hours and 42 minutes.
Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
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By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Home Hubble Spots a Spiral in the… Hubble Space Telescope 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 Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More 35th Anniversary 2 min read
Hubble Spots a Spiral in the Celestial River
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 1637. ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 1637, a spiral galaxy located 38 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, the River.
This image comes from an observing program dedicated to studying star formation in nearby galaxies. Stars form in cold, dusty gas clouds that collapse under their own gravity. As young stars grow, they heat their nurseries through starlight, winds, and powerful outflows. Together, these factors play a role in controlling the rate at which future generations of stars form.
NGC 1637 holds evidence of star formation scattered throughout its disk, if you know where to look. The galaxy’s spiral arms have pockets of pink clouds, many with bright blue stars. The pinkish color comes from hydrogen atoms excited by ultraviolet light from young, massive stars forming within the clouds. This contrasts with the warm yellow glow of the galaxy’s center, which is home to a densely packed collection of older, redder stars.
The stars that set their cloudy birthplaces aglow are comparatively short-lived, and many of these stars will explode as supernovae just a few million years after they’re born. In 1999, NGC 1637 played host to a supernova named SN 1999EM, lauded as the brightest supernova seen that year. When a massive star expires as a supernova, the explosion outshines its entire home galaxy for a short time. While a supernova marks the end of a star’s life, it can also jump start the formation of new stars by compressing nearby clouds of gas, beginning the stellar lifecycle anew.
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Hubble’s Galaxies
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Homing in on Cosmic Explosions
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Hubble Focus E-Book: Galaxies through Space and Time
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated Dec 05, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Spiral Galaxies Stars Supernovae View the full article
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