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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Two Hubble telescope images of Mars, taken about a month apart, reveal a state-sized dust storm churning near the edge of the northern polar cap. The polar storm is probably a consequence of large temperature differences between the polar ice and the dark regions to the south, which are heated by the springtime sun. The increased sunlight also causes the dry ice in the polar cap to shrink. Mars is famous for large, planet-wide dust storms. This is the first time that such an event has been caught near the receding northern polar cap. In the top picture, the salmon-colored notch in the white northern polar cap is a 600-mile-long (1,000 kilometer-long) storm – nearly the …
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The Hubble telescope has been used to assemble a time-lapse color movie showing a full 16-hour rotation of the distant planet Neptune. The movie, made from a series of Hubble observations over nine consecutive orbits, allows astronomers to track cloud motion on the planet. The clear pictures reveal the planet's powerful equatorial jet stream, immense storms, and dark spot in the Northern Hemisphere. These snapshots provide views of the weather on opposite hemispheres. The photos disclose features of Neptune's blustery weather. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope's sharp view of the rapid, spectacular dance of luminescent gases high in Jupiter's atmosphere – better known as aurora – is allowing astronomers to map Jupiter's immense magnetic field and better understand how it generates such phenomena. The ultraviolet-light images [bottom frames] show how the auroral emissions change in brightness and shape as Jupiter rotates. The aurorae are the bright, circular features at the top and bottom of the planet. The top panel illustrates the effects of emissions from Io, one of Jupiter's moons. Io ejects an invisible electrical current of charged particles, which flow along the planet's magnetic field lines. …
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Clusters of stars and a fishhook-shaped cloud of luminescent gases glow brilliantly in NGC 2363, a giant star-forming region in the Magellanic galaxy NGC 2366. The brightest object visible in the Hubble telescope image [right] is a member of a rare class of stars called an erupting Luminous Blue Variable [at the tip of the fishhook]. This monstrous star (30 to 60 times as massive as the Sun) is in a very unstable, eruptive phase of its life. The Hubble telescope photo is the only one in which the star can be clearly isolated from the rest of the cluster. A view of this region from a terrestrial telescope is on the left. Only four giant eruptions of these special stars h…
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This image shows Jupiter's volcanic moon Io passing above the turbulent clouds of the giant planet. The conspicuous black spot on Jupiter is Io's shadow. This shadow is about the size of Io (2,262 miles or 3,640 kilometers across) and sweeps across the face of Jupiter at 38,000 mph (17 kilometers per second). The smallest details seen on Io and Jupiter are about 100 miles across. Bright patches visible on Io are regions of sulfur dioxide frost. Io is roughly the size of Earth's moon but 2,000 times farther away. View the full article
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New Hubble telescope images unveil what may be galaxies under construction in the early universe. Hubble's detailed pictures reveal a grouping of 18 gigantic star clusters that appear to be the same distance from Earth, and close enough to each other that they will eventually merge into a few galaxy- sized objects. They are so far away, 11 billion light-years, that they existed during the epoch when it is commonly believed galaxies started to form. These results add weight to a leading theory that galaxies grew by starting out as clumps of stars, which, through a complex series of encounters, consolidated into larger assemblages that we see as fully formed galaxies. …
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The colorful picture on the right is a Hubble telescope snapshot of a vast nebula of dust and gas called NGC 604, which lies in the neighboring spiral galaxy M33. This region, located in the galaxy's spiral arm, is fertile ground for star birth. Though such nebulae are common in galaxies, this one is particularly large, nearly 1,500 light-years across. The image on the left, taken by a ground-based telescope, illustrates the vastness of this nebula. The galaxy resides 2.7 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope reached a milestone several years sooner than scientists expected when it snapped its 100,000th exposure June 22, 1996. The six-year-old orbiting observatory has averaged 1,389 exposures a month, an amount that would make any photographer envious. This black-and-white picture represents the telescope's 100,000th exposure: a quasar that resides about 9 billion light-years from Earth. The quasar is the bright object in the center of the photo. The fainter object just above it is an elliptical galaxy. Although the two objects appear to be close together, they are actually separated by about 2 billion light-years. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has been used successfully to measure the diameters of a special class of pulsating star called a Mira variable, which rhythmically change size. The results suggest these gigantic, old stars aren't round but egg-shaped. Knowing more about these enigmatic stars is crucial to understanding how stars evolve, and may preview the fate of our Sun, five billion years from now. Due to their distance, the stars are too small for their disks to be resolved in conventional visible-light pictures, so astronomers used Hubble's Fine Guidance Sensors to measure the widths of two Mira variables, R Leonis and W. Hydrae. View the full article
