Study finds Lee Hood’s ‘scientific wellness’ approach can make people healthier – GeekWire

Genomics pioneer Lee Hood, left, and Maverons Clayton Lewis, the CEO of Arivale.

Scientific wellness is a straightforward idea: use data about a persons genes, proteins and other biology, along with behavioral coaching, to keep them healthy, even preventing health problems before they arise.The approach is championed by genomics pioneer Lee Hood, and its being pursued his latest startup, Seattle-basedArivale.

Its such a new and evolving concept that it isnt in thedictionary yet. Or Merriam Websters open-source dictionary. Its not even in that vanguard of the internet, Urban Dictionary.

But a new study, to be published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, is putting the concept on the map with hard data that points to the effectiveness of the scientific wellness approach. The nine-month study by Hoods Institute for Systems Biology led to the founding of Arivale.

In the study, known as the Pioneer 100 Wellness Project, researchers and health coaches tried out the approach, which would later evolve into the Arivale program, on 108 individuals. At the core of the program are what they call personal dynamic, dense data clouds about peoples health and biology.

The clouds were built using troves of data: genetics tests, digital monitoring of physical activity and blood, urine, stool, and saliva samples collected every three months. Using that data, personal health coaches helped participants change their lifestyle to meet health goals.

That coaching could include making changes todiet, exercise, stress management, dietary supplements, or referring people to specific healthcare resources, as needed. And it can focus on a number of health goals, like managing or preventing Type 2 diabetes or improving cardiovascular health.

The bottom line of the study is: Researchers successfully found biological markers that helped them tailor wellness treatment to each patient. In other words, they were able to help people meet health goals using personal data clouds, and they gathered data that will help them do so even more effectively in the future.

Just as the Hubble Telescope provided a new view into the universe, these data sets have been transformational in providing new insights into both human biology and disease, Hood said in a statement. We have termed this quantitative and transformational approach Scientific Wellness, which enables individuals to improve their health and wellbeing, while generating the data necessary to optimize wellness as well as avoid or slow down the transition into certain disease states.

The study was conducted more than two years ago at Hoods Institute for Systems Biology. Hoodfounded Arivale with the companys CEO, Clayton Lewis, and many of the researchers behind the original study.

The company now offers its scientific wellness program to anyone with$3,499 in their pocket, and Arivale is collecting more data to refine and further study the scientific wellness approach. In the paper, researchers said theyre aiming to recruit 100,000 people to a new study by 2020.

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Study finds Lee Hood's 'scientific wellness' approach can make people healthier - GeekWire

‘Fireworks’ Images from Hubble Telescope Capture Stars Forming Just After the Big Bang – Space.com

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this view of the galaxy cluster SDSS J1110+6459, which lies 6 billion light-years from Earth and contains hundreds of galaxies.

A natural magnifying glass has sharpened images captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, revealing a distant galaxy that contradicts existing theories about early star formation. By pairing Hubble with a massive galaxy cluster, scientists captured images 10 times sharper than the space telescope could snap on its own.

The resulting images reveal star-forming knots of newborn stars only 200 to 300 light-years across, in a galaxy that formed only 2.7 billion years after the Big Bang. Previous theories suggested that star-forming regions in the early universe were much larger at least 3,000 light-years across. [Hubble Space Telescope's Latest Cosmic Views]

"There are star-forming knots as far down in size as we can see," Traci Johnson, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. Johnson is the lead author on two of the three research papers describing Hubble's new results, which were published July 6 in the The Astrophysical Journal and the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. The arc consists of three separate images of a galaxy in the background called SGAS J111020.0+645950.8, which has been magnified and distorted through a process known as gravitational lensing.

Though Hubble was built to peer into the early universe, even the legendary space telescope can sometimes use a boost. In this case, astronomers paired the instrument with a gravitational lens, a massive structure in space that bends and distorts light to allow glimpses at greater distances.

Gravitational lenses can be any type of object, ranging from a single massive galaxy to an entire cluster. As light from the more distant galaxy passes the massive object, it is bent and distorted into an arc. For the newfound cluster, this magnified the object almost 30 times. Scientists had to develop a special computer code to remove the distortions and reveal the galaxy as it would normally appear.

Gravitational lenses occur when the light from a more distant galaxy or quasar is warped by the gravity of a nearer object in the line of sight from Earth, as shown in this diagram.

Without the boost of the gravitational lens, the disk galaxy would appear smooth and unremarkable through the Hubble telescope, Johnson said. With it, however, scientists could catch an amazing glimpse of the early universe.

"When we saw the reconstructed image, we said, 'Wow, it looks like fireworks are going off everywhere,'" said Jane Rigby, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the third paper.

The newly spotted galaxy lies about 11 billion light-years from the sun. Because of the connection between distance and time, that means astronomers can see it as it looked 11 billion years ago, only a few billion years after the Big Bang that kick-started the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.

Whereas Hubble revealed newborn stars, NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will reveal older, redder stars. Scheduled to launch in October 2018, Webb will also be able to peer through the dust around the galaxy.

"With the Webb Telescope, we'll be able to tell you what happened in this galaxy in the past, and what we missed with Hubble because of dust," Rigby said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd Facebook or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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'Fireworks' Images from Hubble Telescope Capture Stars Forming Just After the Big Bang - Space.com

NASA’s Hubble telescope pushed beyond limits, astronomers find new stars in distant galaxy – International Business Times, India Edition

Although National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope has provided significant information of the distant universe, it also has a limit till which it can spot planets and galaxies.

However, researchers recently cleverly pushed the telescope's limit to discover a cluster of new stars!

Astronomers reportedly have obtained images10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own, by applyinga new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens.

The images obtained by the telescope show anedge-on disk galaxy, which is studded with brilliant patches of newly-formed stars.

"When we saw the reconstructed image we said, 'Wow, it looks like fireworks are going off everywhere,'" astronomer Jane Rigby of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said.

The cluster of stars in the galaxy are so far away that we see it as it appeared 11 billion years ago, only 2.7 billion years after the big bang.

The cluster of stars is one of more than 70 strongly lensed galaxies studied by the Hubble Space Telescope.

In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. That arc is actually three separate images of the same background galaxy.NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

The gravity of a giant cluster of galaxies between the target galaxy and Earth distorts the more distant galaxy's light. It stretches the light into an arc and magnifies it almost 30 times more.

The astronomers had to develop a special computer code to remove all the distortions caused by the gravitational lens. After the code was implemented, the researchers were able to see the disk galaxy as it would normally appear without the magnifying light.

The galaxy cluster SDSS J1110 6459 is located about 6 billion light-years from Earth and contains hundreds of galaxies.NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

The image of the galaxy, which was reconstructed, showed twodozen clumps of newborn stars, each spanning about 200 to 300 light-years.

"There are star-forming knots as far down in size as we can see," said doctoral student Traci Johnson of the University of Michigan, lead author of two of the three papers describing the research.

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NASA's Hubble telescope pushed beyond limits, astronomers find new stars in distant galaxy - International Business Times, India Edition

Abbott couldn’t read the public mood with the help of the Hubble telescope – The Guardian

Tony Abbott spent a lot of time reflecting on issues of national importance last week, contemplating very publicly what he should have done differently when he was prime minister. His conclusions bear little resemblance to the broader publics views of his failings a lack of focus on jobs and education, a budget that undermined every single election promise his party made and the knighting of Prince Phillip.

No, if he had his time again he would have invested in more coalmines and nuclear-powered submarines. While the real prime ministers adversaries in his own party like to paint him as out of touch, Tony Abbotts pronouncements are those of a politician who couldnt read the public mood with the assistance of the Hubble space telescope.

Abbotts determination to remain in parliament, in the news and in the public eye cant only be because he wants to be a wrecker. He must believe even if he only whispers it to himself in the dark that he is relatively young, fit and capable of leading his party again. But todays Essential Report results show that not only does a good-sized chunk of the electorate want him out of parliament but his policy agenda is out of sync with the national conversation.

