Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

Editorial writers discuss the baby formula shortage, abortion, and more.

The Washington Post:The Ongoing Baby Formula Shortage Is A Reminder Of A Disturbing Truth In AmericaRemember the baby formula crisis? Public attention has largely moved on, but the U.S. supply shortage isnt over and the scarcity continues to distress parents and doctors struggling to feed vulnerable infants. (Alyssa Rosenberg, 9/21)

Los Angeles Times:Fathers Writing Abortion Laws Are Showing No Mercy For DaughtersThis week CNN confirmed what the optics have long suggested: Male lawmakers, many of them fathers, are most eager to punish women for having an abortion.One state representative in Texas, Bryan Slaton, introduced a bill in 2021 that would have made getting an abortion punishable by death, saying in part that it is time for Texas to protect the natural right to life. (LZ Granderson, 9/22)

The Star Tribune:Biden's COVID InsincerityPresident Joe Biden finally dared to say it on Sunday, declaring in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" that the "pandemic is over." Various public-health eminences are saying he's wrong, but his comments recognize the reality of the disease at this stage and the public mood. The trouble is that his administration still hasn't lifted its official finding of a COVID public-health emergency. (9/21)

The CT Mirror:Monkeypox Stigma Hurts Us AllMonkeypox has been in the news a lot, and its being reported on as a gay disease. Calling it this is not only inaccurate, but dangerous to folks both in and outside of the gay community. (Kimberly Adamski, 9/22)

Chicago Tribune:Investing In Black-Led Community Groups Critical To Fighting HIVIn the face of innovations and advancements to better test, treat and prevent HIV, systemic racism continues to prevent Black-led community-based organizations, or CBOs, from accessing the funding and tools required to reach undersupported communities in areas of highest need. (Sista Yaa Simpson, 9/21)

Stat:What NASA Can Teach Public Health About Regaining Public TrustThe amazing images of the Cartwheel Galaxy captured by the James Webb Space Telescope this summer, and before them the spectacular images from the Hubble telescope, have amazed and inspired many people worldwide, who now look to NASA as a trusted federal agency. It hasnt always enjoyed such strong support. (Judy Monroe, 9/22)

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Viewpoints: The Formula Shortage Isn't Over; Male Lawmakers Aren't Doing Their Jobs As Fathers - Kaiser Health News

The Webb Telescope recently imaged a region of the Orion Nebula associated with star birth, and the result is about what weve come to expect from the cutting-edge space observatory.

Im not saying that the image is bad. Its quite nice! It was taken with the telescopes NIRCam instrument and captures an inner region of the Orion Nebula.

But, I must say, its not quite as thrilling asWebbs recent conquests: a deep field eight times larger than the telescopes first, the eerie tendrils of the Tarantula Nebula, and the observatorys first direct image of an exoplanet.

This image was taken as part of Webbs early science program by the PDRs4All scientific collaboration. The collaborations goal is to image Photo-Dissociation Regions (PDRs), where ultraviolet light from stars creates warm regions of gas and dust in space.

The predominant feature here is the Orion Bar, a massive belt of gas and dust, which appears brownish-yellow. Toward the center of the bar is a bright star, 2 Orionis A. The star is bright enough to be visible from Earth with the naked eye, if the observer is in a dark enough place.

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The image is peppered with hot, young stars, especially toward the upper right corner. These stars are collectively known as the Trapezium Cluster; their ultraviolet radiation is slowly eroding the Orion Bar. So an image that at first glance looks to capture a giant space mustache shows a more dynamic phenomenon than you might expect.

Set next to an earlier image of the Orion Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, Webbs impressive quality is more apparent. The Webb image shows cooler material than Hubbles, where hot gas is the main attraction. Webbs infrared instruments are an improvement on Hubbles in that they can peer through clouds of dust and gas, to see star-forming regions and other areas of astrophysical intrigue.

When Webbs images debuted, they appeared almost shockingly resolved. Now, that novelty has faded a bit, as weve grown accustomed to seeing the cosmos in what was once unprecedented detail. But setting Webb images next to Hubble shotsno disrespect to Hubbleis a great reminder of how much our observational technology has improved. Its also a reminder of how our knowledge of the cosmos is only as good as our best technology.

