Hubble

New IMAX Super Short: Galaxies Across Space and Time

May 23, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter “Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time” is an award-winning IMAX Super Short film. In less than 3 minutes you can explore 10 billion years of cosmic history as you fly through one of Hubble’s iconic images, the Hubble Deep Field. These [...]

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The Ring Nebula is Really a Football-Shaped Jelly Donut

May 23, 2013

Sometimes the popular names given to an astronomical object hit the mark of describing its features. Other times…. not so much. Case in point, the Ring Nebula. While the distinctive loop shape and colorful beauty have made it one of the most famous celestial discs, it is not really a classic “ring.” And this recent [...]

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Hubble Observes Planet-”Polluted” Dead Stars In Hyades

May 10, 2013

For those of us who practice amateur astronomy, we’re very familiar with the 150 light-year distant Hyades star cluster – one of the jewels in the Taurus crown. We’ve looked at it countless times, but now the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken its turn observing and spotted something astronomers weren’t expecting – the debris [...]

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The Rosy Remains of a Star’s Final Days

May 3, 2013

Stars like our Sun can last for a very long time (in human terms, anyway!) somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-12 billion years. Already over 4.6 billion years old, the Sun is entering middle age and will keep on happily fusing hydrogen into helium for quite some time. But eventually even stars come to the [...]

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NGC 6240: Gigantic Hot Gas Cloud Sheaths Colliding Galaxies

May 1, 2013

Looking almost like a cosmic hyacinth, this image is anything but a cool, Spring flower… it’s a portrait of an enormous gas cloud radiating at more than seven million degrees Kelvin and enveloping two merging spiral galaxies. This combined image glows in purple from the Chandra X-ray information and is embellished with optical sets from [...]

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