On the question of same-sex marriage, the trend towards growing support continues with 63% in favour and just a quarter against, representing the highest level of support for the issue in over a year. If you break these numbers down according to generations, the argument that marriage equality is inevitable is reinforced; 74% of 18-24-year-olds support same-sex marriage, compared with 48% of over 65-year-olds. The longer Abbott stays in parliament, the greater distance on this issue between him and the electorate. One area where his position matches the broader position of voters is whether this issue should be solved by a national vote or by parliament alone; 59% still favour a national vote.

But as I have said and written many times, the issues of same-sex marriage is rarely discussed in the qualitative work I have conducted on Australian attitudes; it is most often raised as an example of how our politicians seem incapable of dealing with issues that other countries seem capable of dealing with easily.

What does get raised constantly in all kinds of households, in all kinds of communities across the land, is the question of housing affordability. Abbott did very little on this when he was prime minister. His most recent policy ideas in this area have been to cut immigration and let people raid their superannuation. This reflects his lack of understanding that an issue as complex and acute as the availability and cost of housing requires a suite of policies, not just the few that align with his political agenda.

As the Essential Report numbers show, the community understand a range of measures are needed to deal with this escalating problem including tax incentives for downsizers, a ban on interest-only loans for property investors and, yes, reform of negative gearing.

His suggestion about superannuation is in fact the most polarising measure, receiving 44% support and 30% opposition. In my qualitative work on housing affordability, Ive found very strong views against this idea of using super to buy a home. Even among younger people desperate to get into the housing market, the idea of pillaging their super seems a short-term solution, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Let me end on a positive note for our former PM: the group of voters who are most supportive of him remaining in parliament in some capacity are independents, who dont vote Green, Labor or Liberal. Perhaps they think he is raising the issues that matter to them. Or perhaps it is because he is behaving as if he isnt a member of a party at all, except the one he is throwing for himself.

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Abbott couldn't read the public mood with the help of the Hubble telescope - The Guardian

Fast-spinning dead galaxy changes ideas about galactic formation – Cosmos

A Hubble Space Telescope image of MACS21291 (the red blob outlined in the white rectangle).

Toft et al.

The astronomical understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve is being revisited after the recent discovery of a pancake-shaped disc galaxy that stopped forming stars just a few billion years after the Big Bang.

This dead galaxy so-called for its lack of star formation was discovered by Sune Toft from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and his colleagues using gravitational lensing and NASAs Hubble telescope. Ancient disc galaxies are normally too far away to examine in detail, but gravitational lensing offered the researchers a magnified view of this one.

When Toft and team examined the galaxy, known as MACS 2129-1, they initially expected to see a chaotic ball of stars that had formed from the merging of different galaxies.

Surprisingly, however, they found evidence in the photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope that the galaxys stars were born in a flattened disc formation.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature, appear to conflict with observations that elliptical galaxies are generally comprised of older stars and spiral galaxies are usually the domain of younger ones.

Toft and his team suggest that the current rotation of MACS 2129-1 indicates that it must have begun life as a flattened disc and only later changed its shape to become more elliptical.

Toft hypothesises that such a metamorphosis could be caused by a series of mergers with other galaxies from a variety of angles, which would eventually randomise the orbits of stars into what can be seen today.

As Toft points out, this research is invaluable because it is forcing astronomers to re-evaluate their theories of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve over time.

Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early dead galaxies could in fact be discs, simply because we havent been able to resolve them, he says.

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Fast-spinning dead galaxy changes ideas about galactic formation - Cosmos

Colorful Nebula Forms a Cosmic ‘Spirograph’ in Hubble Telescope … – Space.com

Planetary nebula IC 418 looks like a glowing orange and purple jewel in this Hubble image from 2000.

Space is bejeweled with the stunning IC 418, a planetary nebula with purple and orange coloring enveloping a bright white core. The nebula lies close to 2,000 light-years from Earth on the way to the Lepus constellation.

Planetary nebulas like IC 418 are thelast stage of evolution for a star like our sun; it was once ared giant before it ejected its outer layers into space several thousand years ago. Since its eruption, the nebula has expanded to about 0.1 light-year in diameter, representitives from Space Telescope Science Institute in Marylandsaid in a statement.

The hot, white core visible in the image is the stellar remnant of the red giant, and its ultraviolet radiation creates the fluorescence in the nebula around it. The ejecta will continue to spread into the cosmos over the next several thousand years. The star will cool and fade over billions of years as a white dwarf.

This isthe fate of Earth's own sunin some 5 billion years from now.

The camera filters used to isolate light from different chemical elements are represented by the added colors. Red, at the outer edge of the nebula, shows ionized nitrogen emission this is the coolest gas in the nebula. Green shows hydrogen gas emission. Blue, at the center closest to the star, reveals ionized oxygen emissions this is the hottest gas in the nebula. TheHubble Space Telescope revealed the designs and textures within the nebula for the first time, and experts are still searching for their origin.

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Colorful Nebula Forms a Cosmic 'Spirograph' in Hubble Telescope ... - Space.com

The Hubble Telescope just took pictures of a galaxy twice as massive as the Milky Way – Mic

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made an new discovery: it found a giant galaxy located 10 billion light-years from Earth. The disk-shaped galaxy, named MACS2129-1, is categorized as a "dead" galaxy since it no longer creates stars scientists believe star formation stopped for the fast-spinning galaxy a few billion years after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

The new galaxy is compact. For reference, it is three times heavier than the Milk Way but only half the size, according to study leader Sune Toft, an astrophysicist at Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It also rotates a lot faster than the Milky Way.

This artist's concept shows what the young, dead, disk galaxy MACS2129-1, on the right, would look like when compared with the Milky Way galaxy, on the left.

"We were able to establish that the stars in MACS2129-1 rotate in circles around the center of the galaxy at a speed of over 500 km per second, more than twice as fast as stars rotate in the Milky Way, Toft, who published his findings in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature, said in a statement.

What makes this finding so surprising is that it shatters what scientists had previously believed. Until now, it was accepted that there are two types of galaxies: disk-shaped spiral ones and elliptical-shaped ones. The Milky Way is one of the former, which includes active galaxies that are still making new stars, while the latter are dead galaxies.

Galaxy MACS2129-1 is shown in the top box. The middle box is a blown-up view of the gravitationally lensed galaxy. In the bottom box is a reconstructed image of what the galaxy would look like if the galaxy cluster were not present.

With MACS2129-1, things are different since it is a dead, disk-shaped galaxy. This discovery is essential in understanding how galaxies form and evolve.

"This new insight may force us to rethink the whole cosmological context of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve into local elliptical-shaped galaxies," Toft said in a statement to NASA. "Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early 'dead' galaxies could in fact be disks, simply because we haven't been able to resolve them."

As for what's next, Toft and his team hope to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope a large infrared telescope slated to launch into space in October 2018 from French Guiana to learn more.

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The Hubble Telescope just took pictures of a galaxy twice as massive as the Milky Way - Mic

NASA’s Hubble space telescope detects disk-shaped galaxy – BGR India

Astronomers have detected a first-of-its kind compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang. Finding such a galaxy early in the history of the universe challenges the current understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve, the researchers said. The finding, published in the journal Nature, was possible with the capability of NASAs Hubble space telescope.

When Hubble photographed the galaxy, astronomers expected to see a chaotic ball of stars formed through galaxies merging together. Instead, they saw evidence that the stars were born in a pancake-shaped disk. This was the first direct observational evidence that at least some of the earliest so-called dead galaxies where star formation stopped somehow evolve from a Milky Way-shaped disk into the giant elliptical galaxies we see today.

