You may have heard of this phenomenon already but it’s still amazing to see it in action! The image here, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and shared by NASA on Nov. 17, 2020, shows not individual stars but rather entire galaxies, each of them billions of light-years away from Earth. The brightest ones at…
Tag: Hubble
Hubble’s Newest View of Jupiter Shows New Storms Brewing
News from NASA: This latest image of Jupiter, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on August 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of…
Betelgeuse’s Recent Dimming Likely Caused by a Dusty Outburst
From October 2019 to February 2020, Betelgeuse (the bright orange star at Orion’s right shoulder, not Tim Burton’s magical necroprankster) was seen to dim dramatically, even more so than it typically does. It was something that wasn’t just observed with telescopes but also it was quite obvious to the naked eye from most locations. This…
NGC 6441: One of the Milky Way’s Most Massive Star Clusters
(NASA’s image of the day on June 5, 2020) Almost like snowflakes, the stars of the globular cluster NGC 6441 sparkle peacefully in the night sky, about 13,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s galactic center. Like snowflakes, the exact number of stars in such a cluster is difficult to discern. It is estimated that together…
Hypothesized First-Gen Stars Remain Unseen in Hubble Deep Views
(News from NASA) New results from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggest the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe took place sooner than previously thought. A European team of astronomers have found no evidence of the first generation of stars, known as Population III stars, as far back as when…
NGC 3147: A Spiral Giant
Here’s a view of NGC 3147, a spiral galaxy 130 million light-years away in the constellation Draco. This image is made from data acquired by Hubble’s WFC3/UVIS instrument in November 2017 (PI Adam Riess). NGC 3147 is about 140,000 light-years wide, so almost half again as big as our Milky Way. See this and more…
A Dark Horse in a Different Light
Here’s a view of the famous Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) located 1,375 light-years away from Earth, just under Alnitak, the first star in Orion’s belt. This is a color-composite made from images acquired with Hubble in wide-band infrared in October and November of 2012. (Principal Investigator Z. Levay).
When Galaxies Collide
Here’s a cosmic curiosity: Arp 148, aka “Mayall’s Object,” the aftermath of a collision between two galaxies. It’s located 450 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (of which the Big Dipper is part.) This is my color-composite of Hubble images originally acquired in April 2007 in optical and near-infrared light.
Space Telescope Named After Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s First Chief of Astronomy
From NASA on May 20, 2020: NASA is naming its next-generation space telescope currently under development, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe. The newly-named Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – or Roman…
The Glowing Shroud of a Newborn Star
Here’s another of my processed Hubble data images: it’s a look into the star-forming region “S106,” made from data captured in infrared wavelengths on Feb. 13, 2011. Here, a newborn star is in the process of blasting away a clear space while still surrounded by the cloud of dust and hydrogen gas it formed within.
I Took a Crack at the Egg Nebula
This is an interesting object: it’s called the Egg Nebula, a protoplanetary nebula located in our galaxy 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Here, an opaque cloud of dust and gas hides a central star that’s expelling its outer layers. Beams of the star’s light escape the cloud through holes, illuminating the layers. This…
Hubble Marks 30 Years in Space with a Tapestry of Blazing Starbirth
(Via NASA) A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30 years of viewing the wonders of space. In the Hubble portrait above, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a…
Lights in the Dark 