All articles tagged with #hubble space telescope
Hubble re-imaged the Crab Nebula to measure its ongoing expansion since SN 1054, finding filaments moving about 0.3 arcseconds per year (roughly 3.4 million mph) driven by energy from the central pulsar; the thousand-year-old remnant is not a static shell and new filament groups with similar emission were identified, linking the medieval guest star to a living, evolving nebula about 6,500 light-years away in Taurus.
NASA is weighing options to extend the Hubble Space Telescope into the 2030s by moving it to a higher, more stable orbit or to decommission it via a robotic mission. White papers and science-priority pitches are due in July, with recommendations to NASA and Congress later this year. Hubble’s ultraviolet/optical data remain uniquely valuable and complement JWST, aiding studies of galaxy evolution, star formation, dark energy, and exoplanet atmospheres. With the Habitable Worlds Observatory not launching before 2040, keeping Hubble operational for as long as feasible is seen as crucial for the next decade.
Hubble's new image of Messier 3 shows more than 500,000 stars in a distant globular cluster, highlighting rare RR Lyrae variables and blue stragglers; these features help astronomers measure distances and probe the Milky Way's history, including ancient mergers, as part of a Treasury program surveying galactic clusters.
Astronomers using Hubble, JWST, and VLT detected ionizing ultraviolet photons from MXDFz4.4, a compact galaxy about 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang and roughly 250 million years after the Epoch of Reionization, making it the earliest such LyC emitter observed. The galaxy's tiny size but high star-formation rate appears to carve channels in surrounding gas, allowing ionizing light to escape into the intergalactic medium and help clear the universe's hydrogen fog. The discovery, based on a deep Hubble image plus JWST and VLT spectroscopy, offers new clues about how the early cosmos became transparent to light.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, teamed with the Hubble and JWST, released four “red, white and blue” space images to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. The shots showcase the galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652, the spiral galaxy Messier 94, the star-forming region NGC 3603, and the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, blending X-ray data with optical/IR views and adding sonifications that translate the data into celestial sounds.
The Hubble Space Telescope detected ultraviolet light from MXDFz4.4, a compact, star-forming galaxy at redshift 4.4, showing bursts of ionizing UV radiation from a dense cluster of hot, massive stars. This radiation helped ionize surrounding neutral hydrogen, offering a closer look at the Epoch of Reionization when the universe became transparent to ultraviolet light. The finding, supported by JWST observations that reveal the galaxy’s star-formation history, suggests that bursts from young star clusters in early galaxies played a major role in clearing the fog of neutral hydrogen in the early universe; the results appear in The Astrophysical Journal.
Launched in 1990 with a mirror polished to the wrong shape by a measurement error, Hubble produced blurred images. A 1993 servicing mission to the space shuttle Endeavour installed COSTAR and the WFPC2 instrument, effectively giving the telescope “glasses” and fixing the vision. The repair transformed Hubble into the most productive observatory in history, enabling landmark discoveries and earning it a lasting reputation as a public-facing science icon; COSTAR was retired later as each instrument gained its own correction.
NASA’s JWST and Hubble visualisation traces Terzan 5, a dense stellar system in the Milky Way’s bulge about 22,000 light-years away in Sagittarius. Once thought a simple globular cluster, Terzan 5 is now seen as a bulge fossil fragment hosting four star generations, with some stars dating back ~12.5 billion years, and a mass of about two million solar masses. Its survival offers clues to the early Milky Way’s formation as the bulge assembled.
NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a striking image of the faint dwarf irregular galaxy ESO 490-017, about 23 million light-years away in Canis Major and roughly 12,000 light-years across. The portrait reveals a swarm of stars against a hazy backdrop with foreground diffraction spikes and background galaxies, part of a program piecing together how galaxies move and the cosmic flow of the universe.
Space.com highlights a new Hubble Space Telescope image of Messier 88 (NGC 4501), a spiral, active galaxy in the Virgo Cluster about 63 million light-years away. Captured with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, the image reveals swirling spiral arms feeding a central supermassive black hole and offers insight into how spiral galaxies operate in different environments. The piece notes this image is part of a broader study of spiral galaxies, and adds a playful warning that staring at the swirl might hypnotize you.
NASA is weighing a cheaper, potentially commercial reboost to extend the aging Hubble Space Telescope’s life, inspired by a cost-effective plan already pursued for the Swift Observatory. Before any reboost can happen, NASA must reduce Hubble’s operating costs; the telescope is currently about 326 miles up and could reenter around 2033, with 2025 operating costs pegged at roughly $98.8 million.
AnomalyMatch scanned roughly 100 million Hubble image cutouts spanning ~35 years, returning 1,255 unique objects across 18 classes, with more than 800 not previously described in the literature. Most are known categories (merging galaxies, lenses, rings, jellyfish galaxies), but a few dozen resist current schemes. The study shows AI can scale anomaly discovery for future large surveys (Euclid, Rubin Observatory), while confirming that human inspection remains essential and follow-up observations are needed to validate lens candidates and classify unconfirmed objects.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been observed for about 190 years, shrinking from roughly 39,000 km to around 14,000 km across, though still wider than Earth; its long-term change is tracked annually by the Hubble Space Telescope, while shorter-term 90-day fluctuations occur; the reasons for the shrinkage are not settled and future changes could lead to the storm breaking up or stabilizing at a smaller size.
Nature’s May image roundup highlights the month’s sharpest science photos, from NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter tests on Mars and a dramatic Milky Way nightscape to a refreshed Hubble view of the Trifid Nebula, plus bioluminescent art and other striking natural phenomena illustrating how scientists capture the universe and Earth’s wonders.
NASA has reconfigured the Hubble Space Telescope to operate on a single healthy gyroscope, preserving two spare units to extend its life into the mid‑2030s after gyro faults and a 2024 safe mode. The one‑gyro mode, developed in the 2000s, slows slews and restricts targets (notably near Mars and Earth‑bound observations), reducing scheduling efficiency by about 12% and overall scientific productivity by roughly 20–25%. The root cause is corrosion of gyro fluid; there are no funded plans to replace gyros or pursue servicing. Hubble now sits alongside JWST and the Roman Space Telescope in a complementary lineup, continuing science until it gradually winds down.