This new insight may force us to rethink the whole cosmological context of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve into local elliptical-shaped galaxies, said study leader Sune Toft from University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early dead galaxies could in fact be disks, simply because we havent been able to resolve them, Toft said. ALSO READ:NASAs Kepler space telescope discovers 10 near-Earth size, habitable planet candidates

The remote galaxy was three times as massive as the Milky Way but only half the size. Rotational velocity measurements made with the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope (VLT) showed that the disk galaxy was spinning more than twice as fast as the Milky Way. Using archival data from the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH), Toft and his team were able to determine the stellar mass, star-formation rate, and the ages of the stars. ALSO READ:NASAs Hubble telescope shows close-up image of Jupiter, Great Red Spot

Why this galaxy stopped forming stars was still unknown. It might be the result of an active galactic nucleus, where energy was gushing from a supermassive black hole. This energy inhibits star formation by heating the gas or expelling it from the galaxy. Or it might be the result of the cold gas streaming onto the galaxy being rapidly compressed and heated up, preventing it from cooling down into star-forming clouds in the galaxys centre. But how do these young, massive, compact disks evolve into the elliptical galaxies we see in the present-day universe? ALSO READ:Here are five interesting facts about NASAs Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter

Probably through mergers, Toft said.

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NASA's Hubble space telescope detects disk-shaped galaxy - BGR India

NASA Gets Images of Ultra Bright, Distant Galaxies Thanks to Other … – The Epoch Times

NASAs Hubble Telescope has captured some of the universes brightest infrared galaxies on camera, thanks to some closer galaxies that act like magnifying glasses.

These luminous galaxies are up to 10,000 times brighter than our Milky Way galaxy, and we are able to see them because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Galaxies or clusters of galaxies with large gravitational fields create a lense that magnifies what is behind them.

Gravitational lensing magnifies them so that you can see small details that otherwise are unimaginable, said said lead researcher James Lowenthal of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in a NASA article. We can see features as small as about 100 light-years or less across.

Gravitational lenses also come with their problems. Like looking at something magnified through water, researchers must first understand how gravitational lensing is distorting the image.

The bright and distant galaxies are also incredibly industrious star factories, churning out 5,000 to 10,000 times the number of stars as the Milky Way. What is strange is that theyre doing it with the same amount of gas as the Milky Way. NASA researchers have a few theories as how this can be, but so far no answers.

Weve known for two decades that some of the most luminous galaxies in the universe are very dusty and massive, and theyre undergoing bursts of star formation, Lowenthal said. But theyve been very hard to study because the dust makes them practically impossible to observe in visible light. Theyre also very rare: they dont appear in any of Hubbles deep-field surveys. They are in random parts of the sky that nobodys looked at before in detail. Thats why finding that they are gravitationally lensed is so important.

As of June 6, Lowenthals team was halfway through its Hubble survey of 22 galaxies.

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NASA Gets Images of Ultra Bright, Distant Galaxies Thanks to Other ... - The Epoch Times

Hubble Telescope reveals new discovery of universe’s brightest … – AOL

Aaron Dickens

Jun 14th 2017 4:28PM

The Hubble telescope captures the brightest galaxies ever seen in the universe.

Times Square isn't the only place you can catch the glitz and glam. NASA's famous Hubble Telescope got a front row seat using what's called "gravitational lensing."

Thousands of galaxies act like lenses that magnify light, making them appear super bright.

RELATED: Best photos from NASA's Hubble telescope

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Best photos from NASA's Hubble telescope

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The many sides of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Located 10,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a once massive star that died in a violent supernova explosion 325 years ago. Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Spitzer Space Telescope.

(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the ?Cat's Eye Nebula.? Hubble reveals surprisingly intricate structures including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas and unusual Lock-induced knots of gas. Estimated to be 1,000 years old, the nebula is a visual ?fossil record? of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star. A preliminary interpretation suggests that the star might be a double-star system. The suspected companion star also might be responsible for a pair of high-speed jets of gas that lie at right angles to this equatorial ring.

(Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around Earth. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on Feb. 1-2, 2010.

(REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002. The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which gave off a pulse of light, somewhat similar to setting off a flashbulb in a darkened room. The dust may have been ejected during a previous explosion, similar to the 2002 event.

(Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

By pushing NASAs Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.

(Photo via NASA)

This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a peculiar galaxy known as NGC 1487, lying about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Eridanus.

Rather than viewing it as a celestial object, it is actually better to think of this as an event. Here, we are witnessing two or more galaxies in the act of merging together to form a single new galaxy. Each galaxy has lost almost all traces of its original appearance, as stars and gas have been thrown by gravity in an elaborate cosmic whirl.

Unless one is very much bigger than the other, galaxies are always disrupted by the violence of the merging process. As a result, it is very difficult to determine precisely what the original galaxies looked like and, indeed, how many of them there were. In this case, it is possible that we are seeing the merger of several dwarf galaxies that were previously clumped together in a small group.

Although older yellow and red stars can be seen in the outer regions of the new galaxy, its appearance is dominated by large areas of bright blue stars, illuminating the patches of gas that gave them life. This burst of star formation may well have been triggered by the merger.

(Photo viaESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt, Caption viaEuropean Space Agency)

These blue-white stars are burning their hydrogen fuel so ferociously they will explode as supernovae in just a few million years. The combination of outflowing stellar winds and, ultimately, supernova blast waves will carve out cavities in nearby clouds of gas and dust. These fireworks will kick-start the beginning of a new generation of stars in an ongoing cycle of star birth and death.

(Photo viaNASA, ESA, and J. Maz Apellniz (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), Acknowledgment: N. Smith (University of Arizona))

Most galaxies possess a majestic spiral or elliptical structure. About a quarter of galaxies, though, defy such conventional, rounded aesthetics, instead sporting a messy, indefinable shape. Known as irregular galaxies, this group includes NGC 5408, the galaxy that has been snapped here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The galaxy resembles a giant maelstrom of glowing gas, rippled with dark dust that swirls inwards towards the nucleus. Messier 96 is a very asymmetric galaxy; its dust and gas are unevenly spread throughout its weak spiral arms, and its core is not exactly at the galactic center. Its arms are also asymmetrical, thought to have been influenced by the gravitational pull of other galaxies within the same group as Messier 96.

(Photo:ESA/Hubble & NASA and the LEGUS)

It would be reasonable to think of this as a single abnormal galaxy, and it was originally classified as such. However, it is in fact a new galaxy in the process of forming. Two separate galaxies have been gradually drawn together, attracted by gravity, and have collided. We now see them merging into a single structure.

Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe

The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deepfield exposure taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object's color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away.

(Photo Credit:NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team)

(Photo:ESA/Hubble & NASA)

The Veil Nebula, left behind by the explosion of a massive star thousands of years ago, is one of the largest and most spectacular supernova remnants in the sky. This is only a small section of it.

(Photo credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage)

A ribbon of gas, a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago, floats in our galaxy. The supernova that created it was probably the brightest star ever seen by humans.

(Photo credit: NASA, ESA & the Hubble Heritage team)

This image from Hubbles Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 showcases NGC 1501, a complex planetary nebula located in the large but faint constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe).

Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, NGC 1501 is a planetary nebula that is just under 5,000 light-years away from us. Astronomers have modeled the three-dimensional structure of the nebula, finding it to be a cloud shaped as an irregular ellipsoid filled with bumpy and bubbly regions. It has a bright central star that can be seen easily in this image, shining brightly from within the nebulas cloud. This bright pearl embedded within its glowing shell inspired the nebulas popular nickname: the Oyster Nebula.

(Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Marc Canale)

At first glance, Jupiter looks like it has a mild case of the measles. Five spots one colored white, one blue, and three black are scattered across the upper half of the planet. Closer inspection by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals that these spots are actually a rare alignment of three of Jupiter's largest moons Io, Ganymede, and Callisto across the planet's face. In this image, the telltale signatures of this alignment are the shadows [the three black circles] cast by the moons. Io's shadow is located just above center and to the left; Ganymede's on the planet's left edge; and Callisto's near the right edge. Only two of the moons, however, are visible in this image. Io is the white circle in the center of the image, and Ganymede is the blue circle at upper right. Callisto is out of the image and to the right.

