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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...

snr0519 While astronomers have seen the debris from scores of exploded stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, it is often difficult to determine the timeline of the star’s demise. By studying the spectacular remains of a supernova in a neighboring galaxy using NASA telescopes, a team of astronomers has found enough clues to help wind back the clock. The supernova remnant called SNR 0519-69.0 (SNR 0519 for short) is the debris from an explosion of a white dwarf star. After reaching a critical mass, either by pulling matter from a companion star or merging with another white...

The Orion Bar and the bright triple star θ2 Orionis A. (NASA, ESA, CSA, PDRs4All ERS Team, S. Fuenmayor & O. Berné) The Orion nebula is one of the most studied regions of our sky. It sits amidst the constellation of Orion, between the stars, and is so large, close, and bright it can be seen with the naked eye: a vast cloud complex giving birth to and nurturing baby stars. Because it is relatively close, at 1,344 light-years away, it's one of the most important observation targets in the sky for understanding star formation. Although we've been staring at...

Spatial Distribution of NGC 346 Stars Annotated - The massive star cluster NGC 346, located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, has long intrigued astronomers with its unusual shape. Now researchers using two separate methods have determined that this shape is partly due to stars and gas spiraling into the center of this cluster in a river-like motion. The red spiral superimposed on NGC 346 traces the movement of stars and gas toward the center. Scientists say this spiraling motion is the most efficient way to feed star formation from the outside toward the center of the cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA,...

After analyzing data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories, astronomers have concluded that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse quite literally blew its top in 2019, losing a substantial part of its visible surface and producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME). This is something never before seen in a normal star’s behavior. Credit: NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)Our Sun routinely blows off parts of its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, in an event known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). However, the Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME!...

Cartwheel Galaxy (NIRCam and MIRI Composite Image) A large pink, speckled galaxy resembling a wheel with a small, inner oval, with dusty blue in between on the right, with two smaller spiral galaxies about the same size to the left against a black background. This image of the Cartwheel and its companion galaxies is a composite from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which reveals details that are difficult to see in the individual images alone. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Webb’s Instruments Reveal New Details About Star Formation The incredible imaging capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space...

It hasn't even been a fortnight since the first image release, and the James Webb Space Telescope is just continuously knocking all our socks off. Only a few images have been officially released, but that hasn't stopped citizen scientists digging through the raw data to see what they can find. One of those is Judy Schmidt, who has been processing raw space data into breathtaking images for years. Courtesy of her painstaking work, we now have absolutely jaw-dropping images of two spectacular spiral galaxies. The first is NGC 628, also known as the Phantom Galaxy. The other is NGC 7496....

Explanation: The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The featured image is a digital combination of images taken in different colors by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, highlighting many sharp features. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). M51 is a spiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a...

Our Milky Way galaxy is haunted. The vast gulf of space between the stars is plied by the dead, burned-out and crushed remnants of once glorious stars. These black holes cannot be directly seen because their intense gravity swallows light. Like legendary wandering ghosts, their presence can only be deduced by seeing how they affect the environment around them. Imagine crushing the mass of a fleet of battleships into something no bigger than a baseball. That only begins to describe the infinite density locked away into a black hole left over from a stellar explosion. The black hole is typically...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers. The estimated diameter is approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than found at the heart of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun. The behemoth comet, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is barreling this way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the...

Closeup of the region on the sky, 1/250 of a degree across, where the gravity of a foreground cluster of galaxies magnifies the distant background star—nicknamed Earendil—thousands of times. With a fortuitous lineup of a massive cluster of galaxies, astronomers discovered a single star across most of the entire observable Universe. This is the farthest detection of a single star ever. The star may be up to 500 times more massive than the Sun. The discovery has been published today in the journal Nature. Gazing at the night sky, all the stars that you see lie within our own galaxy,...

The Hubble Telescope snapped the object named Arp 282, which is an interacting galaxy pair composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 & the galaxy IC 1559. In ESA's own words, this incredible three-dimensional-looking picture by Hubble shows two galaxies interacting with each other as if engaging in a 'cosmic draw'. The interaction captured by the telescope is considered significant as astronomers believe that the interaction of galaxies with one another is an important aspect of their evolution. According to ESA, the object seen in the picture is named Arp 282, which is an interacting galaxy pair composed of the...

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.

These two galaxies are so tight, the stellar formation encompassing them both actually has a name of its own. Say hello to Arp 91, a pair of spiral galaxies that are situated so close together (in relative terms, space is big) we can actually see their outer arms reaching out and colliding with one another. BFFs on an intergalactic scale. Like a good marriage, these galaxies may share a name but they are their own individuals as well. In the center of the frame is NGC 5953. Just above it and slightly to the right is NGC 5954. They're both...

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. This water vapor forms when ice from the moon's surface sublimates—that is, turns from solid to gas... ...Previous research has offered circumstantial evidence that Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, contains more water than all of Earth's oceans. However, temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface is frozen solid.... ...Roth and his team then took a closer look at the relative distribution of the aurora in the UV images. Ganymede's surface temperature varies strongly throughout the day,...

Explanation: What does the Andromeda galaxy look like in ultraviolet light? Young blue stars circling the galactic center dominate. A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, really is just next door as large galaxies go. Spanning about 230,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light in 2003. While its spiral arms stand out in visible light images, Andromeda's arms look more like rings in ultraviolet. The rings are sites of intense star formation and...

NASA's beloved Hubble Space Telescope has been facing one of its greatest challenges. A technical glitch left it in safe mode for over a month. This week, NASA said it finally tracked down the source of the issue and tried a new fix, and it seems to have worked. "NASA has successfully switched to backup hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope, including powering on the backup payload computer, on July 15," the space agency announced on Friday. The telescope has been in service for over 30 years. The Hubble team had been looking at the payload computer -- hardware dating...

A series of multi-day tests, which included attempts to restart and reconfigure the computer and the backup computer, were not successful, but the information gathered from those activities has led the Hubble team to determine that the possible cause of the problem is in the Power Control Unit (PCU).

The Hubble Space Telescope is currently offline. On Sunday 13 June, the telescope's payload computer went offline, and engineers here on Earth are currently performing operations to get it up and running again. The payload computer, as you might expect, is vital to Hubble's continued science operations. It's the 'brains' of the instrument, coordinating and controlling the various instruments with which Hubble is equipped. It also monitors the telescope for issues. Initially, NASA engineers speculated that the cause of the halt was a degrading memory module. An attempt to restart the computer failed, so, on Wednesday 16 June, the Hubble...