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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Black holes are the universe's monsters: voracious eating machines that swallow anything that ventures near them. These compact behemoths pull stars and gas into a disk that swirls around them. The feeding generates a prodigious amount of energy, producing a powerful gusher of light from superheated infalling gas. These disks are so far away that it's nearly impossible to discern any detail about them. But by a quirk of alignment, astronomers may be getting a glimpse of the structure of the disk around the black hole in nearby galaxy IC 5063. The Hubble Space Telescope has observed a collection of narrow bright rays and dark shadows beaming out of the blazingly bright…
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In our infinite universe, stars can go bump in the night. When this happens between a pair of burned-out, crushed stars called neutron stars, the resulting fireworks show, called a kilonova, is beyond comprehension. The energy unleashed by the collision briefly glows 100 million times brighter than our Sun. What's left from the smashup? Typically an even more crushed object called a black hole. But in this case Hubble found forensic clues to something even stranger happening after the head-on collision. The intense flood of gamma-rays signaling astronomers to this event has been seen before in other stellar smashups. But something unexpected popped up in Hubble's near…
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Stars are not created equal. They span a broad range of sizes, ages, and temperatures from diminutive red, cool, low-mass stars to opulent blue, hot, massive stars. Our Sun is roughly midway between these populations. Because stars are the universe's LEGO blocks for building immense galaxies, astronomers are always seeking a much better understanding of their birth and death. Stars' behavior over their lifespan relates to everything from planets to the formation and evolution of galaxies. To better understand stars and their evolution, the Space Telescope Science Institute has launched an ambitious new initiative with the Hubble Space Telescope called ULLYSES (UV Legac…
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In our infinite universe, if you can imagine something, you may eventually find it out there. And, that even goes for celestial objects that look like some creepy incarnation straight out of a Halloween tale. Hubble's holiday offering is a pair of colliding galaxies that resemble the cartoon Peanuts character Linus's imagining of the elusive Great Pumpkin. "Great" is an understatement in this case because the galaxy pair spans 100,000 light-years. The "pumpkin’s" glowing "eyes" are the bright, star-filled cores of each galaxy that contain supermassive black holes. An arm of newly forming stars embracing the pair gives the imaginary pumpkin a wry smirk. In about 6 billion …
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New Survey Finds that Single Burst of Star Formation Created Milky Way’s Central Bulge
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Like most spiral galaxies, the Milky Way has a roughly spherical collection of stars at its center called the bulge. How the bulge formed has been a long-standing mystery, with many studies suggesting that it built up over time through multiple bursts of star formation. New research finds that the majority of stars in our galaxy’s central bulge formed in a single burst of star formation more than 10 billion years ago. To reach this conclusion, astronomers surveyed millions of stars across 200 square degrees of sky—an area equivalent to 1,000 full Moons. The resulting wealth of data is expected to fuel many more scientific inquiries. View the full article
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Now you see it, now you don't. Though stars explode at the rate of one per second in the vast universe, it's rare to get a time-lapse movie of one fading into obscurity. This disappearing act, in a galaxy 70 million light-years away, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a program to measure the universe's expansion rate. More than just providing celestial fireworks, supernovae can be used as milepost markers to measure distances to galaxies. This yardstick is needed to calculate how quickly galaxies appear to be flying apart from one another, which in turn provides an age estimate for the universe. The titanic explosion, which briefly outshined the entire…
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More massive than all the other planets combined, Jupiter truly is the king of our solar system. The swirling clouds, arranged in colorful, banded structures, change from year to year. The rich colors are produced by trace compounds in Jupiter’s predominantly hydrogen/helium atmosphere. Hurricane-force winds propel these clouds, and upwelling currents are ablaze with lightning bolts far more powerful than those seen on Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope serves as a “weather satellite” for monitoring Jupiter’s stormy weather. The iconic Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, shows that it’s shrinking a little in the Hubble images, but it still dominates the …
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While studying the Coma galaxy cluster in 1933, astronomer Fritz Zwicky uncovered a problem. The mass of all the stars in the cluster added up to only a few percent of the heft needed to keep member galaxies from escaping the cluster's gravitational grip. He predicted that the "missing mass," now known as dark matter, was the glue that was holding the cluster together. Dark matter, as its name implies, is matter that cannot be seen. It does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, nor does it interact with any known particles. The presence of these elusive particles is only known through their gravitational pull on visible matter in space. This mysterious substance is the in…