(Photo: NASA, ESA andE. Karkoschka)

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the region around a star known as R Sculptoris, a red giant located 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Sculptor.Recent observationshave shown that the material surrounding R Sculptoris actually forms a spiral structure a phenomenon probably caused by a hidden companion star orbiting the star. Systems with multiple stars often lead to unusual or unexpected morphologies, as seen, for example, in the wide range of strikingplanetary nebulae that Hubble has imaged.

(Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

This image shows the center of the globular cluster Messier 22, also known as M22, as observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are spherical collections of densely packed stars, relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12 to 13 billion years. This is very old considering that the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

(Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

In a nearby galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud, young stars are spewing radiation thats eating away at the cloud of gas and dust that gave birth to them not too long ago. This Hubble image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows that scene.

The cluster of blue stars, called NGC 602, formed when a large part of the gas cloud collapsed under gravity and became very dense. The fierce radiation now being produced by these hot, young stars is sculpting the inner rim of the gaseous nebula. Parts of the nebula resist this erosion better than others, leaving tall pillars that point toward the source of the radiation the stars.

(Photo:NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) - ESA/Hubble Collaboration )

The giant nebula NGC 3603 is a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy, about 20,000 light-years away. Discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834, it is the largest nebula seen in visible light in the Milky Way. Within its core is nestled a stellar jewel box of thousands of sparkling young stars, one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy.

(Photo:NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), F. Paresce (National Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna, Italy), E. Young (Universities Space Research Association/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. Adrift in Orion's stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed. The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of center is LL Ori's cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across. The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula's hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner of the picture. In three dimensions, LL Ori's wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the "bottom" edge. The beautiful picture is part of a large mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of fluid shapes associated with star formation.

(NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team/ABACAPRESS.COM)

An undated handout picture by NASA/ESA shows around 5,500 galaxies seen through the Hubble telescope. The time exposure titled 'Hubble extreme Deep Field' (XDF reveals galaxies up to 13.2 billion light-years from earth.

(Photo: NASA/ESA/G. Illingworth/D. Magee/P. Oesch/R. Bouwens/HUDF09 Team)

Sun Seasons: Our sun is constantly changing. It goes through cycles of activity - swinging between times of relative calm and times when frequent explosions on its surface can fling light, particles and energy out into space. This activity cycle peaks approximately every 11 years. New research shows evidence of a shorter time cycle as well, with activity waxing and waning over the course of about 330 days. Understanding when to expect such bursts of solar activity is crucial to successfully forecast the sun's eruptions, which can drive solar storms at Earth. These space weather events can interfere with satellite electronics, GPS navigation, and radio communications. The quasi-annual variations in space weather seem to be driven by changes in bands of strong magnetic field that are present in each solar hemisphere.

(NASA)

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures in this visible-light image. Astronomers combined several Hubble exposures to assemble the wider view. The towering pillars about are 5 light-years tall. The new image was taken with Hubble's versatile and sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3. The pillars are bathed in blistering ultraviolet light from a grouping of young, massive stars located off the top of the image. Streamers of gas can be seen bleeding off the pillars as the intense radiation heats and evaporates it into space. Denser regions of the pillars are shadowing material beneath them from the powerful radiation. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust. The pillars are part of a small region of the Eagle Nebula, a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth. The colors in the image highlight emission from several chemical elements. Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) #nasagoddard #space #Hubble #hd

Star V838 Monocerotis's (V838 Mon) light echo, which is about six light years in diameter, is seen from the Hubble Space Telescope in this February 2004 handout photo released by NASA on December 4, 2011. Light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of Monoceros the unicorn. It became the brightest star in the Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002 when its outer surface greatly expanded suddenly.

(REUTERS/ NASA, ESA, H. E. Bond (STScI)/Handout)

This false-color composite image shows the Cartwheel galaxy. Hubble Space Telescope.

(Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

In this composite image provided by NASA, ESA, globular star cluster Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) in the Centaurus constellation and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team, is pictured July 15, 2009 in Space. Today, September 9, 2009, NASA released the first images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope since its repair in the spring.

(Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team via Getty Images)

What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

(Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team/MCT/MCT via Getty Images)

The galaxy cluster Abell S1063, located 4 billion light-years away, is pictured in this undated handout Hubble Telescope image surrounded by magnified images of galaxies much farther. The photo unveils the effect of space warping due to gravity. The huge mass of the cluster distorts and magnifies the light from galaxies that lie far behind it due to an effect called gravitational lensing, first predicted by Einstein a century ago.

(NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS)

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this photo, released on March 1, 2007, of Jupiter with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February 17, 2007, using the planetary camera detector. Jupiter's trademark belts and zones of high- and low-pressure regions appear in crisp detail. Circular convection cells can be seen at high northern and southern latitudes.

(REUTERS/NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

The sky is seen at night just before the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, in this NASA photo illustration released May 31, 2012. About 3.75 billion years from now, Andromeda's disk will fill the field of view and its gravity will begin to create tidal distortions in the Milky Way. The view is inspired by dynamical computer modeling of the future collision between the two galaxies. The two galaxies collide about 4 billion years from now and merge to form a single galaxy about 6 billion years from now.

(REUTERS/NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel)

The central region of our Milky Way galaxy. Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra.

(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

The photo, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, captures a small region within M17, a hotbed of star formation M17, also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula, is located about 5,500 light-years (1690 parsecs) from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The turbulent gases in this photo of Gaseous Nebula in the Milky Way Galaxy shows roughly 1.9.arcminutes (3.1 light-years or 0.95 parsecs) across. The image is being released to commemorate the 13th anniversary of Hubble's launch on April 24, 1990.

(NASA, ESA and J. Hester (ASU)

UNSPECIFIED - 1992: Composite image, taken by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field & Planetary Camera, of hypersonic shock wave (lower right) of material (clouds of dust) moving through Orion Nebula, surrounding (relatively) newborn stars.

(C.R. O'Dell/Rice UniversityNASA/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

The Hubble Space telescope's soon-to-be decommissioned Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 photographed this image of planetary nebula K 4-55 as its final image, released by NASA May 10, 2009. This Hubble image was taken by WFPC2 on May 4, 2009. The colors represent the makeup of the various emission clouds in the nebula: red represents nitrogen, green represents hydrogen, and blue represents oxygen. K 4-55 is nearly 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

(REUTERS/NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in this undated image, has released on April 24, 2007, one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras, a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of a star's birth and death is taking place.

(REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

An image of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet in seen this image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope February 24, 2009 and released by NASA March 17, 2009. In this view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn's north polar hood. Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left, is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn's equatorial cloud tops. Farther to the left, and off Saturn's disk, are the bright moons Dione and the fainter Enceladus.

(REUTERS/NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

Planetary nebula NGC 2818 in the southern constellation of Pyxis (The Compass). Glowing layers and shell of gas were created when a star shed its outer layers into space after running out of nuclear fuel.

(Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Hubble image of Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the center and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. The elongated companion perpendicular to the ring suggests that Arp 148 is a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision. Infrared observations reveal a strong obscuration region that appears as a dark dust lane across the nucleus in optical light. Arp 148 is nicknamed "Mayall's object" and is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away. This interacting pair of galaxies is included in Arp's catalog of peculiar galaxies as number 148. This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on April 24, 2008.

(REUTERS/NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team)

Thousands of sparkling young stars nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603. This stellar 'jewel box' is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 3603 is a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away. This image shows a young star cluster surrounded by a vast region of dust and gas. The image reveals stages in the life cycle of stars. The nebula was first discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834. The image spans roughly 17 light-years.

(NASA/MCT via Getty Images)

The barred spiral galaxy M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel, is seen in a NASA Hubble Space Telescope mosaic released January 9, 2014. The Hubble photograph captures thousands of star clusters, hundreds of thousands of individual stars, and "ghosts" of dead stars called supernova remnants.

(REUTERS/NASA/Handout via Reuters)

IN SPACE - This undated image taken by the Hubble telescope shows Pluto and its moons: Charon, Nix, and Hydra.The International Astronomical Union announced on August 24, 2006 that it no longer considers Pluto a planet, a status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The announcement reduces the solar system from nine planets to eight.

