Hubble | Universe Today

It's time for another beautiful image from the Hubble Space Telescope. And this time, there's an added bonus… video. The latest images released by Hubble are based on research of the Antennae Galaxies, known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039. Astronomers used to think that they were 65 million light-years away, but the new research puts them much closer; probably 45 million light-years away.
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Astronomers looking at galaxies in the universe’s distant past were surprised to find some compact, very young galaxies that have masses similar to a mature, grown-up galaxy. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers discovered nine small galaxies, each weighing in at 200 billion times the mass of the Sun. The galaxies, each only 5,000 light-years across, are a fraction of the size of today's adult galaxies but contain approximately the same number of stars. Each galaxy could fit inside the central hub of our Milky Way Galaxy.
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59 new images from the Hubble Space Telescope show some very unusual but incredibly spectacular colliding galaxies. Colliding or interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, and sometimes these collisions trigger bursts of star formation, or the mergers form new galaxies. The image above shows the aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. Officially called Arp 148, it also has the nickname 'Mayall’s object.' It is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away. These images are the largest collection from Hubble ever published simultaneously, and they celebrate the 18th anniversary of Hubble’s launch. And there’s more….
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One of the breakthroughs in modern astronomy is the use of gravitational lenses, where a closer galaxy or star focuses the light from a more distant object. The more astronomers look, the more they find these helpful objects, allowing them to peer at objects much further away. The number of known gravitationally-lensed galaxies jumped up today, when astronomers announced another 67 new lenses.
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By boosting the abilities of Hubble with a gravitational lens telescope provided by nature, astronomers have been able to peer back to the earliest times in the Universe; to see a galaxy just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
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As galaxies come together through successive mergers they take on the splendid spiral shape like our own Milky Way. Keep merging those larger galaxies, though, and you'll eventually get an elliptical galaxy - a gigantic diffuse cloud of ancient stars with little structure. Such a galaxy, NGC 1132, was recently photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Enough of this small stuff, let's look at the big picture. The really really big picture. In this case, one of the largest patches of the sky ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. A new detailed survey was released today that combines 80 separate Hubble images together. In addition to a framework of galaxy clusters, the images show the distribution of dark matter that holds the clusters together - and tears it all apart.
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Although the space shuttles have a busy schedule completing the construction of the International Space Station, there's one other job to complete - servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA officials announced the details of the mission today at the Winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. If all goes well, the space shuttle Atlantis will visit Hubble some time around August 2008, carrying 7 astronauts and the spare parts they need to bring Hubble back to top-notch condition.
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During many holidays, the folks working on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope try and find an image that captures the essence of the celebration. We've seen Christmas Tree clusters and spooky nebulae. To show their holiday spirit, the Hubble folks have released this beautiful image of the spiral galaxy M74. It's a stretch, I guess, but wow, what a picture.
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All right, here's the picture we've all been waiting for. Step aside ground-based observatories, papa Hubble's here with images of Comet Holmes, which is now larger than the Sun. But don't get fooled. That beautiful image on the left was taken by amateur astronomer Alan Dyer from Alberta, Canada. Hubble's version on the right. It's not as pretty, but it's got inner bigness.
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Ahh, another beautiful photograph captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. This time we're looking at two big, beautiful spiral galaxies… tearing each other apart. The large, face-on spiral is NGC 3808, while its dueling partner is the smaller, edge-on NGC 3808A. And between the two is a long today tail of stars, gas and dust, transferring from one to the other.
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Look at the picture associated with this story. It just looks like a pretty galaxy, right? Well, according to astronomers, it's actually much older than it appears. This image, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, provides one of the most detailed observations ever taken of I Zwicky 18 - a galaxy that looks younger than it should.
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It's not a huge story, just some cool science and a pretty picture. Here's a newly released image of the Orion Nebula, captured by two of the great observatories: the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright blue and orange points are young stars, blazing out the X-rays visible to Chandra, while the diffuse glow is the surrounding gas and dust revealed by Hubble.
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It's time for another amazing image from Hubble. You're looking at nebula NGC 3603, one of the most spectacular star forming regions in the Milky Way. It's located about 20,000 light-years away from the Earth, in the Carina spiral arm. Apart from offering up pretty pictures, this region is important for science too. Birth and death, gas and dust, NGC 3603 has it all.
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Planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful objects in the Universe. Don't let the name confuse you, though, they have nothing to do with planets. They're all that's left behind when stars at the end of their lives cast off their outer layers into space. Here's a nice image released from the Hubble Space Telescope, containing 4 different planetary nebulae.
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Let's go back, way back, to an earlier time when the Universe was a fraction of its current age. Tiny galaxies, just a fraction of the mass of the Milky Way came together, piece by piece, building up larger and larger galaxies. Well, we don't have a time machine, but we've got the next best things: Hubble and Spitzer, which were called upon to look back into the distant Universe, to watch this process unfold.
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All right, this is the coolest thing ever. You know Google Earth, that cool software application that lets you explore satellite photography of the whole planet. Well, some clever Google engineers have flipped the software inside out, letting you explore the Universe with a similar interface.
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Now this is one of the coolest images I've seen captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in a long time. It's just a portion of the Veil Nebula; all that remains from a star that exploded about 5-10,000 years ago.
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If you look at drawings of our Solar System, you'll notice all the planets are lined up nicely in a flat plane, and their orbits are roughly circular. If you can imagine the disk of material that the planets formed out of, it would have been a circle surrounding our Sun. And this circular shape is what astronomers have been seeing when they discover planetary debris disks around other stars.

Until now.
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We experience changing weather here on Earth. One day it's overcast, and then the next day has clear skies. Same goes for the other planets, it just happens on different timescales. The Hubble Space Telescope has been watching how the planet Jupiter's weather transforms over time - it happens surprisingly quickly.
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This latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the dwarf galaxy NGC 4449, located about 12.5 million light-years away. Although the galaxy has been around for billions of years, it recently went through a period of intense star formation.
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Kaboom kaboom. That's what an international team of astronomers saw when they tracked the death of one of the most massive stars that can exist.

Japanese supernova hunter, Koichi Itagaki, first discovered an exploding star in the galaxy UGC4904 back in 2004. It flared briefly and then faded away over the course of 10 days. Two years later, he discovered another supernova in exactly the same location.
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Astronomers released this beautiful photograph of the grand spiral design galaxy, M81, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Although it looks like a single image, it was actually constructed by stitching together many images on computer, using three different wavelengths of light.
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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have turned up a ghostly ring of dark matter, surrounding the aftermath of a collision between two galaxy clusters. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence ever found for the existence of dark matter; a shadowy substance that only interacts with regular matter through gravity.
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Astronomers have long believed that globular star clusters formed out of a single cloud of dust and gas. All the stars in the cluster should be roughly the same age. But new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope show this isn't always the case - in cluster NGC 2808, there were three distinct periods of star formation.
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