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Looks can be deceiving. The Andromeda spiral, the nearest major galaxy to our Milky Way, can be seen as a small, fuzzy, spindle-shaped object in the autumn skies of the Northern Hemisphere. What can’t be seen because it is too faint is a vast halo of hot, rarified gas that would stretch out from the Andromeda galaxy to the width of three Big Dippers. Now, in the most comprehensive study of the monstrous halo, Hubble astronomers have mapped this tenuous plasma, finding that it has a layered structure, with two distinct, nested shells of gas. They also found that it extends 1.3 million light-years from Andromeda—about halfway to our Milky Way—and as far as 2 million light-y…
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Whether it’s a surprise asteroid, colorful aurora or a heart-stopping eclipse, the landscape of the night sky is constantly changing. When a new visitor appears in view, it’s guaranteed to grab the attention of professional astronomers and casual sky gazers alike. Well, consider the Hubble Space Telescope the paparazzi of the sky, as it’s managed to snap the closest images yet of the sky’s latest visitor to make headlines, comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), after it passed by the Sun. Comet NEOWISE is considered the brightest comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere since 1997’s Hale-Bopp. It’s estimated to be traveling at a whopping 40 miles per second, or 144,000 miles per …
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The aging, bright-red supergiant star Betelgeuse has captivated sky watchers since antiquity. The ancient astronomer Ptolemy was one of the first to note the monster star's red color. It is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and appears even more luminous because it is so close to Earth, only 725 light-years away. But the star also periodically changes in brightness, which was first noted in the 1830s by British astronomer John Herschel. Astronomers now know that the star expands and contracts, brightening and dimming, on a 420-day cycle. However, in October 2019, the star dimmed dramatically and continued to become even fainter. By mid-February 2020, the mon…
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Astronauts who have gazed at Earth from space have been awestruck at our blue marble planet's majesty and diversity. Mike Massimino, who helped service the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit, said, "I think of our planet as a paradise. We are very lucky to be here." What's mind-blowing is that astronomers estimate there could be as many as 1 billion other planets like Earth in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Just imagine, one billion – not million – other "paradise planets." But it's paradise lost if nothing is living there to marvel at sunsets in azure blue skies. And, as 19th century philosopher Thomas Carlyle mused, "…what a waste of space." It is sobering that our home p…
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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has just successfully completed a preliminary design review of the mission’s ground systems, including the Science Operations Center that will be hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) 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 the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data. View the full article
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Watching Saturn and Earth from afar, space alien astronomers would note that Earth whips around the Sun nearly 30 times for every one orbit Saturn completes. That's because Earth is 10 times closer to the Sun than Saturn, and hence caught in the Sun's tighter gravitational grasp. Every time Earth "laps" sluggish Saturn, like two NASCAR racers, astronomers aim Hubble at the glamorous world to get a close-up look. Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and so goes through seasons. In this snapshot it is summer in the northern hemisphere. Hubble's crisp view shows multiple banded cloud activity warmed increasingly by direct sunlight. The spectacular ring system remains as …
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The "Bat Shadow" is the nickname Hubble astronomers gave to a huge shadow cast by a young star's planet-forming disk in 2018. Resembling a pair of wings, the striking image is actually a shadow on a more distant cloud—like a fly wandering into the beam of a flashlight shining on a wall. Now, the nickname turns out to be even more appropriate, because the team reports that those "wings" are flapping! The phenomenon may be caused by a planet pulling on the disk and warping it. View the full article
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For stars nearing the end of their lives, the forecast is clear: It's time for the fireworks! Planetary nebulas, whose stars shed their layers over thousands of years, can turn into crazy whirligigs while puffing off shells and jets of hot gas. New images from the Hubble Space Telescope have helped researchers identify rapid changes in material blasting off stars at the centers of two nebulas — causing them to reconsider what is happening at their cores. In the case of NGC 6302, dubbed the Butterfly Nebula, two S-shaped streams indicate its most recent ejections and may be the result of two stars interacting at the nebula's core. In NGC 7027, a new cloverleaf pattern …
