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 survey of galaxy clusters by the Hubble telescope has found what could be some of the most distant clusters ever seen. If ground-based telescopes confirm the distances and masses of the clusters, the survey may hold clues to how galaxies quickly formed into massive, large-scale structures after the Big Bang, which could provide answers for the universe's eventual fate. According to theoretical models, if the clusters turn out to be massive and very distant, it could imply that the cosmos does not contain enough matter for gravity to stop the expansion of the universe. These models predict that such a low-density universe would have built most of its galaxy clusters lo…
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A Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer has found the equivalent of the proverbial 900-pound gorilla in deep space. The "gorilla" is an extremely massive cluster of galaxies - the weight of several thousand of our Milky Ways - that existed when the universe was half its present age. Paradoxically, the unexpected discovery of this ancient, heavyweight cluster is one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet that we live in a lightweight universe, one that doesn't have enough bulk to provide the gravity necessary to halt the expansion of space. Using X-ray satellites and ground-based telescopes to probe the remote regions of space, the Institute astronomer discovered…
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The Hubble telescope has taken a "family portrait" of young, ultra-bright stars nested in their embryonic cloud of glowing gases. The celestial maternity ward, called N81, is located 200,000 light-years from Earth in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small, irregular satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. These are probably the youngest massive stars ever seen in the magellanic cloud. The nebula offers a unique opportunity for a close-up glimpse of the "firestorm" accompanying the birth of extremely massive stars, each blazing with the brilliance of 300,000 suns. Such galactic fireworks were much more common billions of years ago in the early universe, when most star formation …
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Expanding its broadcast universe far beyond the Baltimore area and into cyberspace, the popular WJHU radio program "The Marc Steiner Show" (WJHU, FM 88.1) has teamed up with the Space Telescope Science Institute to take listeners on a Hubble Space Telescope tour of the cosmos via the Internet. For the show's first time, host Marc Steiner's discussion and interview with his guests will be available on the World Wide Web, courtesy of the institute's Office of Public Outreach. View the full article
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Observations obtained by the Hubble telescope and ground-based instruments reveal that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, seems to have heated up significantly since the Voyager spacecraft visited it in 1989. Even with the warming, no one is likely to plan a summer vacation on Triton, which is a bit smaller than Earth's moon. Since 1989 Triton's temperature has risen from about 37 on the absolute (Kelvin) temperature scale (-392 degrees Fahrenheit) to about 39 Kelvin (-389 degrees Fahrenheit). The scientists are basing a rise in Triton's surface temperature on the Hubble telescope's detection of an increase in the moon's atmospheric pressure, which has at least doubled in …
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Resembling a gigantic hubcap in space, a 3,700-light-year-wide dust disk encircles a 300-million- solar-mass black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 7052. The disk, possibly a remnant of an ancient galaxy collision, will be swallowed up by the black hole in several billion years. The black-and-white image on the left, taken by a ground-based telescope, shows the complete galaxy. The Hubble picture on the right is a close-up view of the dust disk surrounding the black hole. View the full article
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This Hubble telescope snapshot reveals clusters of infant stars that formed in a ring around the core of the barred-spiral galaxy NGC 4314. This stellar nursery, whose inhabitants were created within the past 5 million years, is the only place in the entire galaxy where new stars are being born. This close-up view also illustrates other interesting details in the galaxy's core: dust lanes, a smaller bar of stars, dust and gas embedded in the stellar ring, and an extra pair of spiral arms packed with young stars. These details make the center resemble a miniature version of a spiral galaxy. The black-and-white image on the left, taken by a ground-based telescope, shows t…
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The duties of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., will be expanded to include the management of science operations for the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), NASA officials announced today. The Space Telescope Science Institute, located at the Johns Hopkins University, has been operating the science program for the Hubble telescope since 1983. The illustration represents the four designs NASA is considering for NGST. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has given astronomers their first direct look at what is possibly a planet outside our solar system - one apparently that has been ejected into deep space by its parent stars. The discovery further challenges conventional theories about the birth and evolution of planets, and offers new insights into the formation of our own solar system. Located within a star-forming region in the constellation Taurus, the object, called TMR-1C, appears to lie at the end of a strange filament of light, suggesting it has apparently been flung away from the vicinity of a newly forming pair of binary stars. View the full article
