Galaxies

The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful observatory ever sent to space, is gearing up to begin its science mission this summer. In the run-up to that milestone, work is underway to deploy the many instruments aboard the $10 billion (roughly Rs. 76,165 crore) telescope. One of those instruments is NIRSpec, the Near Infrared Spectrograph. It is just about to start delivering data to scientists waiting here desperately to see the cosmos in a different light. The spectrograph is one of the most powerful instruments…

NASA is celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope (aka HST or Hubble) by sharing a stunning view of five galaxies in deep space depicted in a single image. To recall, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, and deployed the next day. Thus, this week serves as the telescope's 32nd anniversary or birthday. It entered service on May 20, 1990.As for the image shared by NASA, it is of a group of galaxies called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This closely knit group includes a giant…

In its more than 30 years of service, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1.3 million observations of intriguing cosmic events and bodies. It once captured a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147, using its prime working camera – the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The “Hubble Classic” image has been again shared on Instagram. The image shows the two galaxies oriented in a way that they appear to form the number 10 in the vast dark sky. While the object on the left, or the “1”, appears…