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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Holland Ford, an astronomer at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., has received NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal for his outstanding contributions to the Hubble Space Telescope. The Distinguished Public Service Medal is NASA's highest form of recognition, awarded to someone who has made a profound impact on the success of a NASA mission. The medal is one of several NASA Agency Honor Awards given annually. View the full article
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In the summer of 1989, a robotic emissary from Earth visited the farthest major planet from the Sun, Neptune. Like any good tourist, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft snapped a lot of pictures during the brief flyby. The prolific probe discovered several moons orbiting close to the blue-green planet. But one moon, no bigger than a metropolitan city and nearly coal-black, escaped detection because it was too faint to be seen. Until now. While analyzing Neptune photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute noticed an extra white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the moons Larissa and Proteus. Hubble'…
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Hubble has identified the true visible-light color of a giant Jupiter-sized planet located 63 light-years away. The planet has a cobalt blue color. It has torrential 4,500-mile-per-hour winds that are so hot they melt silicates into raindrops of molten glass. And that's where the cobalt-blue hue comes from, not oceans. The glass droplets scatter blue light more readily than green or red light. The planet's color provides unique clues to the atmosphere and weather on a truly alien world that orbits much closer to its star than the innermost planet Mercury is to our Sun. View the full article
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This July 4th, the solar system is showing off some fireworks of its own. Superficially resembling a skyrocket, Comet ISON is hurtling toward the Sun at a whopping 48,000 miles per hour. Unlike a firework, the comet is not combusting, but in fact is pretty cold. Its skyrocket-looking tail is really a streamer of gas and dust bleeding off the icy nucleus. The video shows a sequence of Hubble observations taken over a 43-minute span, compressed into just five seconds. The comet travels 34,000 miles during the exposure sequence. View the full article
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What looks like a celestial hummingbird is really the result of a collision between a spiral and an elliptical galaxy at a whopping 326 million light- years away. The flat disk of the spiral NGC 2936 is warped into the profile of a bird by the gravitational tug of the companion NGC 2937. The object was first cataloged as a "peculiar galaxy" by Halton Arp in the 1960s. This interacting galaxy duo is collectively called Arp 142. View the full article
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Nearly 900 extrasolar planets have been confirmed to date, but now for the first time astronomers think they are seeing compelling evidence for a planet under construction in an unlikely place, at a great distance from its diminutive red dwarf star. The keen vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a mysterious gap in a vast protoplanetary disk of gas and dust swirling around the nearby star TW Hydrae, located 176 light-years away in the constellation Hydra (the Sea Serpent). The gap's presence is best explained as due to the effects of a growing, unseen planet that is gravitationally sweeping up material and carving out a lane in the disk, like a snow plow.…
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After 45 years of peaceful bliss, the nova T Pyxidis erupted again in 2011. Astronomers took advantage of a flash of light accompanying the blast to map the ejecta from previous outbursts surrounding the double-star system. The team used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to trace the light as it sequentially illuminated different parts of the disk, a phenomenon called a light echo. Contrary to some predictions, the astronomers were somewhat surprised to find that the ejecta stayed in the vicinity of the star and formed a disk of debris. The discovery suggests that material continues expanding outward along the system's orbital plane, but it does not escape the system. …
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The ancients thought that stars were fixed pinpoints of light on the sky. Today we know that they are all moving, like fish in a pond. This so-called proper motion is so small that it is not noticeable to the human eye over a single lifetime. But Hubble can precisely track stellar motions to razor-sharp precision. Not surprisingly the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, is one of the fastest moving across the sky. Hubble astronomers have found that it will pass in front of two far-more distant background stars, once in 2014 and again in 2016. This will afford a very rare opportunity to see how Proxima's gravity warps the image of the background stars by bending the…
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The distinctive shape of the Ring Nebula, the glowing shroud around a dying Sun-like star, makes it a popular celestial object that appears in many astronomy books. New observations of the Ring Nebula by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, however, reveal a new twist on an iconic nebula. The Hubble images offer the best view yet of the nebula, revealing a complex structure. The observations have allowed astronomers to construct the most precise three-dimensional model of the glowing gas shroud, called a planetary nebula. Based on the new observations, the Hubble research team suggests that the ring wraps around a blue football-shaped structure that protrudes out of opposite …
