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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A class of especially hardy microbes that live in some of the harshest Earthly environments could flourish on cold Mars and other chilly planets, according to a research team of astronomers and microbiologists. In a two-year laboratory study, the researchers discovered that some cold-adapted microorganisms not only survived but reproduced at 30 degrees Fahrenheit, just below the freezing point of water. The microbes also developed a defense mechanism that protected them from cold temperatures. These close-up images, taken by an electron microscope, reveal the tiny one-cell organisms, called halophiles and methanogens, that were used in the study. View the full arti…
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This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters. The new image allows astronomers to better distinguish between the stars and super star clusters created in the collision of two spiral galaxies. View the full article
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Images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have provided a dramatic glimpse of a large and massive galaxy under assembly by the merging of smaller, lighter galaxies. Astrophysicists believe that this is the way galaxies grew in the young universe. Now, Hubble observations of the radio galaxy MRC 1138-262, nicknamed the "Spiderweb Galaxy" show dozens of star-forming satellite galaxies as individual clumpy features in the process of merging. Because the galaxy is 10.6 billion light-years away, astronomers are seeing it as it looked in the universe's early formative years, only 3 billion years after the Big Bang. View the full article
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observations, has provided definitive evidence for the existence of the nearest extrasolar planet to our solar system. The Jupiter-sized world orbits the Sun-like star Epsilon Eridani, which is only 10.5 light-years away. The results are being presented today at the 38th Annual Division of Planetary Sciences Meeting in Pasadena, Calif. and will appear in the November issue of the Astronomical Journal. This is an artist's concept of a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. View the full article
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. The planet bonanza was uncovered during a Hubble survey, called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). Hubble looked farther than has ever successfully been searched for extrasolar planets. Hubble peered at 180,000 stars in the crowded central bulge of our galaxy 26,000 light-years away or one-quarter the diameter of the Milky Way's spiral disk. The results will appear in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Nature. View the full article
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John C. Mather, a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has won the 2006 Nobel Physics Prize. Mather shares the prize with George F. Smoot, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, for work that helped solidify the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. Mather and Smoot were members of a science team that used NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite to measure the diffuse microwave background radiation, which is considered a relic of the Big Bang. View the full article
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Just as we near the end of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, winds whirl and clouds churn 2 billion miles away in the atmosphere of Uranus, forming a dark vortex large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States. Astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the first definitive images of a dark spot on Uranus. The elongated feature measures 1,100 miles by 1,900 miles (1,700 kilometers by 3,000 kilometers). This three-wavelength composite image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on August 23, 2006. The research team found the dark spot again on August 24. The inset image shows a magnified view…
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Astronomers analyzing two of the deepest views of the cosmos made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a gold mine of galaxies, more than 500 that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early universe, researchers said. The discovery is scientifically invaluable for understanding the origin of galaxies, considering that just a decade ago early galaxy formation was largely uncharted territory. Astronomers had not seen even one galaxy that existed when the universe was a billion years old, so finding 500 in a Hubble survey is a significant leap forward for cosmologists. …
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A systematic search for the first bright galaxies to form in the early universe has revealed a dramatic jump in the number of such galaxies around 13 billion years ago. These observations of the earliest stages in the evolution of galaxies provide new evidence for the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation – the idea that large galaxies built up over time as smaller galaxies collided and merged. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to explore the formation of galaxies during the first 900 million years after the Big Bang. They reported their latest findings in the September 14 issue of the journal Nature. Deep observ…
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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The conundrum is that it's also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star. The Hubble observation of the diminutive companion to the low-mass red dwarf star CHXR 73 is a dramatic reminder that astronomers do not have a consensus in deciding which objects orbiting other stars are truly planets -- even though they have at last agreed on how they will apply the definition of "planet" to objects inside our solar system. View the full arti…
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This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image is a never-before-seen astronomical alignment of a moon traversing the face of Uranus, and its accompanying shadow. The white dot near the center of Uranus' blue-green disk is the icy moon Ariel. The 700-mile-diameter satellite is casting a shadow onto the cloud tops of Uranus. To an observer on Uranus, this would appear as a solar eclipse, where the moon briefly blocks out the Sun as its shadow races across Uranus's cloud tops. Though such "transits" by moons across the disks of their parents are commonplace for some other gas giant planets, such as Jupiter, the satellites of Uranus orbit the planet in such a way that they rarely ca…
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A new image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed look at the tattered remains of a supernova explosion known as Cassiopeia A (Cas A). It is the youngest known remnant from a supernova explosion in the Milky Way. The new Hubble image shows the complex and intricate structure of the star's shattered fragments. The image is a composite made from 18 separate images taken in December 2004 using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). View the full article