(Photo by NASA via Getty Images)

A new view of the Whirlpool Galaxy, one of the largest and sharpest images Hubble Space Telescope has ever taken, is released by NASA. A new view of the Eagle Nebula, one of the two largest and sharpest images Hubble Space Telescope has ever taken, is released by NASA on Hubble's 15th anniversary April 25, 2005. The new Eagle Nebula image reveals a tall, dense tower of gas being sculpted by ultraviolet light from a group of massive, hot stars. During the 15 years Hubble has orbited the Earth, it has taken more than 700,000 photos of the cosmos.

(REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

Galaxy Ngc 5866, Image Of The Disk Galaxy Ngc 5866 Taken With The Advanced Camera For Surveys (Acs) On The Hubble Space Telescope, November 2005.

(Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG Via Getty Images)

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope catches the Boomerang Nebula in this image taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in early 2005 and released on September 13, 2005. This reflecting cloud of dust and gas has two nearly symmetric lobes of matter that are being ejected from a central star. Each lobe of the nebula is nearly one light-year in length, making the total length of the nebula half as long as the distance from the Sun to the nearest neighbors-the Alpha Centauri stellar system, located roughly 4 light-years away. The Boomerang Nebula resides 5,000 light-years from Earth. Hubble's sharp view is able to resolve patterns and ripples in the nebula very close to the central star that are not visible from the ground.

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Hubble Telescope reveals new discovery of universe's brightest ... - AOL

Hubble views luminous galaxies through gravitational lens – Cosmos

These six Hubble Space Telescope images reveal a jumble of misshapen-looking galaxies punctuated by exotic patterns such as arcs, streaks, and smeared rings. These unusual features are the stretched shapes of the universe's brightest infrared galaxies that are boosted by natural cosmic magnifying lenses. Some of the oddball shapes also may have been produced by spectacular collisions between distant, massive galaxies. The faraway galaxies are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than our Milky Way. The galaxies existed between 8 billion and 11.5 billion years ago.

NASA, ESA, and J. Lowenthal (Smith College)

Just like water distorting the view of objects beneath its surface, gravitational fields have warped images of some of the universes brightest infrared galaxies that were recently captured by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope.

This process, known as gravitational lensing, occurs when the intense gravity of a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies magnifies the light of fainter, more distant background sources.

While the phenomenon had been seen before, it is shown off to rare effect in the new Hubble Telescope snapshots.

The images are also particularly important because they show relatively tiny details of ultra-luminous starburst galaxies that would be unimaginable without the magnification provided by gravity.

These galaxies are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than the Milky Way and are ablaze with star formation, churning out more than 10,000 new stars in a year.

The reason for this frenzied star production is unknown, however, and these galaxies have traditionally been very difficult to study in visible light because of the dust that they create which cloaks them from view.

Thanks to the magnification provided by gravity in the new images of these galaxies, scientists now have a novel opportunity to examine their inner workings more closely and develop a better understanding of how galaxy and star formation occurs.

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Hubble views luminous galaxies through gravitational lens - Cosmos

Hubble telescope uses ‘cosmic magnifying-glass’ to capture stunning photos of Universe’s brightest galaxies – Mirror.co.uk

NASA's Hubble space telescope has captured a series of stunning images of some of the universe's brightest galaxies.

Only a few dozen of these bright infrared galaxies - which are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than the Milky Way - exist in the universe.

They reside in unusually dense regions of space that somehow triggered rapid star formation in the early universe.

Hubble was able to capture the images thanks to a natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which occurs when the intense gravity of a massive galaxy magnifies the light of fainter, more distant background sources.

In this case, the distant galaxies have been magnified to reveal a tangled web of misshapen objects, punctuated by exotic patterns such as rings and arcs.

NASA scientists believe that the unusual forms may have been produced by spectacular collisions between distant, massive galaxies in a sort of "cosmic demolition derby".

"We have hit the jackpot of gravitational lenses," said lead researcher James Lowenthal of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

"These ultra-luminous, massive, starburst galaxies are very rare. Gravitational lensing magnifies them so that you can see small details that otherwise are unimaginable. We can see features as small as about 100 light-years or less across.

"We want to understand what's powering these monsters, and gravitational lensing allows us to study them in greater detail."

Part of the reason that the galaxies are so bright is that they are pumping out more than 10,000 new stars a year.

The star-birth frenzy creates lots of dust, which enshrouds the galaxies, making them too faint to detect in visible light. But they glow fiercely in infrared light, shining with the brilliance of 10 trillion to 100 trillion suns.

The distance of the galaxies from Earth means that the scenes captured by Hubble actually took place between 8 billion and 11.5 billion years ago, at the peak of the universe's star-making boom.

However, the galaxies' star-birth production is still 5,000 to 10,000 times higher than that of our Milky Way, raising the question of what powered the prodigious star birth.

One possible explanation is that their star-making output is stoked by the merger of two spiral galaxies.

However, Lowenthal said that computer simulations of the birth and growth of galaxies show that major mergers occur at a later epoch than the one in which these galaxies are seen.

Best photos taken by Hubble telescope

Another suggestion is that lots of gas - the material that makes stars - is flooding into the faraway galaxies.

"The early universe was denser, so maybe gas is raining down on the galaxies, or they are fed by some sort of channel or conduit, which we have not figured out yet," Lowenthal said.

The research team plans to use Hubble and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to analyse the details of the monster galaxies, in the hope of shedding more light on their formation.

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Hubble telescope uses 'cosmic magnifying-glass' to capture stunning photos of Universe's brightest galaxies - Mirror.co.uk

Two hot Jupiters around two similar stars orbiting at similar distances look similar, right? WRONG – The Register

WASP-67 b and HAT-P-38 b are two far-flung exoplanets orbiting near-identical stars at similar distances. Their size and temperatures are also pretty close. So, naturally, astronomers thought that their atmospheres wouldn't be too far apart. They were wrong.

"We don't see what we're expecting," said Giovanni Bruno, a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, in a statement.

WASP-67 b and HAT-P-38 b are a special breed of exoplanet called "hot Jupiters" because, like their closer-to-home namesake, they were born on the outskirts of their star systems, but decided to pack up and move to warmers climes over 538C (1,000F) right up against their star. Scientists analyse their atmospheres because it might give clues to how they were born and grew up.

Astroboffins used the Hubble Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 to measure the planets' chemical compositions. By analysing the signature of water in each, they discovered that even though WASP-67 b is really similar to HAT-P-38 b, it's much cloudier.

HAT-P-38 b and WASP-67 b. One's cloudy, the other... not so much. Illustration: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levy (STScI)

But these clouds are probably quite different to the ones on boring old terra firma, which are full of lightweight water vapour and ice crystals. On these warm exoplanets, they are likely formed of heavy molecules such as sodium sulfide and potassium chloride.

The researchers presented their work at the 230th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, on 5 June.

However, Nikolay Nikolov, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the UK who studies the atmospheres of exoplanets but was not involved in the research, was unfazed. "It doesn't seem very surprising to me," he said, adding that it's only confirmation of the huge diversity of all the kinds of exoplanets out there.

Further experiments with Hubble and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope are needed to find out what exactly happened to exoplanets such as WASP-67 b and HAT-P-38. "We need to understand why we find this difference," Bruno said.

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Two hot Jupiters around two similar stars orbiting at similar distances look similar, right? WRONG - The Register

Behold, the Hubble Telescope’s latest close-up photo of Jupiter – Tampabay.com

Amid plenty of political turmoil on Earth on Thursday, NASA and the European Space Agency quietly released the latest photo of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This picture revealed no new discoveries, unlike a Hubble image last fall that detected evidence of water vapor plumes from one of Jupiter's moons. Nor did it capture the aftermath of some significant event, such as when a comet or asteroid collided with Jupiter's atmosphere and left it "bruised."

