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...looming 5,700 feet over L.A., is arguably one of the world's most important spots for scientific discovery: the Mount Wilson Observatory. Worryingly, the Bobcat Fire is charging right for it. Only 500 feet away as of Tuesday afternoon. And Edwin Hubble — yes that Hubble — used the 100-inch telescope to make an even bigger discovery. "Effectively [Edwin] Hubble discovered the universe in the 1920s up on Mt. Wilson," said John Mulchaey, director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, which owns the observatory. Scientists had long believed that the Milky Way was just about all there was to the universe...

It would be extremely optimistic to suggest that we have a good handle on dark matter. But even the slight grasp we do have may be missing something important. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have found much higher concentrations of dark matter than expected in some galaxies, by over an order of magnitude. These concentrations are inconsistent with theoretical models, suggesting that there's a big gap in our understanding - the simulations could be incorrect, or there could be a property of dark matter we don't fully understand, according to the research team. "We have done a lot...

Posted on August 12, 2020 by David Dickinson Hubble Examines Earth’s Reflection as an ‘Exoplanet’ During a Lunar Eclipse What would we look for in a distant exoplanet in the hunt for Earth-like worlds, and perhaps life? A recent observation carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope found tell-tale signatures from our home planet by looking at a familiar source under extraordinary circumstances: Earth’s Moon, during a total lunar eclipse.The experiment was carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and now in its 30th year of operation. Orbiting the Earth once every 96 minutes, Hubble is...

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt Explanation: Can stars, like caterpillars, transform themselves into butterflies? No, but in the case of the Butterfly Nebula -- it sure looks like it. Though its wingspan covers over 3 light-years and its estimated surface temperature exceeds 200,000 degrees, C, the dying central star of NGC 6302, the featured planetary nebula, has become exceptionally hot, shining brightly in visible and ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This sharp close-up was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope and is reprocessed here to show off...

Astronomers don't know exactly when the first stars formed in the Universe because they haven't been observed yet. And now, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the first stars and galaxies may have formed even earlier than previously estimated. Why? We *still* haven't seen them, even with the best telescope we've got, pushed to its limits. A group of researchers used Hubble to look back in time (and space) as far as it could see, hoping to study these first generation of stars of the early Universe, which are called Population III stars. Hubble peered and squinted back...

The Hubble Space Telescope, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has been flying high for almost three full decades. That’s a long time to be peering into space and the telescope has provided mankind with some incredible discoveries and a wealth of celestial eye candy. Over the course of almost 30 years, it’s amassed quite a collection of images and there’s at least one spectacular shot for every day of the calendar year. NASA knows this and to help celebrate the spacecraft’s upcoming 30th anniversary, the agency put together a handy little web tool that shows you what...

This illustration depicts the Sun-like star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered in 2012–2014. These planets are all roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass. This means the planets have an extraordinarily low density, more like that of Styrofoam rather than rock or water, based on new Hubble Space Telescope observations. The planets may have formed much farther from their star and migrated inward. Now their puffed-up hydrogen/helium atmospheres are bleeding off into space. Eventually, much smaller planets might be left behind. The background starfield is correctly plotted as...

Hubble Space Telescope. The workhorse telescope has given us a photo of the new interstellar comet 2I/Borisov... 2I/Borisov has wandered into our Solar System from the deep cold of interstellar space, but nobody knows from whence it came, or how long it’s been travelling. Boris only the second object we’ve observed that’s come into our Solar System from somewhere else in the galaxy, and the Hubble snapped photos of it speeding along at about 177,000 kph (110,000 mph.) So far, the Hubble images are the sharpest ones yet. Comets contain a lot of water ice and other volatiles. When they...

Each new image of Eta Carinae reveals new subtle details, streams of light and filaments of gas and dust, that astronomers hadn't observed before. Photo by Hubble/NASA/ESA ================================================================ July 1 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope has captured Eta Carinae's fireworks in red, white and blue, just in time for Independence Day. Eta Carinae is a binary star system located 7,500 light-years away in the Carina constellation. One of its two stars, which orbit each other, is large, highly unstable and nearing the end of its life. The dynamic stellar duo occasionally produces violent outbursts. The system's most famous outburst...