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Deep inside the Hyades star cluster, a pair of burned-out stars are yielding clues to the presence of rocky planets that may have whirled around them. Asteroid debris is 'raining' into the hot atmospheres of these white dwarfs. Asteroids should consist of the same material that form terrestrial planets, and seeing evidence of asteroids points to the possibility of Earth-sized planets in the same system. Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observed silicon and only low levels of carbon in the white dwarfs' atmospheres. Silicon is a major ingredient of the rocky material that constitutes Earth and other solid planets in our solar system. Astronomers used sophisticated co…
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The Space Telescope Science Institute has appointed Dr. Massimo Stiavelli as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Mission Head. Stiavelli will be responsible for the development and operations of the JWST Science and Operations Center at STScI. He has been acting JWST Mission Head since January 2012. The largest space observatory ever developed, JWST is scheduled for launch in 2018. Stiavelli succeeds Dr. Kathy Flanagan, who was appointed the Institute's Deputy Director in October 2012. Stiavelli has worked at the Institute for over 17 years. His many positions at the Institute include instrument scientist for three Hubble cameras. Stiavelli has been working on the JWST …
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Comet ISON is potentially the "comet of the century" because around the time the comet makes its closest approach to the Sun, on November 28, it may briefly become brighter than the full Moon. Right now the comet is far below naked-eye visibility, and so Hubble was used to snap the view of the approaching comet, which is presently hurtling toward the Sun at approximately 47,000 miles per hour. When the Hubble picture was taken on April 10, the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter's orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the Sun. Even at that great distance the Sun is warming the comet enough to trigger outgassing from its frozen gases locked up in the solid nucle…
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Unlike other celestial objects there is no question how the Horsehead Nebula got its name. This iconic silhouette of a horse's head and neck pokes up mysteriously from what look like whitecaps of interstellar foam. The nebula has graced astronomy books ever since its discovery over a century ago. But Hubble's infrared vision shows the horse in a new light. The nebula, shadowy in optical light, appears transparent and ethereal when seen at infrared wavelengths. This pillar of tenuous hydrogen gas laced with dust is resisting being eroded away by the radiation from a nearby star. The nebula is a small part of a vast star-forming complex in the constellation Orion. The Horse…
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NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) have announced the selection of 17 new Hubble Fellows. The Hubble Fellowship Program now includes all research relevant to present and future missions in NASA's Cosmic Origins theme. These missions currently include the Herschel Space Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), and the Spitzer Space Telescope. STScI in Baltimore, Md., administers the Hubble Fellowship Program for NASA. More than 310 of the most prominent and active scientists in this field have been supported at a crucial phase in their careers by…
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a star detonated with enough energy to briefly shine with an intrinsic brightness of one billion of our suns. The beacon of radiation arrived at Earth 10 billion years later and was captured in a Hubble Space Telescope deep survey of the universe. It is the farthest, and earliest, supernova of its type detected to date. More than simply an example of the ancient fireworks in the young and effervescent universe, the supernova belongs to a special class of stellar detonations that are so reliably bright, they can be used as intergalactic milepost markers. Supernovae like this one provided the first observational evidence that th…
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NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope has made the first detection of X-ray emission from young solar-type stars that lie outside our Milky Way galaxy. They live in a region known as the "Wing" of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. X-rays from young stars trace how active their magnetic fields are. Magnetic activity provides clues to a star's rotation rate and the rising and falling of hot gas in the star's interior. Astronomers suggest that if the X-ray properties of young stars are similar in different environments around our galaxy, then other related properties, such as the formation of planets, are also likely to be similar. In this composite…
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Looking up through hundreds of colored filters and spectral glasses, 526 people shattered the record for the Largest Astronomy Lesson. Under the Texas night sky, students were instructed on the lawn of the Long Center for the Performing Arts at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin on Sunday, March 10, 2013. View the full article