Instead, Thursday's picture was simply a reminder that, somewhere out there above the heavens, a decades-old space telescope is still doing what it has done best: capturing spectacularly detailed images of the universe to blow the minds of those on Earth.

Courtesy of NASA, the European Space Agency, A. Simon via GSFC

Jupiter, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on Monday.

This month, Jupiter is in opposition, meaning it is at its closest to our planet (416 million miles away), with its Earth-facing hemisphere fully illuminated by the sun. It will shine especially brightly Friday night and early Saturday morning, when it makes its absolute closest approach.

Never ones to miss an opportunity, NASA and the ESA decided to point the Hubble toward Jupiter while it was in opposition, so that it could capture the atmosphere of the largest planet in the solar system in more detail.

The image it took Monday didn't disappoint. Hubble was able to capture surface features that are just 80 miles across.

"The final image shows a sharp view of Jupiter and reveals a wealth of features in its dense atmosphere," NASA and the ESA, which cooperate on the Hubble project, said in a statement. The picture "reveals the intricate, detailed beauty of Jupiter's clouds as arranged into bands of different latitudes."

Clearly visible in the photo are Jupiter's famous atmospheric bands, created by different-colored clouds. The lighter bands have higher concentrations of frozen ammonia in them, compared with the darker ones, the agencies said.

On the lower left side of the image is Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot, an ongoing larger-than-Earth storm on the gas giant planet's surface. A smaller storm, dubbed "Red Spot Junior," is visible farther south. Winds on the planet can reach up to 400 mph.

"However, as with the last images of Jupiter taken by Hubble and telescopes on the ground, this new image confirms that the huge storm that has raged on Jupiter's surface for at least 150 years continues to shrink," the agencies said. "The reason for this is still unknown. So Hubble will continue to observe Jupiter in the hope that scientists will solve this stormy riddle."

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, and ever since its first photo an underwhelming grainy, black-and-white image of some stars, thanks to a flaw in a primary mirror it has gone on to deliver some truly dazzling images from space. Time magazine has a roundup of the 50 "best" photos taken by Hubble, though all are quite extraordinary in their own way, depending on one's interest in any particular corner of the universe.

NASA has been developing a new telescope, the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, that will be able to see back in time, almost to the beginning of the universe. The Webb will be able to collect seven times the starlight as the Hubble and observe the universe in infrared wavelengths of light, which the Hubble can't, The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach reported in February. Eventually, the Webb telescope is expected to replace the Hubble, which "is still working fabulously but getting long in the tooth," Achenbach wrote.

Until then, the Hubble will continue capturing away. The photo released Thursday was part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, according to NASA and the ESA. The program, which allows the telescope to study the outer planets each year, started in 2014 with Uranus and has been observing Jupiter and Neptune since 2015. In 2018, the Hubble will turn its focus to Saturn.

Behold, the Hubble Telescope's latest close-up photo of Jupiter 04/07/17 [Last modified: Friday, April 7, 2017 2:31pm] Photo reprints | Article reprints

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Behold, the Hubble Telescope's latest close-up photo of Jupiter - Tampabay.com

Satellite Expert To Speak On Hubble Telescope, Exoplanets In Westport – Westport Daily Voice

WESTPORT, Conn. Ys Man Marty Yellin will once again share his knowledge of the scientific world, thistime updating the group on the work of the Hubble Telescope.

The Hubble was sent into low Earthorbit in 1990 and remains the most productive astronomical instrument ever built.

Yellin will speak to Ys Men of Westport/Weston on April 13 at the SaugatuckCongregational Church at 245 Post Road E., Westport.

He will speak about some ofthe latest findings from the telescope, with an emphasis on its recent discoveries of manyexoplanets, which seem to have the conditions for life of some kind.

He will also talkabout some of the most recently discovered Black Holes, including showing the first-ever picture of a Black Hole swallowing a star like our Sun.

Yellin earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from CUNY.

He joined Perkin-Elmer, where he was a member of the top-secret Hexagon program,the largest and most successful spy satellite ever to be flown up to that time. He laterworked on the team that designed and fabricated the Hubble Space Telescope.

In his "retirement," Yellin earned a doctorate at New York University in biomedical engineering, then joined aprogram evaluating new approaches to cancer treatment.

If youre a retired or semi-retired man living in Westport or Weston and looking forsomething new, for an active group with over 400 men like yourself, drop by Thursdaymorning.

Coffee, doughnuts and schmoozing are on the agenda as you learn about Ys Men, hear aninteresting speaker, meet old friends and make new ones. Ys Men gets you out of yourhouse and into your choice of over two dozen activities, from bridge to boating to hikingto international affairs and book discussions.

Click here to learn more about the group.

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Satellite Expert To Speak On Hubble Telescope, Exoplanets In Westport - Westport Daily Voice

Hubble Space Telescope spots galaxy four times the mass of the Milky way – The Indian Express


The Indian Express
Hubble Space Telescope spots galaxy four times the mass of the Milky way
The Indian Express
The Hubble space telescope has captured a new image showcasing an incredibly massive galaxy located under 400 million light-years away from the Earth. The galaxy UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral, according to NASA.
NASA's Hubble telescope captures image of UGC 12591 galaxyBGR India
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Image Showcases ...SpaceCoastDaily.com
See Pic: NASA Hubble shots breathtaking image of Galactic HybridThe TeCake

all 17 news articles »

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Hubble Space Telescope spots galaxy four times the mass of the Milky way - The Indian Express

Hubble Telescope Snaps Photo of Massive (and Weird) Hybrid Galaxy – Space.com

Hubble collected this stunning image of galaxy UGC 12591, located in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster. This hybrid galaxy is a combination of a lenticular and a spiral galaxy and is one of the largest known structures in the Universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an amazing view of a strange hybrid galaxy 400 million light-years away.

The galaxy, called UGC 12591, is odd because it's a cross betweena typical lenticular and spiral galaxy. It is located in the westernmost reaches of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster - a vast chain of galaxy clusters that extends across hundreds of millions of light-years. The galaxy is also a fast spinner, rotating at a mind-boggling 1.1 million mph (1.8 million km/h), according to a NASA description. [8 Galaxies With Really Weird Names]

"The galaxy itself is also extraordinary: it is incredibly massive," NASA officials wrote in an image description. The galaxy and its halo together contain several hundred billion times the mass of the sun; four timesmass of the Milky Way."

Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers are beginning to understand the mass of UGC 12951, NASA officials added. Scientists are using data from Hubble to establish whether the monster galaxy formed and stretched over time, or if it was formed from two large galaxies colliding at some point in the distant past, they added.

The Pisces-Perseus Supercluster of galaxy clusters, which UGC 12951 calls home, is one of the largest known structures in the universe, NASA officials added.

You can follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook & Google+. Original story on Space.com.

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Hubble Telescope Snaps Photo of Massive (and Weird) Hybrid Galaxy - Space.com

A recharged debate over the speed of the expansion of the universe could lead to new physics – Science Magazine

By Joshua SokolMar. 8, 2017 , 8:00 AM

It was the early 1990s, and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, had emptied out for the Christmas holiday. Wendy Freedman was toiling alone in the library on an immense and thorny problem: the expansion rate of the universe.

Carnegie was hallowed ground for this sort of work. It was here, in 1929, that Edwin Hubble first clocked faraway galaxies flying away from the Milky Way, bobbing in the outward current of expanding space. The speed of that flow came to be called the Hubble constant.

Freedman's quiet work was soon interrupted when fellow Carnegie astronomer Allan Sandage stormed in. Sandage, Hubble's designated scientific heir, had spent decades refining the Hubble constant, and had consistently defended a slow rate of expansion. Freedman was the latest challenger to publish a faster rate, and Sandage had seen the heretical study.

"He was so angry," recalls Freedman, now at the University of Chicago in Illinois, "that you sort of become aware that you're the only two people in the building. I took a step back, and that was when I realized, oh boy, this was not the friendliest of fields."

