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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Springtime is blooming on Neptune! This might sound like an oxymoron because Neptune is the farthest and coldest of the major planets. But observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveal an increase in Neptune's brightness in the southern hemisphere. Astronomers consider this increase a harbinger of seasonal change. The observations, made over six years, show a distinct increase in the amount and brightness of the clouds encircling the planet's southern hemisphere. View the full article
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This photograph of the coil-shaped Helix Nebula is one of the largest and most detailed celestial images ever made. The composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. The image shows a fine web of filamentary "bicycle-spoke" features embedded in the colorful red and blue ring of gas. At 650 light-years away, the Helix is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth. A planetary nebula is the glowing gas around a dying, Sun-like star. View the full article
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Relying on the deepest visible-light images ever taken in space, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have reliably measured the age of the spherical halo of stars surrounding the neighboring Andromeda galaxy (M31). To their surprise, they have discovered that approximately one-third of the stars in Andromeda's halo formed only 6 to 8 billion years ago. That's a far cry from the 11-to-13 billion-year age of the stars in the Milky Way's halo. View the full article
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A dusty spiral galaxy appears to be rotating on edge, like a pinwheel, as it slides through the larger, bright galaxy NGC 1275, in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. These images, taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), show traces of spiral structure accompanied by dramatic dust lanes and bright blue regions that mark areas of active star formation. View the full article
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Resembling the fury of a raging sea, this image actually shows a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen gas and small amounts of other elements such as oxygen and sulfur. The photograph, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, captures a small region within M17, a hotbed of star formation. M17, also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula, is located about 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The image is being released to commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of Hubble's launch on April 24, 1990. View the full article
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New Hubble Space Telescope observations of a pair of very distant exploding stars, called Type Ia supernovae, provide new clues about the accelerating universe and its mysterious "dark energy." Astronomers used the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys to help pinpoint the supernovae, which are approximately 5 billion and 8 billion light-years from Earth. The farther one exploded so long ago the universe may still have been decelerating under its own gravity. View the full article
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Resembling a rippling pool illuminated by underwater lights, the Egg Nebula offers astronomers a special look at the normally invisible dust shells swaddling an aging star. These dust layers, extending over one-tenth of a light-year from the star, have an onionskin structure that forms concentric rings around the star. A thicker dust belt, running almost vertically through the image, blocks off light from the central star. Twin beams of light radiate from the hidden star and illuminate the pitch-black dust, like a flashlight shining in a smoky room. View the full article
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In January 2002, a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun, temporarily making it the brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy. The mysterious star, called V838 Monocerotis, has long since faded back to obscurity. But observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of a phenomenon called a "light echo" around the star have uncovered remarkable new features. These details promise to provide astronomers with a CAT-scan-like probe of the three-dimensional structure of shells of dust surrounding an aging star. View the full article
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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have observed for the first time the atmosphere of a planet beyond our solar system evaporating into space. Most of the planet may eventually disappear, leaving only a dense core. The evaporating planet is a member of a type of planet called a "hot Jupiter," a giant gaseous planet that orbits very closely around its parent star, drawn to it like a moth to a flame. The scorched planet, called HD 209458b, orbits only 4 million miles (7 million kilometers) from its yellow, Sun-like star. The planet circles the parent star in a tight 3.5-day orbit. The Hubble observations reveal a hot and bloated hydrogen atmosphere, which is ev…
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The central region of the small galaxy NGC 1705 blazes with the light of thousands of young and old stars in this image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. At 17 million light-years away, the individual stars of the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 1705 are out of range of all but the sharp eyes of Hubble. NGC 1705 is classified as a dwarf irregular because it is small and lacks any regular structure. View the full article
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An aging star's last hurrah is creating a flurry of glowing knots of gas that appear to be streaking through space in this close-up image of the Dumbbell Nebula, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Dumbbell, a nearby planetary nebula residing more than 1,200 light-years away, is the result of an old star that has shed its outer layers in a unique display of color. View the full article
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Researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope believe they are seeing the conclusion of the cosmic epoch where the young galaxies started to shine in significant numbers. This marks a time when the so-called "Dark Ages" of the universe was completed, about 13 billion years ago (based on an estimate of 14 billion years for the current age of the universe). View the full article
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The Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has provided the clearest view yet in visible light of the nearby quasar, 3C 273 [image at right]. Using the new camera's coronagraph to block the light from the brilliant central quasar, astronomers discovered that the quasar's host galaxy is significantly more complex than had been suggested in previous observations. Features in the surrounding galaxy that are normally drowned out by the quasar's glow now show up clearly. The ACS reveals a spiral plume wound around the quasar and a red dust lane. Material in the form of a clump and a blue arc are shown in the path of a jet that was blasted from the quasa…
