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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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have made the first direct detection of the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system. Their unique observations demonstrate that it is possible with Hubble and other telescopes to measure the chemical makeup of alien planet atmospheres and to potentially search for the chemical markers of life beyond Earth. The planet orbits a yellow, Sun-like star called HD 209458, located 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. View the full article
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The appearance of a galaxy can depend strongly on the color of the light with which it is viewed. This Hubble Heritage image of NGC 6782 illustrates a pronounced example of this effect. This spiral galaxy, when seen in visible light, exhibits tightly wound spiral arms that give it a pinwheel shape similar to that of many other spirals. However, when the galaxy is viewed in ultraviolet light with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, its shape is startlingly different. View the full article
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The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) will unite astronomical databases of many earthbound and orbital observatories, taking advantage of the latest computer technology and data storage and analysis techniques. The goal is to maximize the potential for new scientific insights from the data by making them available in an accessible, seamlessly unified form to professional researchers, amateur astronomers, and students. The new project is funded by a five- year, $10 million Information Technology Research grant from the National Science Foundation. Organizers characterize their goal as "building the framework" for the National Virtual Observatory. View the full arti…
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The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA) has reached an agreement with Celera Genomics Group, an Applera Corporation business in Rockville, MD, on the use of AURA's Operational Pipeline Unified Systems (OPUS) software package. Originally designed for use in the Hubble Space Telescope program, OPUS is being used by Celera to process bioinformatics data. OPUS was developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is managed by AURA under contract with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It is used to process astronomical data generated by the Hubble Space Telescope for use by researchers studying the universe, and it has been widely empl…
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A pair of eagle-eyed NASA spacecraft – the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) and Hubble Space Telescope – are giving amazed astronomers a ringside seat to the biggest global dust storm seen on Mars in several decades. The Martian dust storm, larger by far than any seen on Earth, has raised a cloud of dust that has engulfed the entire planet for several months. View the full article
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A very small, faint galaxy -- possibly one of the long sought "building blocks" of present-day galaxies – has been discovered by a collaboration between NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the 10-meter Keck Telescopes at a tremendous distance of 13.4 billion light-years (based on the estimate of 14 billion years as the age of the universe). The discovery was made possible by examining small areas of the sky viewed through massive intervening clusters of galaxies. These act as a powerful gravitational lens, magnifying distant objects and allowing scientists to probe how galaxies assemble at very early times. This has profound implications for our understanding of how and whe…
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Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to peer into the center of a dense swarm of stars called Omega Centauri. Located some 17,000 light-years from Earth, Omega Centauri is a massive globular star cluster, containing several million stars swirling in locked orbits around a common center of gravity. The stars are packed so densely in the cluster's core that it is difficult for ground-based telescopes to make out individual stars. Hubble's high resolution is able to pick up where ground-based telescopes leave off, capturing distinct points of light from stars at the very center of the cluster. View the full article
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Data from the Space Telescope Science Institute's Digitized Sky Survey has played an important supporting role in helping radio and X-ray astronomers discover an ancient black hole speeding through the Sun's galactic neighborhood. The rogue black hole is devouring a small companion star as the pair travels in an eccentric orbit looping to the outer reaches of our Milky Way galaxy. It is believed that the black hole is the remnant of a massive star that lived out its brief life billions of years ago and later was gravitationally kicked from its home star cluster to wander the Galaxy with its companion. View the full article
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Most galaxies form new stars at a fairly slow rate, but members of a rare class known as "starburst" galaxies blaze with extremely active star formation. The galaxy NGC 3310 is one such starburst galaxy that is forming clusters of new stars at a prodigious rate. Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are perfecting a technique to determine the history of starburst activity in NGC 3310 by studying the colors of its star clusters. View the full article
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These NASA Hubble Space Telescope snapshots reveal dramatic activities within the core of the galaxy NGC 3079, where a lumpy bubble of hot gas is rising from a cauldron of glowing matter. The picture at left shows the bubble in the center of the galaxy's disk. The structure is more than 3,000 light-years wide and rises 3,500 light-years above the galaxy's disk. The smaller photo at right is a close-up view of the bubble. Astronomers suspect that the bubble is being blown by "winds" (high-speed streams of particles) released during a burst of star formation. Gaseous filaments at the top of the bubble are whirling around in a vortex and are being expelled into space. Eventu…
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NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) satellite has given astronomers their best glimpse yet at the ghostly cobweb of helium gas left over from the big bang, which underlies the universe's structure. The helium is not found in galaxies or stars but spread thinly through the vastness of space. The helium traces the architecture of the universe back to very early times. This structure arose from small gravitational instabilities seeded in the chaos just after the big bang. These FUSE observations help confirm theoretical models of how matter in the expanding universe condensed into a web-like structure pervading all of the space between galaxies. View …
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The Hubble telescope has captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars. The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on. This Hubble Heritage image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that, by contrast, has an unusual twisted disk structure, first seen in ground-based photographs. View the full article
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a panoramic portrait of a vast, sculpted landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born. This fertile star-forming region, called the 30 Doradus Nebula, has a sparkling stellar centerpiece: the most spectacular cluster of massive stars in our cosmic neighborhood of about 25 galaxies. The mosaic picture shows that ultraviolet radiation and high-speed material unleashed by the stars in the cluster, called R136 [the large blue blob left of center], are weaving a tapestry of creation and destruction, triggering the collapse of looming gas and dust clouds and forming pillar-like structures that are incubators for nas…