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In Greek mythology the first deities born from the universe's origin in "the Chaos," created a race of Titans. The powerful Titans were eventually superseded by the gods of Olympus. In modern cosmology, the stellar equivalent of the legendary Titans are so-called Population III stars, that would have been the very first stars born after the big bang. These hypothetical stars are as elusive as the Titans. Unlike the stars of today—like our Sun (that contains heavier elements, such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and iron)—the Population III stars would have been solely made out of the few primordial elements first forged in the seething crucible of the big bang. Much more mass…
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About 3.5 million years ago, our distant hominid ancestors might have noticed a mysterious glowing spot along the arc of the star-studded Milky Way. Today we know that this would have been evidence for a tremendous explosion around a black hole that rocked the center of our galaxy. Scientists using Hubble now see the aftermath of that enormous flash of light that beamed out of our galaxy's center way back then. It illuminated a huge, ribbon-like tail of gas orbiting the Milky Way. Called the Magellanic Stream, this long trail lies far outside of our galaxy, at an average distance of 200,000 light-years. Like an aircraft contrail, It extends from neighboring dwarf galaxie…
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One of the top priorities for new home buyers is location. Finding a home in the right neighborhood is a key ingredient for a happy, prosperous family. Like families hunting for a house, fledgling planets also need the proper location to grow and thrive. Astronomers using Hubble to probe the giant, young star cluster Westerlund 2 are finding that stars residing in the system's crowded central city face a rough-and-tumble neighborhood that suppresses planet formation. The Hubble observations show that lower-mass stars near the cluster's core do not have the large, dense clouds of dust that eventually could become planets in just a few million years. But life is a lot e…
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Today, NASA announced that it is naming its next-generation space telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief Astronomer, who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe. The newly named Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (or Roman Space Telescope, for short), is set to launch in the mid-2020s. The Space Telescope Science Institute will serve as the science operations center for the Roman Space Telescope. In that role, the Institute will plan, schedule, and carry out observations, process and archive mission datasets, and engage and inform the astronomical community and the publi…
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With thunderheads that tower forty miles high and stretch half the width of a continent, hurricane-force winds in enormous storms that rage for centuries, and lightning three times as powerful as Earth's strongest superbolts, Jupiter—king of the planets—has proven itself a more-than-worthy namesake to the supreme Roman god of sky and thunder. In spite of more than 400 years of scientific observations, many details of the gas giant's turbulent and ever-changing atmosphere have remained elusive. Now, thanks to the teamwork of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gemini Observatory, and the Juno spacecraft, scientists are able to probe deep into storm systems, investigating sou…
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Brown dwarfs, often called “failed stars,” weigh up to 80 times as much as Jupiter, yet their gravity compacts them to about the size of Jupiter in diameter. And like Jupiter, brown dwarfs can have clouds and weather. Astronomers have found evidence that the closest known brown dwarf, Luhman 16A, has Jupiter-like cloud bands. In contrast its companion brown dwarf, Luhman 16B, shows signs of patchy clouds. View the full article
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The 1927 song, "Blue Skies,' by celebrated American composer Irving Berlin, was an instant hit, and even featured in the very first Hollywood "talking picture," the Jazz Singer. But if Berlin lived on the planet WASP-79b, he would only have had yellow skies for inspiration. This has piqued the curiosity of astronomers because it is so peculiar. The gas giant planet was expected to show evidence for Rayleigh scattering, a phenomena where certain colors of light are dispersed by very fine dust particles in the upper atmosphere. Rayleigh scattering is what makes Earth's skies blue by dispersing the shorter (bluer) wavelengths of sunlight. This is a moot point regarding l…
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Comets are one of the most legendary and opulent denizens of deep space. Their long tails are so mysterious looking, their sudden appearance so unpredictable, and their journey across the sky so ephemeral that they were once feared as omens of evil, pestilence, and war. These latest images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the doomed comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20 and 23, 2020, provide the sharpest views yet that the comet's solid icy nucleus is breaking apart into as many as 30 pieces that are each roughly the size of a house. So, despite the name, ATLAS doesn't look like anything to be afraid of. The comet was discovered on December 29, 2019 by the A…
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A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 30 years of viewing the wonders of space. In the Hubble portrait, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the "Cosmic Reef," because NGC 2014 resembles part of a coral reef floating in a vast sea of stars. Some of the stars in NGC 2014 are monsters. The nebula's sparkling centerpiece is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 t…
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