Free Republic

Explanation: Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and around 45 times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The...

The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7653, is an emission nebula located 11,000 light-years away. This stunning new image was observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to celebrate its 26th year in space. Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team =============================================================================================================== This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, released to celebrate Hubble's 26th year in orbit, captures in stunning clarity what looks like a gigantic cosmic soap bubble. The object, known as the Bubble Nebula, is in fact a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the brilliant star within it. The vivid new portrait of this dramatic scene...

An international team of scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to successfully dissect the young star cluster R136 in the ultraviolet for the first time [1].The image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen at the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young blue stars, among them the most massive star detected in the...

This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889 (arrowed) in front of hundreds of background galaxies. Well-hidden from human eyes, there is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. (Credit: NASA & ESA) ===================================================================================================================================== Astronomers have found one of the largest-ever black holes in giant galaxy NGC 4889, some 300 million light years away. The Hubble space telescope has captured an incredible image of elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, which is located in the Coma Cluster. Scientists, however, note that the giant galaxy harbors a dark secret. The European Space Agency...

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This image, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the galaxy NGC 6052, located around 230 million light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. It would be reasonable to think of this as a single abnormal galaxy, and it was originally classified as such. However, it is in fact a "new" galaxy in the process of forming. Two separate galaxies have been gradually drawn together, attracted by gravity, and have collided. We now see them merging into a single structure. As the merging...

Although impressive, the number of galaxies found at this early epoch is not the team’s only remarkable breakthrough, as Johan Richard from the Observatoire de Lyon, France, points out. “The faintest galaxies detected in these Hubble observations are fainter than any other yet uncovered in the deepest Hubble observations.” By looking at the light coming from the galaxies the team discovered that the accumulated light emitted by these galaxies could have played a major role in one of the most mysterious periods of the universe’s early history — the epoch of reionization. Reionization started when the thick fog of...

Bill and Hillary Clintons’ convict crony Webster Hubbell said that Ken Starr’s investigation into his wrongdoing “made me a better person.” Hubbell, 67, told The Daily Caller that he has no bitterness toward independent prosecutor Starr, whose extensive investigation of the Clintons snared Hubbell for overbilling his clients at Arkansas’ Rose Law Firm — where he worked alongside Hillary Clinton. Hubbell served about a year and a half in prison. “You always have regrets,” Hubbell said. “I don’t have any bitterness toward anyone, even Ken Starr. He was doing his job. It made me a better person. It gave me...

With the 25th anniversary of The Hubble Space Telescope fast approaching, Brady and Keith look at a priceless artefact - Sir Isaac Newton's very own reflecting telescope.

As usual the MSM got it wrong: they’re all celebrating Hubble’s 25th birthday today when in fact it is the 25th anniversary of his launch into deep space. I should know, as Hub is my twin brother: I am a fraternal twin (female). My brother (Hub) is the mirror in the Hubble telescope. We are Cassegrain reflectors of Ritchey-Chretien design, and were conceived in 1979 at the Corning New York factory when 2 conjoined blanks of ultra-low expansion glass were sandwiched around a honeycomb lattice. (I didn’t mean to get into the sex stuff, but a lot of people are...

A object from the very early universe is bafflingly rich with dust that theory says shouldn't have formed yet. Photograph by NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Blakeslee (NRC Herzberg Astrophysics Program, Dominion Astrophysical Observatory), and H. Ford (JHU) Astronomers have spotted a surprisingly dusty little galaxy within the cluster Abell 1689, shown here in an image by the Hubble telescope. Peering back in time to find the very earliest objects in the universe, an international team of astronomers has discovered a galaxy that shouldn't be there at all. The problem, the scientists report Monday in Nature, is...

Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100 (alias NGC 4321) is 56 million light-years distant toward the constellation of Berenice's Hair (Coma Berenices). This Hubble Space Telescope image of M100 was made in 2006 and reveals bright blue star clusters and intricate winding dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies. Studies of...

This smiley face hovering in space looks like it was beamed into the heavens by a celestial keyboard. Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, it was in fact created by a quirk of general relativity known as gravitational lensing. The glowing eyes are bright galaxies that are part of a galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849. The massive structure warps space-time, bending light like a lens to create a stretched image of distant galaxies, called an Einstein ring. The well-positioned circular shape creates the outline of the face and the wry grin.

The Hubble 'Pillars of Creation' Revisited by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * In 1995 the Hubble Telescope photographed spectacular columns of gas, illuminated by nearby stars, in a section of the Eagle Nebula.1 The enormous columns of gas in this famous photo have been nicknamed "pillars of creation" since secular scientists insist that new stars are being "born" within them. In celebration of the Hubble Telescope's 25th anniversary, a new photograph was taken of the same region in the Eagle Nebula, but this time the image was captured in both visible and infrared light, in order to reveal more detail.2 As...

Embedded in these Eagle Nebula towers, which are sometimes called elephant trunks, are stars under creation. And in a short span of 20 years, you can see how the stars are slowly blowing the pillars apart. This is leading some press officials to call the structures “pillars of destruction.” And astronomers can chart how everything is changing over time. “I’m impressed by how transitory these structures are. They are actively being ablated away before our very eyes,” stated Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe, one of the astronomers who led the 1995 observations.

Astronomers searching the sky with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an odd little dwarf galaxy in our very own backyard -- a mere 7 million light years away.. ... Given that these isolated dwarf spheroidal galaxies are so hard to find, there could be many more of these fascinating galactic fossils just hanging out in the darkness of our own intergalactic neighborhood, just waiting to be found,

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground observation have found an unlikely object in an improbable place -- a monster black hole lurking inside one of the tiniest galaxies ever known. The black hole is five times the mass of the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It is inside one of the densest galaxies known to date -- the M60-UCD1 dwarf galaxy that crams 140 million stars within a diameter of about 300 light-years, which is only 1/500th of our galaxy’s diameter. If you lived inside this dwarf galaxy, the night sky would...

Hubble Space Telescope (in Earth orbit) is scoping out icy objects beyond Pluto. What astronomers are doing now is a “pilot observation” where the space telescope looks at a spot in the constellation Sagittarius. Controllers will try to turn the telescope at the same rate as what a KBO would be orbiting around the sun. If the method works, stars will look like streaks and the KBOs will look like “pinpoint objects”, NASA stated. “If the test observation identifies at least two KBOs of a specified brightness it will demonstrate statistically that Hubble has a chance of finding an appropriate...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured the most comprehensive picture ever assembled of the evolving universe—and one of the most colorful. The study is called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field project. Prior to this survey, astronomers were in a curious position. They knew a lot about star formation occurring in nearby galaxies thanks to UV telescope facilities such as NASA's Galex observatory, which operated from 2003 to 2013. And, thanks to Hubble's near-infrared and visible capability, they had also studied star birth in the most distant galaxies. We see these distant galaxies in their...

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton said Sunday that the gay-rights cause made "incredible progress" on political and legal fronts in 2013, but progress should not be mistaken for success. Clinton called lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues "the unfinished business of the 21st century" in an address at a national conference in Las Vegas where actress Ellen Page came out as gay days earlier in an emotional speech that's stirred a social media outpouring. Clinton urged a crowd of 600 professionals who work with children to become more sensitive to the needs of LGBT youth, saying the deck is stacked...

Religion and astronomy may not overlap often, but a new NASA X-ray image captures a celestial object that resembles the "Hand of God." The cosmic "hand of God" photo was produced when a star exploded and ejected an enormous cloud of material, which NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, glimpsed in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue in the photo. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory had imaged the green and red parts previously, using lower-energy X-rays. "NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light," NuSTAR telescope principal investigator Fiona...