A 1923 image of the Andromeda galaxy. A cepheid, or variable star (marked VAR!), helped Edwin Hubble determine the vast distance to Andromeda.

The Carnegie Observatories

The acrimony has diminished, but not by much. Sandage died in 2010, and by then most astronomers had converged on a Hubble constant in a narrow range. But in a twist Sandage himself might savor, new techniques suggest that the Hubble constant is 8% lower than a leading number. For nearly a century, astronomers have calculated it by meticulously measuring distances in the nearby universe and moving ever farther out. But lately, astrophysicists have measured the constant from the outside in, based on maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the dappled afterglow of the big bang that is a backdrop to the rest of the visible universe. By making assumptions about how the push and pull of energy and matter in the universe have changed the rate of cosmic expansion since the microwave background was formed, the astrophysicists can take their map and adjust the Hubble constant to the present-day, local universe. The numbers should match. But they don't.

It could be that one approach has it wrong. The two sides are searching for flaws in their own methods and each other's alike, and senior figures like Freedman are racing to publish their own measures. "We don't know which way this is going to land," Freedman says.

But if the disagreement holds, it will be a crack in the firmament of modern cosmology. It could mean that current theories are missing some ingredient that intervened between the present and the ancient past, throwing off the chain of inferences from the CMB to the current Hubble constant. If so, history will be repeating itself. In the 1990s, Adam Riess, now an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, led one of the groups that discovered dark energy, a repulsive force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. It is one of the factors that the CMB calculations must take into account.

Now, Riess's team is leading the quest to pin down the Hubble constant in nearby space and beyond. His goal is not just to refine the number, but to see whether it is changing over time in ways that even dark energyas currently conceivedcan't explain. So far, he has few hints about what the missing factor might be. "I'm really wondering what is going on," he says.

In1927, Hubble was moving beyond the Milky Way with what was then the world's biggest telescope, the 100-inch (2.5-m) Hooker telescope that loomed over Pasadena on top of Mount Wilson. He photographed the faint spiral smudges we know as galaxies and measured the reddening of their light as their motions Doppler-shifted it to longer wavelengths, like the keening of a receding ambulance. By comparing the galaxies' redshifts to their brightness, Hubble stumbled on something revolutionary: The dimmer and presumably farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was receding. That meant the universe was expanding. It also meant the universe had a finite age, beginning in a big bang.

Debate over the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe, has exploded again. Astronomers had mostly settled on a number using a classical techniquethe "distance ladder," or astronomical observations from the local universe on out. But these values conflict with cosmological estimates made from maps of the early universe and adjusted to the present day. The dispute suggests a missing ingredient may be fueling the growth of the universe.

J. You

To pin down the expansion ratehis eponymous constantHubble needed actual distances to the galaxies, not just relative ones based on their apparent brightness. So he began the laborious process of building up a distance ladderfrom the Milky Way to neighboring galaxies to the far reaches of expanding space. Each rung in the ladder has to be calibrated by "standard candles": objects that shift, pulse, flash, or rotate in a way that reliably encodes how far away they are.

The first rung seemed reasonably sturdy: variable stars called cepheids, which ramp up and down in brightness over the course of days or weeks. The length of that cycle indicates the star's intrinsic brightness. By comparing the observed brightness of a cepheid to the brightness inferred from its oscillations, Hubble could gauge its distance. The Mount Wilson telescope was only good enough to see a few cepheids in the nearest galaxies. For more distant galaxies, he assumed that the brightest star in each had the same intrinsic brightness. Even farther out, he assumed that entire galaxies were standard candles, with uniform luminosities.

C. Bickel

They weren't good assumptions. Hubble's first published constant was 500 kilometers per second per megaparsecmeaning that for every 3.25 million light-years he looked out into space, the expanding universe was ferrying away galaxies 500 kilometers per second faster. The number was way offan order of magnitude too fast. It also implied a universe just 2 billion years old, a baby compared with current estimates. But it was a start.

By 1949, construction had finished on the 200-inch (5.1-m) telescope at Palomar in southern Californiajust in time for Hubble to suffer a heart attack. Hubble passed the mantle to Sandage, an ace observer who spent the subsequent decades exposing photographic plates during all-night sessions suspended in the telescope's vast apparatus, shivering and in desperate need of a bathroom break.

With Palomar's higher resolution and light-gathering power, Sandage could pluck cepheids from more distant galaxies. He also realized that Hubble's bright stars were in fact entire star clusters. They were intrinsically brighter and thus farther away than Hubble thought, which, in addition to other corrections, implied a much lower Hubble constant. By the 1980s, Sandage had settled on a value of about 50, which he zealously defended. Perhaps his most famous foil, French astronomer Grard de Vaucouleurs, promoted a competing value of 100. One of the key parameters of cosmology was contested to an embarrassing factor of two.

In the late 1990s, Freedman, having survived Sandage's verbal abuse, was determined to solve the puzzle with a powerful new tool designed with just this job in mind: the Hubble Space Telescope. Its sharp view from above the atmosphere allowed Freedman's team to pick out individual cepheids up to 10 times farther away than Sandage had with Palomar. Sometimes those galaxies happened to host both cepheids and an even brighter beacona type Ia supernova. These exploding white dwarf stars are visible across space and flare to a consistent, maximum brightness. Once calibrated with the cepheids, the supernovae could be used on their own to probe the most distant reaches of space. In 2001, Freedman's team narrowed the Hubble constant to 72 plus or minus eight, a definitive effort that ended Sandage and De Vaucouleurs's feud. "I was done," she says. "I never thought I'd work on the Hubble constant again."

Edwin Hubble poses inside the 200-inch Palomar telescope a few years before his death in 1953.

Ned/Steer/Huchra/Riess; NASA/ESA

But then came the physicist, who had an independent way of calculating the Hubble constant with the most distant, redshifted thing of all: the microwave background. In 2003, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) published its first map showing the speckles of temperature variations on the CMB. The maps provided not a standard candle, but a standard yardstick: a pattern of hotter and colder spots in the primordial soup created by sound waves rippling through the newborn universe.

With a few assumptions about the ingredients in that soupfamiliar particles like atoms and photons, some extra invisible stuff called dark matter, and dark energythe WMAP team could calculate the physical size of those primordial sound waves. That could be compared to the apparent size of the sound waves as recorded in the CMB speckles. The comparison gave the distance to the microwave background, and a value for the expansion rate of the universe at that primordial moment. By making assumptions about how regular particles, dark energy, and dark matter have altered the expansion since then, the WMAP team could tune the constant to its current rate of swelling. Initially, they came up with a value of 72, right in line with what Freedman had found.

But since then, the astronomical measurements of the Hubble constant have inched higher, even as error bars have narrowed. In recent publications, Riess has leapfrogged ahead of competitors like Freedman by using the infrared camera installed in 2009 on the Hubble Telescope, which can both pinpoint the distances to Milky Way cepheids and pick out their faraway, reddish cousins from the bluer stars that tend to surround cepheids. The most recent result from Riess's team is 73.24.

Meanwhile, Planck, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that has imaged the CMB at higher resolution and greater temperature sensitivity, has settled on 67.8. In statistical terms, the two values are separated by a gulf of 3.4 sigma not quite the 5 sigma that in particle physics signals a significant result, but getting there. "That, I think, is hard to explain as a statistical fluke," says Chuck Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who led the WMAP team.

Each side is pointing its finger at the other. George Efstathiou, a leading cosmologist for the Planck team at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, says the Planck data are "absolutely rock solid." Fresh off analyzing the first Planck results in 2013, Efstathiou cast his eyes elsewhere. He downloaded Riess's data and published his own analysis with a lower and less-precise Hubble constant. He found the astronomers' outwardly groping ladder "messy," he says.

Allan Sandage, Edwin Hubble's designated scientific heir, consistently defended a lower value for the Hubble constant.

