Posts tagged hubble
Hubble’s Best Ever View of a Giant Cosmic… Doughnut?
Doughnut or Eye of Sauron?
Hubble at 23: Horsehead Nebula in a New Light
The Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit for 23 years and, to celebrate this milestone, the space telescope has revisited the famous Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion.
It really has been a crappy week, so here’s some Hubble therapy to end the week a little less crappy. Hubble reminds us that the human spirit for exploration and discovery far outweigh our drive to maim and kill.
Hubble’s Latest Mind Blowing Cosmic Pictures
The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking deep into the Cosmos for over two decades returning over a million observations of planets, exoplanets, nebulae, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The mission has surpassed our wildest expectations, but some of the most intricately beautiful views of the Universe have been released only recently — sometimes in collaboration with other observatories.
Hubble’s Dwarf Galaxy Stellar Treasure Trove
Anyone who’s read or seen The Hobbit knows that dwarves love sparkling treasures — and this image from Hubble shows that dwarf galaxies are no different. Read more…
A Galaxy Far, Far Away is Furthest in Universe:
A new celestial wonder has stolen the title of most distant object ever seen in the universe, astronomers report. The new record holder is the galaxy MACS0647-JD, which is about 13.3 billion light-years away. The universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so this galaxy’s light has been traveling toward us for almost the whole history of space and time.
Hubble to Use the Moon to View Transit of Venus
It’s one of the first things kids learn when they start to turn their heads skywards: never look directly at the sun. Even if there’s a solar eclipse you’re dying to see, don’t do it.
It turns out the Hubble Space Telescope operates under the same guidelines –- it can’t look directly at the sun.
This isn’t normally something astronomers want to do, but the upcoming transit of Venus is too exciting to miss with Hubble’s amazing eyes in the sky. So to protect its cameras, the orbiting telescope is going to use perhaps the neatest way to observe the transit. It’s going to use the moon as a mirror.
Rare Earth Element Discovered In Ancient Stars
In three stars far, far away, one of the rarest elements known to man has been spotted, improving our understanding about how heavy elements are created, bolstering evidence that a rare type of supernova may have been responsible for their creation.
Tellurium — a brittle and toxic semiconducting metal — has for the first time been discovered in the atmospheres of three stars that are nearly 12 billion years old. The stars, all a few thousand light-years from Earth, live inside the Milky Way.
With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers from MIT and other institutions were able to “see” tellurium by the light it absorbs.