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The General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, has named Dr. Robert Williams, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), as its President-Elect. He will become IAU President in 2009. Dr. Williams served as STScI director from 1993 until 1998. He is the principal investigator for the Hubble Deep Field — one of humankind's deepest, most detailed visible-light views of the universe. The IAU is a body of distinguished professional astronomers, founded in 1919 to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. The IAU named Dr. Catherine Cesarsky of the European South…
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This active region of star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), as photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, unveils wispy clouds of hydrogen and oxygen that swirl and mix with dust on a canvas of astronomical size. The LMC is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This particular region within the LMC, referred to as N 180B, contains some of the brightest known star clusters. This image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in 1998 using filters that isolate light emitted by hydrogen and oxygen gas. View the full article
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Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the "bullet cluster." The hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the "normal" matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of th…
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered what astronomers are reporting as the dimmest stars ever seen in any globular star cluster. Globular clusters are spherical concentrations of hundreds of thousands of stars. These clusters formed early in the 13.7-billion-year-old universe. The cluster NGC 6397 is one of the closest globular star clusters to Earth. Seeing the whole range of stars in this area will yield insights into the age, origin, and evolution of the cluster. View the full article
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Astrophysicist Michael G. Hauser (Space Telescope Science Institute deputy director and adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.) is a member of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) science team sharing the Peter Gruber Foundation's 2006 Cosmology Prize. The prize's gold medal and $250,000 cash prize was presented to the team on August 15 at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, Czech Republic. The COBE satellite was launched in 1989 to measure the early universe's diffuse infrared and microwave radiationn. The COBE science team was honored by the foundation for the sa…
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has for the first time identified the parent star of a distant planet (system name OGLE-2003-BLG-235L/MOA-2003-BLG-53L) discovered in 2003 through ground-based gravitational microlensing. Gravitational microlensing occurs when a foreground star amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. Follow-up observations by Hubble in 2005 separated the light of the slightly offset foreground star from the background star. This allowed the host star to be identified as a red dwarf star located 19,000 light-years away. The Hubble observations allow for the planet's mass and the orbit from its parent red star to be determined.…
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of a cosmic explosion that is quite similar to fireworks on Earth. In the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, a massive star has exploded as a supernova, and begun to dissipate its interior into a spectacular display of colorful filaments. The greenish-blue supernova remnant, E0102, resides 50 light-years away from the edge of a bright glowing massive star-forming region. View the full article
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After a brief hiatus, the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, probing the far reaches of space in a quest to understand the true nature of the universe's most dominant constituent: dark energy. This is one of the first images of the universe taken after the ACS camera resumed science operation on July 4th. The camera was offline for nearly two weeks as NASA engineers switched to a backup power supply after the camera's primary power supply failed. View the full article
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Detailed images of the nearby star Beta Pictoris, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the existence of not one but two dust disks encircling the star. The images offer tantalizing new evidence for at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting Beta Pictoris. The finding ends a decade of scientific speculation that an odd warp in the young star's debris disk may actually be another inclined disk. The recent Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys view - the best visible-light image of Beta Pictoris - clearly shows a distinct secondary disk that is tilted by about 4 degrees from the main disk. The secondary disk is visible out to roughly 24 billion miles from the star, …
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A pair of small moons that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered orbiting Pluto now have official names: Nix and Hydra. Photographed by Hubble in 2005, Nix and Hydra are roughly 5,000 times fainter than Pluto and are about two to three times farther from Pluto than its large moon, Charon, which was discovered in 1978. View the full article
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Astronomer Adam Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University, and two colleagues, have been awarded this year's $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy for their discovery of the mysterious "dark energy" that is causing the universe to expand at an ever-faster rate. View the full article
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Staring into the crowded, dusty core of two merging galaxies, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a region where star formation has gone wild. The interacting galaxies appear as a single, odd-looking galaxy called Arp 220. The galaxy is a nearby example of the aftermath of two colliding galaxies. In fact, Arp 220 is the brightest of the three galactic mergers closest to Earth. This latest view of the galaxy is yielding new insights into the early universe, when galactic wrecks were more common. The sharp eye of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys has unveiled more than 200 mammoth star clusters. The clusters are the bluish-white dots scattered throughout the im…
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This is a unique view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight. Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo. NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type "S0" (pronounced s-zero). Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure. It remains in the spiral category because of the flatness of the main disk of stars as opposed to the more spherically rotund (or ellipsoidal) class of galaxies called "el…
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