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You can't be older than your parents. But there is a nearby star that at first glance looks like it is older than the universe! Hubble Space Telescope astronomers are coming to grips with this paradox by improving the precision of the observations used to estimate the age of this "Methuselah star." Around the year 2000, estimates for the star's age were about 16 billion years. But the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, based on a meticulous calibration of the expansion of space and analysis of the microwave afterglow from the big bang. Hubble data and improved theoretical calculations were used to recalculate the star's age and lower the estimate to 14.5 billion …
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The universe is eerie enough without giving us an apparition of a 1980s video game alien attacker. This oddball-looking object is really a mirage created by the gravitational field of a foreground cluster of galaxies warping space and distorting the background images of more distant galaxies. This effect, called gravitational lensing, can make multiple mirror image copies of the light coming from a far-flung galaxy. It is a powerful tool for seeing remote galaxies that otherwise would not be observable by Hubble because they are too dim and far away. In this Hubble photo a background spiral galaxy is warped into an image that resembles a cartoon of a simulated space inv…
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Peering deep into the vast stellar halo that envelops our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered tantalizing evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that are a relic of cannibalism by our Milky Way. Hubble was used to precisely measure, for the first time ever, the sideways motions of a small sample of stars located far from the Milky Way galaxy's center. Their unusual lateral motion is circumstantial evidence that the stars may be the remnants of a shredded galaxy that was gravitationally ripped apart by the Milky Way billions of years ago. These stars support the idea that the Milky Way grew, in part, through t…
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Everything's bigger in Texas, and a life-sized model of the world's largest space telescope, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, will be on display at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival along with Webb-related exhibits, educational events, interactives, visualizations, scientists, and much more. The NASA events at SXSW will occur March 8-10, 2013, in Austin. The Webb telescope model is coming to SXSW just in time to highlight the fact that this spring NASA is starting to bring together some of the major parts of the observatory. In 2013, NASA will begin to integrate the four science instruments that will be attached to the telescope. NASA is partnering wi…
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A mysterious infant star, swaddled inside a dusty blanket, behaves like a police strobe light. The newly discovered object offers clues into the early stages of star formation, when a lot of gas and dust is being rapidly sucked into a newly forming binary star. Every 25.34 days, the object, designated LRLL 54361, unleashes a burst of light. The flashes may be due to material suddenly being dumped onto the growing protostars, unleashing a blast of radiation each time the stars get close to each other in their orbits. The phenomenon has been seen in later stages of star birth, but never in such a young system, nor with such intensity and regularity. LRLL 54361 was discove…
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Working with astronomical image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., renowned astrophotographer Robert Gendler has taken science data from the Hubble Space Telescope archive and combined it with his own ground-based observations to assemble a photo illustration of the magnificent spiral galaxy M106. Gendler retrieved archival Hubble images of M106 to assemble a mosaic of the center of the galaxy. He then used his own and fellow astrophotographer Jay GaBany's observations of M106 to combine with the Hubble data in areas where there was less coverage, and finally, to fill in the holes and gaps where no Hubble data existed. View the…
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Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., has been awarded the 2013 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize. This annual prize from the American Astronomical Society is for outstanding achievement in observational astronomy by an astronomer under the age of 36. Kalirai, 34, received the award for his contributions to the field of stellar and galactic astrophysics. Kalirai has also devised new methods to measure the age of the Milky Way galaxy. View the full article
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Newly released Hubble Space Telescope images of a vast debris disk encircling the nearby star Fomalhaut, and of a mysterious planet circling it, may provide forensic evidence of a titanic planetary disruption in the system. Astronomers are surprised to find that the debris belt is wider than previously known, spanning a gulf of space from 14 billion miles to nearly 20 billion miles from the star. Even more surprisingly, the latest Hubble images have allowed a team of astronomers to calculate that the planet follows an unusual elliptical orbit that carries it on a potentially destructive path through the vast dust ring. The planet, called Fomalhaut b, swings as close to …
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