Hubbles

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed 12 interacting galaxies, revealing long tidal tails rich in gas, dust, and stars, along which 425 clusters of newborn stars have been identified. These clusters, containing up to 1 million blue, newborn stars each, are a result of galaxy collisions that trigger star formation rather than destruction. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Jayanne English (University of Manitoba)Long Trail of Clumpy Stars Follows Galaxy InteractionsWhen galaxies go bump in the night, they cook up new…

Resembling sparks from a fireworks display, this image taken by a JPL camera onboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows delicate filaments that are sheets of debris from a stellar explosion in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. Credit: NASA/JPL/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)The Hubble Space Telescope captured this spectacular image of a stellar explosion throwing out sheets of debris in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy on July 7, 2003. Since its 1990 launch, Hubble has changed our fundamental…

This photo of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on October 22, 2023, when the ringed planet was approximately 850 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s ultra-sharp vision reveals a phenomenon called ring spokes.Saturn’s spokes are transient features that rotate along with the rings. Their ghostly appearance only persists for two or three rotations around Saturn. During active periods, freshly-formed spokes continuously add to the pattern. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC)Levitated Dust Takes a…

This image features NGC 2814, an irregular galaxy in the Holmberg 124 group, captured by the Hubble Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. KilpatrickThis Hubble Picture of the Week features NGC 2814, an irregular galaxy that is located approximately 85 million light-years from Earth. In this image, which was captured using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the galaxy appears to be quite isolated: visually, it looks a little like a loose stroke of bright paint across a dark background.However, looks can be…

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken an image of NGC 3489, a lenticular galaxy located approximately 30 million light-years away in the Leo constellation. Lenticular galaxies, such as NGC 3489, exhibit characteristics of both spiral and elliptical galaxies, with a central bulge of densely clustered stars and a thin disk of stars, gas, and dust, but without the distinctive arms of a spiral galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Erwin (Max-Planck-Institut fur extraterrestrische Physik), L. Ho (Peking University), and S. Kaviraj…

Hubble’s 33rd anniversary image unveils the mesmerizing chaos of star birth within the dark nebula NGC 1333, offering a glimpse into the early days of our own solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI; Image Processing: Varun Bajaj (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Jennifer Mack (STScI)Dark Nebula is a Cauldron of Star BirthYou should know where you come from, but understanding the birth of our Sun and family of planets is largely sketchy because it happened 4.6 billion years ago. Trying to imagine far back in time,…

The sun will die, eventually. Like any star, the one at the center of our solar system is not meant to live forever. Eventually, it will use up all of the nuclear fuel in its core and explode, becoming a shell of what it once was. Now, Hubble’s various images of the Butterfly Nebula have given us a glimpse of what it could look like after our star finally says goodbye. Many scientists expect the sun to die in around 10 billion years or so, give or take a few million years. Of course, this is just a prediction,…

The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured a scene made famous by its sibling, the James Webb Space Telescope. One of the first images released from Webb showed the Carina Nebula, a particularly striking structure of dust and gas located in an area of the Milky Way called the Carina-Sagittarius arm. Recently, Hubble has imaged Carina as well, snapping an image of a small section of this famous nebula. Compared to Webb’s image of Carina, which was taken in the infrared wavelength, Hubble’s image is more pastel.…

For more than three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has been breaking new ground in astronomy, cosmology and planetary science, delivering results that few if any other facilities can match—let alone exceed. No other orbital observatory has managed such consistent high performance for so many years, thanks to a series of repair and servicing missions by NASA astronauts. NASA staged five space shuttle missions to Hubble in low-Earth orbit between 1993 and 2009 to upgrade science instruments, replace failed systems and…

NASA and SpaceX are working on a study that could lead to new missions to restore Hubble’s orbit. The space telescope has been running since 1990. Throughout its over 30 years of service, Hubble has received five servicing missions designed to help boost the telescope’s orbit and keep it working at optimum levels. The last service mission, though, was in 2009. With over ten years of orbiting without servicing, Hubble has undoubtedly fallen from its peak in Earth’s orbit. That’s not to mention any number of…