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In the beginning of the 1946 holiday film classic "It's a Wonderful Life," angelic figures take on the form of a famous group of compact galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet. In reality, these galaxies aren't so heavenly. Pictures from the Hubble telescope show that Stephan's Quintet has been doing some devilish things. At least two of the galaxies have been involved in high-speed, hit-and-run accidents, which have ripped stars and gas from neighboring galaxies and tossed them into space. But the galactic carnage also has spawned new life. Arising from the wreckage are more than 100 star clusters and several dwarf galaxies. The young clusters, each harboring up to millions…
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There are stars with planets. Stars with companion stars. Stars with pancake-shaped disks of rocky debris. But how about young, hot, hefty stars embedded in large inner tube-shaped clouds of shimmering gas? Astronomers had suspected that the thick rings are the signatures of stars with strong magnetic fields. Sometimes, the surfaces of those "magnetic stars" possess peculiar chemical compositions, namely low amounts of "heavy elements" like iron. Now a team of astronomers analyzing archival information on four stars provides convincing evidence of the link between rings and magnetic fields. The team also suggests that rings around massive stars are more common than scient…
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These two dazzling clusters of stars, called NGC 1850, are found in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The photo's centerpiece is a young, "globular-like" star cluster -- a type of object unknown in our own Milky Way Galaxy. The smaller second cluster is below and to the right of the main cluster. The stars are surrounded by a filigree pattern of diffuse gas [left], which scientists believe was created by the explosion of massive stars. View the full article
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Frosty white water ice clouds and swirling orange dust storms above a vivid rusty landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic planet in this sharpest view ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope. The Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope snapped this picture on June 26, when Mars was approximately 43 million miles (68 million km) from Earth -- its closest approach to our planet since 1988. Hubble can see details as small as 10 miles (16 km) across. Especially striking is the large amount of seasonal dust storm activity seen in this image. One large storm system is churning high above the northern polar cap [top of image], and a smaller dust storm cloud can be seen nearby. Another larg…
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Piercing the heart of a globular star cluster, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope uncovered tantalizing clues to what could be a strange and unexpected population of wandering, planet-sized objects. The orbiting observatory detected these bodies in the globular cluster M22 by the way their gravity bends the light from background stars, a phenomenon called microlensing. These microlensing events were unusually brief, indicating that the mass of the the intervening objects could be as little as 80 times that of Earth. Bodies this small have never been detected by microlensing observations. View the full article
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Looming like a giant flying saucer in our outer solar system, Saturn puts on a show as the planet and its magnificent ring system nod majestically over the course of its 29-year journey around the Sun. These Hubble telescope images, captured from 1996 to 2000, show Saturn's rings open up from just past edge-on to nearly fully open as it moves around the Sun. View the full article
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Want to learn more about your favorite star or galaxy? NASA Hubble Space Telescope pictures and other information about thousands of stars and galaxies beyond our solar system are just a mouse click away by visiting the "Spectral/Image Scrapbook." The "scrapbook" was developed by the Multi-Mission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (MAST) team in Baltimore, MD. This new astronomy Web resource provides easy access to the rich repository of black-and-white images and spectra of stars and galaxies stored in the MAST digital archives. While a picture shows astronomers what a celestial object looks like, a spectrum provides information about its physical nature a…
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It's a very big universe out there, and an astronomer's work is never done when it comes to simply counting and cataloging the sheer number of stars in the heavens. Completing a seven-year effort at digitizing the entire sky for a second time, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino are releasing the Guide Star Catalog II. This new version, which replaces the historic 1989 catalog, provides important information on nearly one-half billion stars - over 20 times as many as the original Guide Star Catalog. View the full article
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In this view of the center of the magnificent barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512, the Hubble telescope reveals a stunning 2,400 light-year-wide circle of infant star clusters. Astronomers generally believe that the giant bar, which is too faint to be seen in this image, funnels the gas to the inner ring, where massive stars are formed within numerous star clusters. Located 30 million light-years away, NGC 1512 is a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy. View the full article
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Astronomers analyzing debris from a comet that broke apart last summer spied pieces as small as smoke-sized particles and as large as football-field-sized fragments. But it's the material they didn't see that has aroused their curiosity. Tracking the doomed comet, named LINEAR, the Hubble telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile found tiny particles that made up the 62,000-mile-long dust tail and 16 large fragments, some as wide as 330 feet. But the telescopes didn't detect any intermediate-sized pieces. If they exist, then the fundamental building blocks that comprised LINEAR's nucleus may be somewhat smaller than current theories suggest. View the full art…
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'Survivor' Planets: Astronomers Witness First Steps of Planet Growth - and Destruction
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Planet formation is a hazardous process. New pictures from the Hubble telescope are giving astronomers the first direct visual evidence for the growth of planetary "building blocks" inside the dusty disks of young stars in the Orion Nebula, a giant "star factory" near Earth. But these snapshots also reveal that the disks are being "blowtorched" by a blistering flood of ultraviolet radiation from the region's brightest star, making planet formation extremely difficult. View the full article
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Rising from a sea of dust and gas like a giant seahorse, the Horsehead nebula is one of the most photographed objects in the sky. The Hubble telescope took a close-up look at this heavenly icon, revealing the cloud's intricate structure. This detailed view of the horse's head is being released to celebrate the orbiting observatory's eleventh anniversary. Hubble was launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and deployed into a 360-mile-high Earth orbit on April 25. Produced by the Hubble Heritage Project, this picture is a testament to the Horsehead's popularity. Internet voters selected this object for the orbiting telescope to view. View the full a…
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