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Astronomers have obtained an unprecedented look at the nearest example of galactic cannibalism – a massive black hole hidden at the center of a nearby giant galaxy that is feeding on a smaller galaxy in a spectacular collision. Such fireworks were common in the early universe, as galaxies formed and evolved, but are rare today. The Hubble telescope offers a stunning unprecedented close-up view of a turbulent firestorm of star birth along a nearly edge-on dust disk girdling Centaurus A, the nearest active galaxy to Earth. The picture at upper left shows the entire galaxy. The blue outline represents Hubble's field of view. The larger, central picture is Hubble's close-up…
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A team of astronomers has announced that a recently detected gamma-ray burst was as bright as the rest of the universe, releasing a hundred times more energy than previously theorized. The team measured the distance to a faint galaxy from which the burst, designated GRB 971214, originated. It is about 12 billion light-years from Earth. The astronomers used a suite of satellites and ground-based telescopes to follow the burst. This Hubble image of the GRB 971214 field was taken about four months after the burst, well after the afterglow had faded away. The extremely faint and distant object marked with an arrow is the host galaxy of the gamma-ray burst. View the f…
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In honor of NASA Hubble Space Telescope's eighth anniversary, we have gift-wrapped Saturn in vivid colors. Actually, this image is courtesy of Hubble's infrared camera, which has taken its first peek at Saturn. This view provides detailed information on the clouds and hazes in Saturn's atmosphere. The blue colors indicate a clear atmosphere down to the main cloud layer. Most of the Northern Hemisphere that is visible above the rings is relatively clear. The dark region around the South Pole indicates a big hole in the main cloud layer. The green and yellow colors indicate a haze above the main cloud layer. The red and orange colors indicate clouds reaching up high into …
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Pinpointing the rapidly fading ember of a recently burned-out star, the Hubble telescope is giving astronomers a better estimate on just how big a star can be before it ultimately explodes as a supernova. Based on Hubble's detection of a rare, young white dwarf star, astronomers conclude that its progenitor was a whopping 7.6 times the mass of our Sun. Previously, astronomers had estimated that stars anywhere from 6 to 10 solar masses would not just quietly fade away as white dwarfs, but abruptly self-destruct in torrential explosions. In this picture, Hubble can easily resolve the star [the white circle] in the crowded cluster and detect its intense blue-white glow fro…
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Astronomers have caught a peek at a rare moment in the final stages of a star's life: a ballooning shroud of gas cast off by a dying star flicking on its stellar light bulb. The Hubble telescope has captured the unveiling of the Stingray nebula (Hen-1357), the youngest known planetary nebula. Twenty years ago, the nebulous gas entombing the dying star wasn't hot enough to glow. The Stingray nebula (Hen-1357) is so named because its shape resembles a stingray fish. Images of a planetary nebula in its formative years can yield new insights into the last gasps of ordinary stars like our Sun. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has probed the inner regions of Comet Hyakutake. This picture captures sunlight scattered by dust particles in the comet's inner coma. The coma is the head or dusty-gas atmosphere surrounding a comet's icy nucleus. This image will help astronomers understand the effects of sunlight on the comet's icy central region. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope has captured a flurry of star birth near the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1808. This is a close-up view of the galaxy's center, the hotbed of vigorous star formation. The yellow color pinpoints older stars; the blue color reveals areas of star birth. NGC 1808 is called a barred spiral galaxy because of the straight lines of star formation on both sides of the bright nucleus. The bar may be the catalyst for this intense star formation. The rotation of the bar may have triggered the star birth, or matter streaming along the bar towards the central region may be feeding the stellar breeding ground. View the full article
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The Hubble telescope continues to capture stunning, colorful snapshots of stellar burnout. These images reveal the beauty and complexity of planetary nebulae, the glowing relics of Sun-like stars. This image of NGC 7027, for example, is one of the first infrared views of planetary nebulae taken with Hubble's infrared camera. In this picture, Hubble peers through the dusty core of a young planetary nebula to reveal the bright, central star. This picture also captures a young planetary nebula in a state of rapid transition. View the full article
