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Explanation: Is this galaxy jumping through a giant ring of stars? Probably not. Although the precise dynamics behind the featured image is yet unclear, what is clear is that the pictured galaxy, NGC 7714, has been stretched and distorted by a recent collision with a neighboring galaxy. This smaller neighbor, NGC 7715, situated off to the left of the frame, is thought to have charged right through NGC 7714. Observations indicate that the golden ring pictured is composed of millions of older Sun-like stars that are likely co-moving with the interior bluer stars. In contrast, the bright center of NGC...

The search for exomoons orbiting planets outside our solar system has sparked a significant debate within the astronomical community, involving a pair of contrasting studies that presented divergent viewpoints on the existence of exomoons Kepler-1625b-i and Kepler-1708b-i. Much like Schrödinger’s oddball cat that is both dead and alive inside a box, we won’t really know until someone goes and looks. But in a new paper recently uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, a team of astronomers led by David Kipping from Columbia University takes issue with the drama surrounding the ongoing exomoon search. A DISCOVERY GETS DASHED In 2017, Kipping,...

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the unbarred spiral galaxy NGC 5033, located about 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs). The galaxy is similar in size to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, at just over 100,000 light-years across. (Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ At the center of this image is a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun that is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. (NASA, ESA, and STScI)...

Billions of light years away, there is a giant ball of hot gas that is brighter than hundreds of billions of suns. It is hard to imagine something so bright. So what is it? Astronomers are not really sure, but they have a couple theories. They think it may be a very rare type of supernova — called a magnetar — but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits of physics, or in other words, the most powerful supernova ever seen as of today. This object is so luminous that astronomers are having a really difficult time finding...

Star Spaghettification Black Hole - This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Scientists hope to improve their understanding of the growth of supermassive black holes in massive galaxies by studying intermediate-mass black holes. After lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy, an intermediate-mass black hole revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. Known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, the violent shredding of the star produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar...

Hubble has been orbiting the Earth since 1990 - NASA The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 with an expected lifespan of around 15 years, but servicing missions and upgrades have seen it continue to gather important science observations to this day. NASA is now exploring how it can remain operational even further into the future with the help of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which might be used to dock with the telescope and shift it to a more stable orbit. Hubble currently orbits the Earth at an altitude of around 335 miles (540 km), though this is decreasing slowly...

A galaxy about 13.3 billion light-years away (inset in this image of a galaxy cluster from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is the most distant galaxy to show signs of rotation. ====================================================================== There is a galaxy spinning like a record in the early universe — far earlier than any others have been seen twirling around. Astronomers have spotted signs of rotation in the galaxy MACS1149-JD1, JD1 for short, which sits so far away that its light takes 13.3 billion years to reach Earth. “The galaxy we analyzed, JD1, is the most distant example of a...

Comet C/2017 K2 will be at its closest point to us for the next few million years this week. Hubble caught sight of comet K2 when it was out between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI) One of the largest comets known is about to zip by our planet on the only trip through the inner solar system it will make during our lifetimes. Five years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a large comet at the farthest distance ever, as it was approaching the sun from way out between the orbits of Saturn...

Researchers have found over 1,700 asteroid trails in archived Hubble data from the last 20 years. While many of the asteroids are previously known, more than 1,000 are not. What good are another 1,000 asteroids? Like all asteroids, they could hold valuable clues to the Solar System's history. As time passes and more and more telescopes perform more and more observations, their combined archival data keeps growing. Sometimes discoveries lurk in that data that await new analytical tools or renewed efforts from scientists before they're revealed. That's what happened in an effort called the Hubble Asteroid Hunter. In 2019 a...

Webb MIRI and Spitzer Comparison Image Comparison of a Webb Space Telescope Mid-Infrared Instrument image of the Large Magellanic Cloud and a past image of the same view using the Spitzer Space Telescope Infrared Array Camera. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (left), NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (right) ************************************************************************ NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is aligned across all four of its science instruments, as seen in a previous engineering image showing the observatory’s full field of view. Now, we take a closer look at that same image, focusing on Webb’s coldest instrument: the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI. The MIRI test image (at 7.7 microns) shows part of...

I have carried out a search for Planet 9 in the IRAS data. At the distance range proposed for Planet 9, the signature would be a 60 micron unidentified IRAS point source with an associated nearby source from the IRAS Reject File of sources which received only a single hours-confirmed (HCON) detection. The confirmed source should be detected on the first two HCON passes, but not on the third, while the single HCON should be detected only on the third HCON. I have examined the unidentified sources in three IRAS 60micron catalogues: some can be identified with 2MASS galaxies, Galactic...

It’s taken 25 years to build, has faced long delays, and cost many billions of dollars more than expected, but the countdown is finally on to launch the James Webb telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. In just six weeks, a powerful rocket is expected to carry into space the most ambitious space telescope ever built, one promising to revolutionize how we see the universe. At a news conference this week, scientists said that after more than a decade of delays, the James Webb telescope is finally ready to fly.

NASA is continuing to investigate why the instruments in the Hubble Space Telescope recently went into safe mode configuration, suspending science operations. The instruments are healthy and will remain in safe mode while the mission team continues its investigation. Hubble’s science instruments issued error codes at 1:46 a.m. EDT on October 23, indicating the loss of a specific synchronization message. This message provides timing information the instruments use to correctly respond to data requests and commands. The mission team reset the instruments, resuming science operations the following morning. At 2:38 a.m. EDT, on October 25, the science instruments again issued...

<p>He turned around, and looked. There, no more than 20 feet away, its feet on a tipped over trash can, was a huge black bear. The bear did not notice him immediately.</p> <p>But Greg’s dog had come out, and peaked around the corner. It growled and emitted a bark, Grrrr..ru..ruff! The bear jumped over the downed trash can, landed with a Woof!, and charged directly at Greg.</p>

A team of astronomers from NASA’s New Horizons mission has unveiled our best look yet at the far side of Pluto, which went unseen to the spacecraft during its historic July 2015 flyby of the dwarf planet. We have only seen one hemisphere of Pluto in high-resolution because the New Horizons flyby of Pluto lasted just hours, whereas the dwarf planet takes 6.4 Earth days to rotate. Thus as New Horizons flew past, one side of the world was illuminated by the Sun, but the other was shrouded in darkness. However, using images taken by the spacecraft while it was...

Astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System. Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon. Scientists suspect subtle forces acting on dust in the rings allow smaller particles to persist while larger ones are recaptured by the moon. Smaller particles reflect blue light, giving the ring its distinctive colour, the US team reports in Science. All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are made up of both large and small particles, making the...

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...

It has taken researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias almost three years to produce the deepest image of the universe ever taken from space, by recovering a large quantity of "lost" light around the largest galaxies in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field survey. To produce the deepest image of the universe, a group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) led by Alejandro S. Borlaff used original images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) taken over a region in the sky called the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF). After improving the process of combining several images, the...

Messier 100, also known as M100, NGC 4321 and LEDA 40153, is located approximately 50 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices.This galaxy is one of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster, a group of about 1,300 (and possibly up to 2,000) galaxies.Its apparent magnitude of 10.1 means that, while it can be seen through small telescopes, it will appear only as a faint patch of light. Larger telescopes can resolve more details of the galaxy.The galaxy was discovered on March 15, 1781 by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain, Charles Messier’s fellow comet hunter who discovered eight...