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These are composite images of the galaxy 0313-192, the first spiral galaxy known to be producing a giant radio-emitting jet. The image at left represents two views of the galaxy that astronomers have combined into one photograph. The view of the galaxy and its surrounding environment was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The red material in the image represents the radio-emitting jet, which was taken by the Very Large Array. The galaxy is seen edge-on. At right is a close-up of the Hubble telescope image. Another red overlay from a higher-resolution Very Large Array picture shows the inner portion of the jet. View the full article
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The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has used a natural "zoom lens" in space to boost its view of the distant universe. Besides offering an unprecedented and dramatic new view of the cosmos, the results promise to shed light on galaxy evolution and dark matter in space. Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. For this observation, Hubble had to gaze at the distant cluster, located 2.2 billion light-years away, for more than 13 hours. The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars - plus dark matter - acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide "lens" in space. This "gravitati…
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NASA Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has given astronomers their clearest view yet of the dust disk around a young, 5-million-year-old star. Such disks are expected to be the birthplace of planets. The star, called HD 141569A, lies 320 light-years away in the constellation Libra and appears to be a member of a triple-star system. The image at left shows the star and disk as it appears in space. The system is slightly tilted when viewed from Earth. The photo at right portrays the system if astronomers could view it from above. View the full article
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New detailed images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show a "late-blooming" galaxy, a small, distorted system of gas and stars that still appears to be in the process of development, even though most of its galactic cousins are believed to have started forming billions of years ago. Evidence of the galaxy's youthfulness can be seen in the burst of newborn stars and its disturbed shape. This evidence indicates that the galaxy, called POX 186, formed when two smaller clumps of gas and stars collided less than 100 million years ago (a relatively recent event in the universe's 13-billion-year history), triggering more star formation. Most large galaxies, such as our Milky W…
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is witnessing a grouping of galaxies engaging in a slow dance of destruction that will last for billions of years. The galaxies are so tightly packed together that gravitational forces are beginning to rip stars from them and distort their shapes. Those same gravitational forces eventually could bring the galaxies together to form one large galaxy. The name of this grouping, Seyfert's Sextet, implies that six galaxies are participating in the action. But only four galaxies are on the dance card. The small face-on spiral with the prominent arms [center] of gas and stars is a background galaxy almost five times farther away than the other four.…
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A unique peanut-shaped cocoon of dust, called a reflection nebula, surrounds a cluster of young, hot stars in this view from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The "double bubble," called N30B, is inside a larger nebula, named DEM L 106. The larger nebula is embedded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way located 160,000 light-years away. The wispy filaments of DEM L 106 fill much of the image. View the full article
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An international team of astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to help make a precise measurement of the mass of a planet outside our solar system. The Hubble results show that the planet is 1.89 to 2.4 times as massive as Jupiter, our solar system's largest orbiting body. Previous estimates, about which there are some uncertainties, place the planet's mass at a much wider range: between 1.9 and 100 times that of Jupiter's. The planet, called Gliese 876b, orbits the star Gliese 876. It is only the second planet outside our solar system for which astronomers have determined a precise mass. View the full article
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A new book of majestic images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope brings the wonders of our universe to the fingertips of the blind. Called "Touch the Universe: A NASA Braille Book of Astronomy," the 64-page book presents color images of planets, nebulae, stars, and galaxies. Each image is embossed with lines, bumps, and other textures. The raised patterns translate colors, shapes, and other intricate details of the cosmic objects, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see. Braille and large-print descriptions accompany each of the book's 14 photographs, making the design of this book accessible to readers of all visual abilities. View the f…
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A nearby black hole is hurtling like a cannonball through the disk of our galaxy. The detection of this speed demon is the best evidence yet, some astronomers say, that stellar-mass black holes - those that are several times as massive as the Earth's Sun - are created when a dying, massive star explodes in a violent supernova. The stellar-mass black hole, called GRO J1655-40, is streaking across space at a rate of 250,000 miles per hour, which is four times faster than the average velocity of the stars in that galactic neighborhood. At that speed, the black hole may have been hurled through space by a supernova blast. View the full article
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught a glimpse of a colorful cosmic ghost, the glowing remains of a dying star called NGC 6369. The glowing apparition is known to amateur astronomers as the "Little Ghost Nebula," because it appears as a small, ghostly cloud surrounding the faint, dying central star. View the full article
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Riccardo Giacconi, the "father of X-ray astronomy," has received the Nobel Prize in physics for "pioneering contributions to astrophysics," which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources. Giacconi, president of the Associated Universities Inc., in Washington, DC and Research Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD discovered the first X-ray stars and the X-ray background in the 1960s and conceived of and led the implementation of the Uhuru and High Energy Astronomy Observatory-2 (HEAO-2) X-ray observatories in the 1970s. With funding from NASA, he also detected sources of X-rays that most astronomers now consider to contain…
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has measured the largest object discovered in the solar system since the discovery of Pluto 72 years ago. Approximately half the size of Pluto, the icy world is called "Quaoar" (pronounced kwa-whar). Quaoar is about 4 billion miles away, more than a billion miles farther than Pluto. Like Pluto, Quaoar dwells in the Kuiper belt, an icy belt of comet-like bodies extending 7 billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit. View the full article
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