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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Stars come in an extraordinary range of sizes. One of the most colossal is VY Canis Majoris. If placed in the middle of our solar system it would engulf all the planets out to Saturn's orbit. This monster, appropriately called a red hypergiant, is as bright as 300,000 Suns. Yet it is so far away that, 200 years ago, it could be seen only as a faint star in the winter constellation of the Great Dog. Since then, it has faded and is no longer visible to the naked eye. Astronomers used Hubble to get a close-up look at the star and discovered the reason for the dimming. The star is expelling huge clouds of dust in the final stages of its life. Eventually, the bloated star may …
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SpaceX SN10 Starship Test Flight Launch & Landing!
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AURORA LiveStream From Finland! Northern Lights Live (2nd March 2021)
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AURORA LiveStream From Finland! Northern Lights Live (3rd March 2021)
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Live Coverage of ISS Expedition 64 U.S. spacewalk #71 with Rubins and Glover
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Long road trips can be tedious and boring. That's why many road travelers break up their arduous journey by making rest stops along the way. Astronomers found that at least one roaming comet is doing the same thing. The wayward object made a temporary stop near giant Jupiter. The icy visitor has plenty of company: It has settled near the family of captured asteroids known as Trojans that are co-orbiting the Sun alongside Jupiter. This is the first time a comet-like object has been spotted near the Trojan asteroid population. Hubble Space Telescope observations reveal the vagabond is showing signs of transitioning from a frigid asteroid-like body to an active comet, sp…
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4K Perseverance Rover’s Descent and Touchdown on Mars Official NASA Video
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NASA Perseverance Landing on MARS
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AURORA LiveStream From Finland! Northern Lights Live (20th February 2021)
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AURORA LiveStream From Finland! Northern Lights Live (19th February 2021)
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AURORA LiveStream From Finland! Northern Lights Live (19th February 2021)
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AURORA LiveStream From Finland! Northern Lights Live (17th February 2021)
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The idea that black holes come in different sizes may sound a little odd at first. After all, a black hole by definition is an object that has collapsed under gravity to an infinite density, making it smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. But the amount of mass a black hole can pack away varies widely from less than twice the mass of our Sun to over a billion times our Sun's mass. Midway between are intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) weighing roughly hundreds to tens of thousands of solar masses. So, black holes come small, medium, and large. However, the IMBHs have been elusive. They are predicted to hide out in the centers of globular star clusters, …
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Sometime during the third century, a brilliant burst of light from the explosion of a massive star was visible from Earth. If the supernova blast had flashed over the northern hemisphere, it might have been considered an evil omen. At that time, Western Civilization was in upheaval. The Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. An emperor was assassinated, followed by political upheavals, civil wars, and barbarian attacks. But the violent supernova death could only be seen in the southern skies. The blast occurred in the nearby satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud. No record exists of the titanic event. However, like the smoke and ash drifting across the sky afte…
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How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe? Astronomers can estimate the total number of galaxies by counting everything visible in a Hubble deep field and then multiplying them by the total area of the sky. But other galaxies are too faint and distant to directly detect. Yet while we can’t count them, their light suffuses space with a feeble glow. To measure that glow, astronomers have to escape the inner solar system and its light pollution, caused by sunlight reflecting off dust. A team of scientists has used observations by NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt to determine the brightness o…
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In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a blank patch of the sky for 10 straight days. The resulting Deep Field image captured thousands of previously unseen, distant galaxies. Similar observations have followed since then, including the longest and deepest exposure, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Now, astronomers are looking ahead to the future, and the possibilities enabled by NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The Roman Space Telescope will be able to photograph an area of sky 100 times larger than Hubble with the same exquisite sharpness. As a result, a Roman Ultra Deep Field would collect millions of galaxies, including hundreds that date back t…
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When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Neptune in 1989 after a nearly 3-billion-mile odyssey, astronomers expected to get a close-up look at a blue-green planet that seemed as featureless as a marble. Instead, they were shocked and intrigued to see a dynamic and turbulent world of whirling storms, including a giant feature dubbed the Great Dark Spot, looming in Neptune's far southern hemisphere. The vortex was reminiscent of Jupiter's legendary Great Red Spot, a monstrous storm that has been raging for hundreds of years. Had this Great Dark Spot been brewing for the same amount of time? Or, was it a more ephemeral tempest? Scientists had to wait until 1994, when the…
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Though every planet in our solar system has been visited by spacecraft over nearly the past 60 years, the outer frontier of the solar system, beyond Neptune, has been barely explored. There is circumstantial evidence that a planet five times Earth's mass – dubbed Planet Nine – may be lurking out there in the abyss. If real, it is creeping along a very wide orbit taking it 800 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. Though astronomers have yet to find this legendary world – if it exists at all – they have found another clue 336 light-years away. Astronomers analyzing Hubble images of the double star, HD 106906, have discovered a planet in a huge 15,000-year-long orbit …
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Great things take time. This is true when it comes to many processes in the universe. For example, it takes millions of years for stars—the building blocks of the universe—to form. Then, many stars last for billions of years before they die and begin to eject shells of gas that glow against the vastness of space—what we call nebulas. It can be exceedingly rare to capture some of these processes in real time. Lucky for us, it seems as if the Stingray nebula, Hen 3-1357, was destined to stand out from the crowd since its beginnings. It was dubbed the youngest known planetary nebula in 1998 after Hubble caught a rare peek at the central star’s final stages of life. Now, tw…
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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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