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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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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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have probed the stormy atmosphere of a brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026, creating the most detailed "weather map" yet for this class of cool, star-like orbs. The forecast shows wind-driven, planet-sized clouds enshrouding these strange worlds. Brown dwarfs form out of condensing gas, as stars do, but lack the mass to fuse atoms and produce energy. Instead, these objects, which some call failed stars, are more similar to gas planets with their complex, varied atmospheres. The new research is a stepping stone toward a better understanding not only brown dwarfs, but also of the atmospheres of planets beyond …
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been providing astounding images of the universe since April 1990 and has led to remarkable discoveries. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the next-generation telescope that will peer even deeper into space and unveil even more mysteries. Both of these extraordinary telescopes are now the topics of two free e-books available from the Apple iBookstore. The e-book "Hubble Space Telescope: Discoveries" takes the reader on a tour of some of Hubble's most significant science successes, combined with some of the telescope's technology and history. In the e-book called the "James Webb Space Telescope: Science Guide," readers will learn ho…
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'Tis the season for holiday decorating and tree-trimming. Not to be left out, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed a festive-looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189. The intricate structure of this bright gaseous nebula resembles a glass-blown holiday ornament with a glowing ribbon entwined. View the full article
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Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a previously unseen population of seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 3 percent of its present age. The deepest images to date from Hubble yield the first statistically robust sample of galaxies that tells how abundant they were close to the era when galaxies first formed. The results show a smooth decline in the number of galaxies with increasing look-back time to about 450 million years after the big bang. The observations support the idea that galaxies assembled continuously over time and also may have provided enough radiation to reheat, or …
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Bright pink nebulae almost completely encircle a spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 922. The ring structure and the galaxy's distorted spiral shape result from a smaller galaxy scoring a cosmic bull's-eye, hitting the center of NGC 922 some 330 million years ago. Hubble's image of NGC 922 consists of a series of exposures taken in visible light with the Wide Field Camera 3, and in visible and near-infrared light with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. View the full article
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Now you see it, now you don't. Douglas Clowe of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, is reporting on new Hubble observations that do not find an unusually dense clump of dark matter in the universe that a different Hubble team reported on earlier this year. The region of interest lies at the center of a collision among massive galaxy clusters in Abell 520, located 2.4 billion light-years away. "The earlier result presented a mystery. But in our observations we didn't see anything surprising in the core," said Clowe. "Our measurements are in complete agreement with how we would expect dark matter to behave." Because dark matter is not visible, its presence and distribution is …
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Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A illustrate the combined imaging power of two of astronomy's cutting-edge tools, the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, and the recently upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico. View the full article
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By combining the power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and one of nature's own natural "zoom lenses" in space, astronomers have set a new distance record for finding the farthest galaxy yet seen in the universe. The diminutive blob, which is only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way galaxy, offers a peek back into a time when the universe was 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. The newly discovered galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, is observed 420 million years after the big bang. Its light has traveled 13.3 billion years to reach Earth. This is the latest discovery from a large program that uses natural zoom lenses to reveal …
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Solar systems with life-bearing planets may be rare if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid belts of just the right mass, according to a study by Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. They suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the Sun's protoplanetary disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life will evolve on an Earth-like planet. The findings will appear today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Let…
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The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is releasing 12 additional months worth of planet-searching data meticulously collected by one of the most prolific planet-hunting endeavors ever conceived, NASA's Kepler Mission. As of Oct. 28, 2012, every observation from the extrasolar planet survey made by Kepler since its launch in 2009 through June 27, 2012, is available to scientists and the public. This treasure-trove contains more than 16 terabytes of data and is housed at the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, at the Space Telescope Science Institute. MAST is a huge data archive containing astronomical observations from 16 NASA sp…
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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have obtained a remarkable new view of a whopper of an elliptical galaxy that may have been puffed up by the actions of one or more black holes in its core. The galaxy's core measures about 10,000 light-years and is the largest yet seen. View the full article
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