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of electrically-charged molecules in space shaped like soccer balls, shedding light on the mysterious contents of the interstellar medium (ISM) - the gas and dust that fills interstellar space. The molecules … are a form of carbon called "Buckminsterfullerene," also known as "Buckyballs," which consists of 60 carbon atoms (C60) arranged in a hollow sphere. C60 has been found in some rare cases on Earth in rocks and minerals, and can also turn up in high-temperature combustion soot. C60 has been seen in space before. However, this is the first...

Giant polar cap dominates Uranus; dark tempest is raging on Neptune. The two major planets beyond Saturn have only been visited once by a spacecraft, albeit briefly. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft swung by Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989. Our robotic deep-space tourist snapped the only close-up, detailed images of these monstrous worlds. For Neptune, the images revealed a planet with a dynamic atmosphere with two mysterious dark vortices. Uranus, however, appeared featureless. But these views were only brief snapshots. They couldn't capture how the planets' atmospheres change over time, any more than a single snapshot of Earth...

There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe. The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed...

Scientists have finally been able to accurately calculate the weight of the Milky Way, overcoming the difficult hurdle of measuring dark matter, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced Thursday. After years of struggling to estimate the size of our galaxy, astronomers with NASA and the ESA used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA’s Gaia mission to determine the Milky Way weighs about 1.5 trillion solar masses within a radius of 129,000 light years from the center. Because dark matter makes up about 90 percent of the galaxy, estimates of the Milky Way’s weight have differed widely in...

Located in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away, NGC 6052 is a pair of colliding galaxies. They were first discovered in 1784 by William Herschel and were originally classified as a single irregular galaxy because of their odd shape. However, we now know that NGC 6052 actually consists of two galaxies that are in the process of colliding. This particular image of NGC 6052 was taken using the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. A long time ago gravity drew the two galaxies together into the chaotic state we now observe. Stars from...

NASA Hubble's designers prepared for gyroscope failure by equipping the observatory with a backup. Unfortunately, when one of Hubble's gyroscopes conked out in early October, the backup didn't work as expected -- it was rotating too fast and hence won't be able to hold the telescope in place when it needs to stay still and lock in on a target. NASA has since been able to reduce its rotation rates and fix its issues by implementing an age-old fix for malfunctioning electronics: turning it off and on again. Back to science! @NASAHubble is well on its way to normal...

The Three Supernovas By Philip Cottraux Atheists used to believe the universe was eternally pre-existing and static. By rejecting the biblical creation account, they couldn’t accept the idea of a universe that had a beginning. Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin, and at one time even Einstein labored under this philosophy. The idea of the whole universe condensed to a small state whose expansion was triggered by a colossal explosion was first proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges LeMaitres. The idea seemed so preposterous that astronomer Fred Hoyle first coined the phrase “big bang” as a term of ridicule. But two years...

NASA is working to resume science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope after the spacecraft entered safe mode on Friday, October 5, shortly after 6:00 p.m. EDT. Hubble’s instruments still are fully operational and are expected to produce excellent science for years to come. Hubble entered safe mode after one of the three gyroscopes (gyros) actively being used to point and steady the telescope failed. Safe mode puts the telescope into a stable configuration until ground control can correct the issue and return the mission to normal operation. Built with multiple redundancies, Hubble had six new gyros installed during Servicing...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space telescope have taken a series of images featuring the fluttering auroras at the north pole of Saturn. The observations were taken in ultraviolet light and the resulting images provide astronomers with the most comprehensive picture so far of Saturn’s northern aurora...Because the atmosphere of each of the four outer planets in the Solar System is – unlike the Earth – dominated by hydrogen, Saturn’s auroras can only be seen in ultraviolet wavelengths

================================================================================================================ Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus. Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings. Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus,...

(much larger hi-res picture at link) Globular clusters are gravitationally-bound groupings of stars which orbit galaxies. These objects typically contain hundreds of thousands of stars that are thought to have formed at roughly the same time as their host galaxy. They are denser and more spherical than open star clusters like the famous Pleiades. The large mass in the rich stellar center of the cluster pulls the stars inward to form a ball of stars. The word globulus, from which these clusters take their name, is Latin for small sphere. It is thought that every galaxy has a population...