Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known
Founder: Joseph Barone
Contributors: crookedindifference, bumerangue, propagandery, rocketmagic, rostenbach
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Hubble captures a “lucky” galaxy alignment
An interesting galaxy has been circled in this Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy — one of a group of galaxies called Luminous Red Galaxies — has an unusually large mass, containing about ten times the mass of the Milky Way. However, it’s actually the blue horseshoe shape that circumscribes the red galaxy that is the real prize in this image.
This blue horseshoe is a distant galaxy that has been magnified and warped into a nearly complete ring by the strong gravitational pull of the massive foreground Luminous Red Galaxy. To see such a so-called Einstein Ring required the fortunate alignment of the foreground and background galaxies, making this object’s nickname “the Cosmic Horseshoe” particularly apt.
The Cosmic Horseshoe is one of the best examples of an Einstein Ring. It also gives us a tantalising view of the early Universe: the blue galaxy’s redshift is approximately 2.4. This means we see it as it was about 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The Universe is now 13.7 billion years old.
Astronomers first discovered the Cosmic Horseshoe in 2007 using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But this Hubble image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3, offers a much more detailed view of this fascinating object.
Billions of years ago, when the universe was still in its infancy, the formation of stars is believed to have occurred at a much faster rate than it does today. Now, a recent discovery by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) suggests that the universe’s earliest galaxies may have been pumping out stars even faster than we thought.
The video featured here zooms in on Hubble imagery to reveal the young galaxies that are brimming with starbirth.
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Hubble’s New Infrared Mosaic is the Best Picture of Our Galactic Center Ever
Behold, your galactic center. This Hubble image, captured with the space telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), is the highest-resolution pic of the Milky Way’s galactic center taken to date, taking in a newly discovered group of massive stars, lots of super-hot gas, and roughly 35,000 square light years of space in one sweeping mosaic. But naturally this image goes far beyond simply being aesthetically pleasing. The galactic center is obscured from our view by gas and dust, but Hubble’s infrared camera can peer through that dense, swirling detritus and focus in on the various structures and processes taking place at our galaxy’s core. That in turn makes it a kind of laboratory in which astronomers can observe and draw conclusions about what’s happening not just in the Milky Way but in other galactic hubs around the universe. The ambient red glow is produced by ionized hydrogen gas, but amidst that you can clearly see plenty of massive stars distributed across the panorama—a finding that is relatively new for astronomers who thought most of the massive stars at the galaxy’s center were confined into three general clusters. And if you look really hard, you can see the supermassive black hole that sits at the very center of our galaxy, surrounded by a spiral of swirling gas. See it? Maybe you need the super-enlarged wallpaper quality version.
Source: Popsci.com
Two hidden planets discovered in old Hubble data
“According to the researchers, this is the only alien multi-planet system of which astronomers have direct images.”
Hopefully the first of many exoplanets that we get images of!
Above, a disassembled Hubble at the NASA Goddard Center.
this is what it looks like when a star is born.
A team of scientists has collected enough high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of powerful jets ejected from three young stars.
NASA’s press release (with images)
APOD: Globular Cluster M15 from Hubble
Credit: ESA, Hubble, NASA
Explanation: Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy, and continues to orbit the Milky Way’s center. M15, one of about 150 globular clusters remaining, is noted for being easily visible with only binoculars, having at its center one of the densest concentrations of stars known, and containing a high abundance of variable stars and pulsars. This sharp image, taken by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, spans about 120 light years. It shows the dramatic increase in density of stars toward the cluster’s center. M15 lies about 35,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Winged Horse (Pegasus). Recent evidence indicates that a massive black hole might reside as the center of M15.
NASA’s Hubble Celebrates 21st Anniversary with ‘Rose’ of Galaxies
To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.
Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard Discovery’s STS-31 mission. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research from planetary science to cosmology.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Creating a Hubble Galaxy in Two Minutes
Hubble images are made, not born. Images must be woven together from the incoming data from the cameras, cleaned up and given colors that bring out features that eyes would otherwise miss. In this video from HubbleSite.org, online home of the Hubble Space Telescope, a Hubble-imaged galaxy comes together on the screen at super-fast speed.