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Astronomers analyzing the Hubble Deep Field - the faintest view of the universe taken with the Hubble telescope - may have identified what may prove to be the most distant objects observed to date. Scattered among the nearly 2,000 galaxies in the Hubble images, which were taken in December 1995, researchers have found several dozen galaxies they believe exhibit characteristics which make them appear to be more distant than any seen previously. Six of the galaxies appear to be more distant than the farthest quasars, the current distance record holders. The arrow pinpoints one of those six galaxies. View the full article
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A huge, billowing pair of gas and dust clouds is captured in this stunning Hubble telescope picture of the super-massive star Eta Carinae. Even though Eta Carinae is more than 8,000 light-years away, features 10 billion miles across (about the diameter of our solar system) can be distinguished. Eta Carinae suffered a giant outburst about 150 years ago, when it became one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Though the star released as much visible light as a supernova explosion, it survived the outburst. Somehow, the explosion produced two lobes and a large, thin equatorial disk, all moving outward at about 1.5 million miles per hour. Estimated to be 100 times he…
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Probing the mysterious heart of the Crab Nebula, the tattered remains of an exploding star, astronomers have found this object to be even more dynamic than previously understood. These findings are based on a cosmic "movie" assembled from a series of Hubble telescope observations. The sequence of pictures is giving astronomers a remarkable look at the dynamic relationship between the tiny Crab pulsar - the collapsed core of the exploding star - and the vast nebula of dust and gas that it powers. This picture, which reveals the inner parts of the Crab, represents one frame from the movie. The Crab pulsar is the star on the left [white dot] near the center of the frame. S…
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Using the Hubble telescope, two international teams of astronomers are reporting major progress in converging on an accurate measurement of the universe's rate of expansion - a value that has been debated for over half a century. These new results yield ranges for the age of the universe from 9-12 billion years and 11-14 billion years, respectively. The black and white photograph from a ground-based telescope shows the entire galaxy. The color image from the Hubble telescope shows a region in NGC 1365, a barred spiral galaxy located in a cluster of galaxies called Fornax. A barred spiral galaxy is characterized by a "bar" of stars, dust, and gas across its center. Astro…
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The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) are pleased to announce the availability of RealSky CD, the digitized Palomar Observatory Sky Survey compressed by a factor of 100x, available on 8 CD-ROMs. View the full article
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This is a rare view of Saturn's rings seen just after the Sun has set below the ring plane. This perspective is unusual because the Earth is slightly above Saturn's rings and the Sun is below them. Normally we see the rings fully illuminated by the Sun. The Hubble telescope photograph reveals three bright ring features [moving from the outer to the inner rings]: the F Ring, the Cassini Division, and the C Ring. The low concentration of material in these rings allows light from the Sun to shine through them. The A and B rings are much denser, which limits the amount of light that penetrates through them. Instead, they are faintly visible because they reflect light from S…
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A new golden era of space exploration and discovery began April 24, 1990 with the launch and deployment of the Hubble telescope. Over the past six years Hubble's rapid-fire rate of unprecedented discoveries has invigorated astronomy. Not since the invention of the telescope nearly 400 years ago have astronomers' vision of the universe been so revolutionized over such a short stretch of time. This picture, released to commemorate Hubble's sixth anniversary, shows several blue, loop-shaped objects that are actually multiple images of the same galaxy. The duplicate images were produced by a cosmic lens in space: the massive cluster of yellow elliptical and spiral galaxies …
