Tag: Hubble Space Telescope

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Make the most of a super-sized Mars

This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. Click on the image for an annotated view. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)
This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)

For the next couple of weeks, Mars will look bigger than it’s looked in a decade! And no, this is not a hoax.

Every August, the Internet goes a little crazy over claims that the Red Planet is about to look twice as big as the moon in the night sky. That viral hoax got started in 2003, when some folks scrambled up reports about Mars’ historic close approach during that summer.

Mars isn’t coming quite as close as it did back then, and it certainly won’t be anywhere near as big as the moon. But by May 30, the distance between Earth and Mars will shrink to 46.8 million miles, which is closer than any other approach since 2005.

That closeness is due to the position of Earth and Mars in their elliptical orbits as they line up with each other and with the sun. On May 22, Mars will be directly opposite the sun, looming right in the center of the night sky at astronomical midnight. The occasion is known as opposition.

Because Mars’ full disk is illuminated, as seen from Earth, opposition is an especially good time to check out the Red Planet with your naked eye, with binoculars … or with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Hubble celebrates 26 years with a bubbly view

Image: Bubble Nebula
The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7653, is an emission nebula located 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. (Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team)

It’s been 26 years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit, but the Bubble Nebula picture unveiled to mark its birthday would make the great observatory feel like a kid again.

Anthropomorphizing inanimate objects is usually a bad idea: They hate that. But every April, the telescope’s science team releases an eye-opening picture as a birthday present. It’s not really for Hubble. It’s for its fans.

The telescope went into space aboard the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, went through a mission-saving series of optical repairs in 1993, had its final servicing mission in 2009, and is continuing to send back jaw-dropping pictures of the universe.

Hubble has previously captured views of the Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7635. But this time, the science team knit together four images from the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 to show off the bubble in its entirety.

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Hubble sets new mark for farthest-out galaxy

Image: GN-z11
This image locates galaxy GN-z11 in the northern hemisphere field of the Hubble GOODS survey, which takes in tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back into time. GN-z11, shown in the inset, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age. (Credit: NASA / ESA / Oesch et al.)

Like the rockers in “This Is Spinal Tap,” astronomers cranked the dials on the Hubble Space Telescope up to 11 to identify what they say is the farthest-out galaxy ever detected, from a time when the universe was a mere 400 million years old.

The light from the galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major, known as GN-z11, was sent out 13.4 billion years ago, astronomers report in a study to be published in theAstrophysical Journal. That light-year measurement surpasses the distances that were recorded for two faraway galaxies over the past year.

The researchers say this record is likely to stand until NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope comes online.

“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble,” Yale astronomer Pascal Oesch said in a news release.

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Super-Earth’s atmosphere isn’t super for life

Image: Exoplanet
An artist’s impression shows the super-Earth 55 Cancri e in front of its parent star. The star is slightly smaller, cooler and less massive than our sun. (Credit: M. Kornmesser / ESA / Hubble)

For the first time, astronomers have conducted a spectral analysis of a distant super-Earth’s atmosphere – and the results show it would be a hellish place to visit.

We already knew that about 55 Cancri e, which is about 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. It circles its parent star once every 18 hours, in an orbit so close that its surface temperature is 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,100 degrees Celsius). The world, which is also known as Planet Janssen, is eight times as massive as Earth and has been nicknamed the diamond planet due to its carbon content.

Now we know the planet’s air would be poisonous, even if it we could cool it down.

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Hubble salutes ‘Star Wars’ with lightsaber

An image from the Hubble Space Telescope focuses on jets of hot gas blazing forth from a protostar in the middle of a dusty cloud known as Herbig-Haro 24. (Credit: NASA / ESA)
An image from the Hubble Space Telescope focuses on jets of hot gas blazing forth from a protostar in the middle of a dusty cloud known as Herbig-Haro 24. (Credit: NASA / ESA)

Leave it to the scientists behind the Hubble Space Telescope to capitalize on the craziness over “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Their latest cosmic snapshot shows what looks like a double-bladed lightsaber worthy of Darth Maul.

The lightsaber is actually a pair of jets of superheated gas, emanating a newborn star that’s hidden in a cloak of dust as thick as a Jedi Knight’s cloak. This scene isn’t set in a galaxy far, far away. Instead, it’s 1,350 light-years away in our own galaxy, in a celestial cradle called the Orion B molecular cloud complex.

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Hubble catches supernova’s ‘instant replay’

Image: Hubble supernova
The red circles on this image from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate the three spots where flashes from Supernova Refsdal showed up at different times. The middle circle indicates the spot where it was last observed on Dec. 11. (Credit: NASA / ESA / GLASS / Frontier Fields / CLASH)

Astronomers traced one of the weirder twists in relativity to determine when they’d see an “instant replay” of a distant supernova, and now the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that their prediction was right. They say it marks the first time a supernova observation was predicted in advance.

The confirmation comes in the form of Hubble’s observations of the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 over the course of more than a year. When scientists studied pictures taken in November 2014, they identified a supernova flash that had beensplit into four separate images, due to the cluster’s gravitational lensing effect.

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