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Astronomers have stumbled on an unusual asteroid hunting ground: the thousands of Hubble telescope images stored in the orbiting observatory's archive. The hunt has yielded a sizable catch of small asteroids - about 100. A preliminary analysis suggests that a total population of 300,000 small asteroids - essentially rocks just over 1 to 3 kilometers wide (equal to half a mile to two miles) - are orbiting between Mars and Jupiter in a band of space debris known as the main belt. Currently, there are 8,319 confirmed main belt asteroids whose orbits have been measured, and about the same number have been sighted but not confirmed. These pictures are a sampling of what astr…
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The Hubble telescope is giving astronomers a ringside seat to a never-before-seen titanic collision of an onrushing stellar shock wave with an eerie glowing gas ring encircling a nearby stellar explosion, called supernova 1987A. Though the star's self-destruction was first seen nearly 11 years ago on Feb. 23, 1987, astronomers are just now beginning to witness its tidal wave of energy reaching the "shoreline" of the immense light-year-wide ring. Shocked by the 40-million-mile-per-hour sledgehammer blow, a 100-billion-mile-wide knot of gas in a piece of the ring has already begun to "light up," as its temperature surges from a few thousand degrees to a million degrees Fa…
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An agreement has been reached in principle to appoint Dr. Steven V. W. Beckwith director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), in Baltimore. The agreement is under negotiation and will be finalized in the near future. The appointment becomes effective on Sept. 1, 1998. Dr. Beckwith is currently the managing director of the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. The STScI carries out the scientific mission of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., manages STScI for NASA. The European Space Agency participates in the Hubble Project under a long-term arrangement with NASA. View the…
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Astronomers have assembled the first definitive detection of a background infrared glow across the sky produced by dust warmed by all the stars that have existed since the beginning of time. For scientists, the discovery of this "fossil radiation" is akin to turning out all the lights in a bedroom only to find the walls, floor, and ceiling aglow with an eerie luminescence. The telltale infrared radiation puts a limit on the total amount of energy released by all the stars in the universe. Astronomers say this will greatly improve development of models explaining how stars and galaxies were born and evolved after the Big Bang. These three pictures are maps of the full sk…
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Teaming up space telescopes to make simultaneous ultraviolet and X-ray observations, astronomers may have solved a 20-year-old mystery and possibly discovered a new class of X-ray star. The unlikely suspect is a second-magnitude star 600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. It turns out that the mild-mannered-looking star is ejecting 100-million-degree flares into space - 10 times hotter than typical flares ejected from our Sun. The findings are based on observations by the Hubble telescope and the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. View the full article
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Peering halfway across the universe to analyze light from exploded stars that died long before our Sun even existed, the Hubble telescope has allowed astronomers to determine that the expansion of the cosmos has not slowed since the initial impetus of the Big Bang. Thus, the universe's expansion should continue to balloon outward indefinitely. These results are based on unprecedented distance measurements to supernovae that are so far away they allow astronomers to determine if the universe was expanding at a faster rate long ago. These images showcase three of the supernovae used in the survey. The arrows in the bottom row of pictures pinpoint these exploding stars; th…
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A telltale new warp uncovered in a vast, thin disk of dust encircling the star Beta Pictoris may be caused by the gravitational tug of a bypassing star or companion brown dwarf. These conclusions are based on Hubble telescope pictures that reveal the dim outermost reaches of the disk, which are 7 billion miles from the central star. The top image presents the entire disk, which spans 140 billion miles edge-to-edge. An unusual flaring at the top of the right side of the disk reveals that dust has been pulled above the dense plane of the disk beyond what is observed on the left side. A detailed close-up view of the inner region of the disk [bottom picture] shows a warp in…
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The Hubble telescope has captured a complete view of Jupiter's northern and southern auroras. Images taken in ultraviolet light show both auroras, the oval-shaped objects in the inset photos. The "curtains" of auroral light extend several hundred miles above the edge of Jupiter. Images of Earth's auroral curtains, taken from the space shuttle, have a similar appearance. Jupiter's auroras are viewed against a backdrop of the entire planet. The auroras are brilliant curtains of light in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Jovian auroral storms, like Earth's, develop when electrically charged particles trapped in the magnetic field surrounding the planet spiral inward at high ener…
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