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The Hubble telescope has captured a view of a globular cluster called G1, a large, bright ball of light in the center of the photograph. G1, also known as Mayall II, orbits the Andromeda galaxy (M31), the nearest major spiral galaxy to our Milky Way. Located 130,000 light-years from Andromeda's center, G1 is the brightest globular cluster in the Local Group of galaxies, containing at least 300,000 old stars. The Local Group consists of about 20 nearby galaxies, including the Milky Way. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has peered deep into Uranus's atmosphere to see clear and hazy layers created by a mixture of gases. Using infrared filters, Hubble captured detailed features of three layers of the planet's atmosphere. Hubble's images are different from the ones taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by Uranus 10 years ago. Those images - not taken in infrared light - showed a greenish-blue disk with very little detail. The infrared image allows astronomers to probe the structure of the planet's atmosphere, which consists mostly of hydrogen with traces of methane. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has captured snapshots of Saturn with its rings nearly edge-on to our view. In the top image, the rings are barely visible. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is casting a shadow on the planet. Four moons - Mimas, Tethys, Janus, and Enceladus - are clustered around the edge of Saturn's rings on the right. Two other moons - Pandora and Prometheus - appear in front of the ring plane. The rings are casting a shadow on Saturn because the Sun was above the ring plane. The bottom snapshot captures the planet with its rings slightly tilted. The moon Dione is on the lower right. The moon on Saturn's upper left is Tethys. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has snapped a view of several generations of stars in the central region of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), located 23 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs). The spiral galaxy's massive center, the bright ball of light in the center of the photograph, is about 80 light-years across and has a brightness of about 100 million suns. Astronomers estimate that it is about 400 million years old and has a mass 40 million times larger than our Sun. The concentration of stars is about 5,000 times higher than in our solar neighborhood, the Milky Way Galaxy. View the full article
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The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has selected nine young scientists for the 1996 Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. The awardees were selected from a pool of applications received from highly qualified candidates worldwide. Inaugurated in 1990, the Hubble Fellowship Program funds research opportunities for outstanding applicants selected from among the approximately 200 Ph.D. astronomers and astrophysicists who graduate annually. The program is a joint venture between NASA and STScI, in cooperation with astronomical institutions across the United States. View the full article
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Resembling a bizarre setting from a science fiction movie, dramatic images sent back by the Hubble telescope have surprised astronomers by uncovering thousands of gigantic, tadpole-shaped objects surrounding a dying star. Dubbed "cometary knots" because their glowing heads and gossamer tails superficially resemble comets, they are probably the result of a dying star's final outbursts. Though ground-based telescopic observations have hinted at such objects, they have not previously been seen in such abundance, say researchers. Hubble captured thousands of these knots from a doomed star in the Helix Nebula, the closest planetary nebula to Earth - 450 light-years away in t…
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The Hubble telescope snapped pictures of comet Hyakutake March 25, 1996, when the comet was just 9.3 million miles from Earth. Unlike most of the published images of Hyakutake, the Hubble pictures focus on a very small region near the heart of the comet, the icy, solid nucleus. The images provide an exceptionally clear view of the near-nucleus region of comet Hyakutake. The image above is a complete view of the 2,070-mile-wide (3,340-kilometer-wide) comet. This picture shows that most of the dust is being produced on the comet's sunward-facing hemisphere. Also at upper left are three small pieces that have broken off the comet and are forming their own tails. Vie…
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For the first time since Pluto's discovery 66 years ago, astronomers have at last directly seen details on the surface of the solar system's farthest known planet. The Hubble telescope's snapshots of nearly the entire surface of Pluto, taken as the planet rotated through a 6.4-day period, show that Pluto is a complex object, with more large-scale contrast than any planet, except Earth. Topographic features such as basins, or fresh impact craters may cause some of the variations across Pluto's surface. View the full article
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Hubble Space Telescope's ongoing black hole hunt has bagged yet another supermassive black hole in the universe. The compact object - equal to the mass of two billion suns - lies at the heart of the edge-on galaxy NGC 3115, located 30 million light-years away in the constellation Sextans. This result promises to open the way to systematic demographic studies of very massive black holes that might once have powered quasars - objects that are incredibly small, yet release a gusher of light and other radiation. View the full article
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