The Carnegie Observatories

In response, the astronomers argue that they are making an actual measurement in the present-day universe, whereas the CMB technique relies on many cosmological assumptions. If the two don't agree, they ask, why not change the cosmology? Instead, "The George Efstathious of the world moved in and said, I'm going to reanalyze all of your data," says the University of Chicago's Barry Madore, who has been Freedman's collaborator and husband since the 1980s. "So what do you do? You have to find a tiebreaker."

Wendy Freedman thought her 2001 study pinned down the Hubble constant, but debate has resumed.

Yuri Beletsky, Carnegie Institution for Science

In the astronomers' corner is a technique called gravitational lensing. Around massive galaxy clusters, gravity itself warps space, forming a giant lens that can bend light from a more distant light source, like a quasar. If the alignment of the lens and quasar is just right, the light can follow several paths to Earth, creating multiple images around the lensing cluster. In even luckier circumstances, the quasar flickers in brightness. That causes each cloned image to flicker, too, but at different times, because the light rays for each image take different paths through the bent space. The delays between the flickers indicate differences in the path lengths; by combining those with the size of the cluster, astronomers can use trigonometry to calculate the absolute distance to the lensing galaxy cluster. Only three gravitational lenses have been rigorously measured this way, with six more under study now. But in late January, astrophysicist Sherry Suyu of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and her collaborators published their current best guess at the Hubble constant. "Our measurement is in agreement with the distance ladder approach," Suyu says.

The cosmologists, meanwhile, have their own sister technique: baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). As the universe aged, the same sound wave patterns imprinted on the CMBthe primordial yardstickseeded the nuggets of matter that grew into galaxy clusters. The patterning of galaxies on the sky should preserve the original dimensions of the sound waves, and as before, comparing the apparent scale of the pattern to its calculated actual size leads to a distance. Like the CMB technique, the BAO method makes cosmological assumptions. But over the past few years, it has been yielding Hubble constant values in line with Planck's. The ongoing fourth iteration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a vast galaxy mapping effort, should help refine these measurements.

That's not to say that the bickering distance ladder and CMB teams are simply waiting for other methods to settle the dispute. To firm up the foundation of the distance ladder, the distances to cepheids in the Milky Way, ESA's Gaia mission is trying to find precise distances to about a billion different nearby stars, cepheids included. Gaia, in orbit around the sun beyond Earth, uses the surest of all measures: parallax, or the apparent shift of the stars against the background sky, as the spacecraft swings to opposite sides of its orbit. When Gaia's full data set is released in 2022, it should provide another leap forward in certainty for the astronomers. (Already, Riess has found that his higher Hubble constant persists when he uses the preliminary Gaia results.)

The cosmologists expect to firm up their measurements, too, using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile and the South Pole Telescope, which can check Planck's high-resolution results. "It's not going to remain ambiguous," says Lyman Page, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. And if the divergent results prove rock solid, it will be up to the theorists to try to close the gap. "The gold is where the model breaks down," Page says. "Confirming the model isblah."

The South Pole Telescope will help astrophysicists map the tiny temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background, refining one Hubble measurement.

Keith Vanderlinde

One fixis to add an extra particle to the standard model of the universe. The CMB offers an estimate of the overall energy budget of the universe soon after the big bang, when it was divided into matter and high-energy radiation. Because of Albert Einstein's famous equivalence E=mc2, energy acted like matter, slowing the expansion of space with its gravity. But matter is a more effective brake. As time passed, radiationphotons of light and other lightweight particles like neutrinoscooled and lost energy, diluting its gravitational influence.

There are currently three known kinds of neutrinos. If there were a fourth, as some theorists have speculated, it would have claimed a little more of the universe's initial energy budget for the radiation side, which would dissipate faster. That, in turn, would mean an early universe that expanded faster than the one predicted by standard cosmology's list of ingredients. Fast-forwarding that adjustment into the present brings the two measurements in line. Yet neutrino detectors haven't turned up any evidence for a fourth kind, and other Planck measurements put a tight cap on the total amount of surplus radiation.

Another possible fix is so-called phantom dark energy. Current cosmological models assume a constant strength for dark energy. If dark energy becomes slightly stronger over time, though, it would explain why the cosmos is expanding faster today than one might guess from looking at the early universe. But critics like Hiranya Peiris, a Planck astrophysicist based at University College London, says variable dark energy seems "ad hoc and contrived." And her work suggests that new neutrino physics doesn't work either. Right now, she says, flaws in the different techniques are more likely than new physics.

For Freedman, now a dean of the field, the only solution to the squabble is to fight fire with firewith new observations of the universe. She and Madore are now preparing a separate measurement calibrated not just with cepheids, but other types of variable stars and bright red giantsusing an automated telescope only 30 centimeters across to study the nearest examples, and the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to monitor them in remote galaxies. If she could handle the dark and stormy Sandage, she's ready to stand with Riess and answer the brash challenge from the Planck team. "The message was You guys are wrong. Well, maybe," she says, chuckling. "We'll see."

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A recharged debate over the speed of the expansion of the universe could lead to new physics - Science Magazine

The Hubble telescope won’t crash into Mars, but it may look that way – Poughkeepsie Journal

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The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday night and because of our depth perception it will look like the decades-old telescope is slamming into the Red Planet.

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USA Today Network Bernie Badger Published 11:40 a.m. ET March 3, 2017 | Updated 3:17 p.m. ET March 3, 2017

NASA released the largest photo ever of the Andromeda Galaxy. The panoramic image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is 1.5 billion pixels. 1-20-15

In this image released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Hubble Space Telescope is backdropped against black space.(Photo: Getty Images/file)

The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday night and because of our depth perception it will look like the decades-old telescope is slamming into the Red Planet.

The Hubble's expected pathputs it right in front of Mars at 7:58:42 p.m.People think that they can see in 3-D, but this isnt true. Our retinas are fundamentally two-dimensional. We see light in different positions but not truly at different depths.

So, thanks to our lack of true depth perception, we'll see the illusion of a Mars-Hubble collision, even though Mars is about 140 million miles from Earth.

Scientists find incredible fountains shooting from Jupiter's moon

If you are looking through the observatory telescope, you may or may not see the Hubble Space Telescope zoom through the field of view. I cannot predict it with that much accuracy. A low power eyepiece will offer the best chance. But for anyone looking without optical aid, you should see the Hubble Space Telescope glide right over Mars. No explosions will ensue but perhaps a feeling that the Red Planet has just dodged a bullet.

The Hubble, according to NASA, was launched in 1990 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then it's been orbiting Earth, snapping photos and collecting data that has been used in more than 14,000 scientific papers. It's roughly the size of a school bus and moves orbits at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour. So far, it's traveled more than 3 billion miles.

Far out: Most distant galaxy cluster discovered

The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday evening.(Photo: USA TODAY)

Mr. Badger is Project Coordinator at the Eastern Florida State College Planetarium in Cocoa. Send questions, suggestions, or comments tobadgerb@easternflorida.edu

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The Hubble telescope won't crash into Mars, but it may look that way - Poughkeepsie Journal

NASA’s Hubble telescope captures image of UGC 12591 galaxy – BGR India

The Hubble space telescope has captured an image to showcase an incredible massive galaxy, UGC 12591, that lies just under 400 million light-years away from the Earth. The galaxy and its halo together contain several hundred billion times the mass of the Sun four times the mass of the Milky Way, NASA said in a statement on Friday. It also whirls round extremely quickly, rotating at speeds of up to 1.8 million kilometers per hour, it added.

UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral. It lies in the westernmost region of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster, a long chain of galaxy clusters that stretches out for hundreds of light-years ? one of the largest known structures in the cosmos. Observations with Hubble are helping astronomers to understand the mass of UGC 12591, and to determine whether the galaxy simply formed and grew slowly over time, or whether it might have grown unusually massive by colliding and merging with another large galaxy at some point in its past, NASA said. The Hubble Space Telescope is collaboration between NASA and European Space Agency (ESA).

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NASA's Hubble telescope captures image of UGC 12591 galaxy - BGR India