WHERE ARE ALL THE BABY STARS?
Not all spiral galaxies are grand and well-defined. Some of my favorites are the fluffy, wispy, flocculent spirals, such as the one shown above. The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide-Field Camera 3 reveals NGC 2841 to be quite lovely, but also quite… quiet.
This galaxy was imaged as part of a study of a wide-range of star formation in galaxies. Astronomers have long known that stars are born from collapsing gas clouds, but the details of why and how are still elusive, especially for the most massive stars. Why does one galaxy produce stars at a prolific rate, while others chug quietly along, producing some here and there?
This image by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dramatic view of the spiral galaxy M51, dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy. Seen in near-infrared light, most of the starlight has been removed, revealing the Whirlpool’s skeletal dust structure. This new image is the sharpest view of the dense dust in M51. The narrow lanes of dust revealed by Hubble reflect the galaxy’s moniker, the Whirlpool Galaxy, as if they were swirling toward the galaxy’s core.
Source: NASA.
Looks Like NASA Has Discovered the Galaxy Where the Evil Aliens Are Hiding
This is one of the most bizarre photos ever taken by the Hubble telescope. It shows a mysterious “ghostly green blob of gas” looming over a spiral galaxy like an evil ghost. The 300,000-light-year-long gas stream is called Hanny’s Voorwerp.
Hanny’s Voorwerp—which probably means The Galactic Empire of the Nefarious Ones or Hanny’s Object in Dutch—is as large as our entire home galaxy, the Milky Way. We only can see part of it in this image because it’s illuminated by a searchlight beam from a quasar, located inside the spiral galaxy core—I know, this is getting quite unbelievable—called IC 2947 and located 650 million light-years from Earth. There’s an apparent hole in the middle of it, but it’s all an optical illusion: NASA scientists think that this is the 20,000 light-year wide shadow from an object between the quasar and the cloud stream, which makes it a shadow projector of galactic proportions. Are we really supposed to believe that?
Hubble Supernova Bubble Resembles Holiday Ornament
A delicate sphere of gas, photographed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, floats serenely in the depths of space. The pristine shell, or bubble, is the result of gas that is being shocked by the expanding blast wave from a supernova. Called SNR 0509-67.5 (or SNR 0509 for short), the bubble is the visible remnant of a powerful stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth.
Ripples in the shell’s surface may be caused by either subtle variations in the density of the ambient interstellar gas, or possibly driven from the interior by pieces of the ejecta. The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per second).
Astronomers have concluded that the explosion was one of an especially energetic and bright variety of supernovae. Known as Type Ia, such supernova events are thought to result from a white dwarf star in a binary system that robs its partner of material, takes on much more mass than it is able to handle, and eventually explodes.
Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys observed the supernova remnant on Oct. 28, 2006 with a filter that isolates light from glowing hydrogen seen in the expanding shell. These observations were then combined with visible-light images of the surrounding star field that were imaged with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on Nov. 4, 2010.
With an age of about 400 years as seen from Earth, the supernova might have been visible to southern hemisphere observers around the year 1600, however, there are no known records of a “new star” in the direction of the LMC near that time. A more recent supernova in the LMC, SN 1987A, did catch the eye of Earth viewers and continues to be studied with ground- and space-based telescopes, including Hubble.
For images and more information about SNR 0509, visit:
http://hubblesite.org/news/2010/27
http://heritage.stsci.edu/2010/27
Source: NASA.
New record! Ancient galaxy is most distant thing in space.
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have now measured the distance to the most distant galaxy so far, UDFy-38135539 (the faint object shown in the excerpt on the left, n photo above). It is seen here in a Hubble Space Telescope photo and is about 13.1 billion light-years away. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth.
This galaxy may provide insight into what the first stars were like and how they influenced the formation of the universe, researchers said.
The new record-holder galaxy contains roughly a billion stars that would have formed within 600 million years of the Big Bang, which scientists think started the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
The distant galaxy was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. In the new study, researchers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe the galaxy for 16 hours to confirm its distance from Earth by measuring how much its extremely faint glow was distorted by the expansion of the universe. UDFy-38135539 was found to be about 100 million light-years farther than the previous record-holder, a gamma-ray burst.