More: Are the Colors in Webb Telescope Images Fake?

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What the Orion Nebula Looks Like to Webb Telescope Vs Hubble Telescope - Gizmodo

Title: Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field

Authors: Leonardo Ferreira, Nathan Adams, Christopher J. Conselice, Elizaveta Sazonova, Duncan Austin, Joseph Caruana, Fabricio Ferrari, Aprajita Verma, James Trussler, Tom Broadhurst, Jose Diego, Brenda L. Frye, Massimo Pascale, Stephen M. Wilkins, Rogier A. Windhorst, Adi Zitrin

First Authors Institution: University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Status: Accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, available on arXiv

Ever since the first data release of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in July, it has become clear that this telescope is going to completely transform our view of the distant Universe. Galaxies that looked like featureless blobs when viewed through the Hubble Space Telescope can now be resolved in incredible detail (see Figure 1), despite the fact that Hubble has been one of the worlds leading telescopes for the past 30 years.

Figure 1: Four galaxies from the SMACS 0723 field (the focus of todays paper), as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (left) and the James Webb Space Telescope (right). Each one displays features that were undetected with Hubble, but can easily be seen with JWST. Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI.

Being able to measure the shapes of galaxies (known as their morphology) is vital if we want to understand how galaxies, including our own, were formed. Galaxies typically come in two shapes: thin, delicate disk-shaped galaxies, and spheroid-shaped elliptical galaxies, but it is still not really clear how and when these different galactic structures emerged. Todays paper uses early JWST observations of a large galaxy cluster, called SMACS 0723, to measure the shapes of very distant galaxies. With this exciting new data, the authors hope to expand our knowledge of galaxy evolution all the way to the very dawn of our Universe.

This photo of SMACS 0723 is one of the first images to be released from JWST. The cluster is located about four billion light years away at a redshift of 0.4, but todays paper actually looks at even more distant galaxies, in the background of this image many of these have been magnified by the gravitational lensing of the cluster. Specifically, it looks at 280 background galaxies at redshifts between 1.5 and 8, meaning we are seeing them just 1-4 billion years after the beginning of the Universe.

The authors firstly measure galaxy shapes using quantitative properties of galaxies, such as their concentration and asymmetry. Their really exciting findings, however, come from classifying these galaxies by eye, splitting them into three categories: disks, spheroids, and peculiars.

Galaxies in this third class have an irregular shape, which can be caused by processes such as starbursts or tidal interactions. Alternatively, collisions between galaxies (known as galaxy mergers) that are currently in-progress can lead to these peculiar galaxies. These violent events are thought to play a major role in galaxy evolution: in the early Universe mergers allow large amounts of mass to clump together, which can later form a galactic disk. Later on, they can destroy these fragile disk structures, turning disk galaxies into featureless ellipticals.

It turns out that at high redshifts (between 3 and 6), about half of galaxies have a disk shape (Figure 2). This is much higher than we previously thought the data from the Hubble telescope shows that it found a disk fraction of less than 10% at similar redshifts! Interestingly, according to JWST, the disk fraction also stays roughly constant across the whole range of redshifts.

Figure 2: Fraction of spheroid, disk, and peculiar galaxies at different redshifts, measured with JWST in todays paper, and with Hubble (HST) in previous work. The trends found by Hubble had predicted the number of disks would decrease at redshifts greater than three, and that most galaxies would be peculiar. JWST shows that this is not the case. Figure 4 in todays paper.

Our current idea that mergers assemble galaxies in the early Universe means that we would expect to find lots of peculiar galaxies and few disks at high redshift, as these disks are still in the process of forming. However, the near-constant disk fraction found in this study indicates that disk galaxies (like the Milky Way) have existed in a fairly stable state for more than 10 billion years, seemingly contradicting our old ideas.

So whats going on? There are several ways to interpret these results. It could be that almost all mergers occur extremely early in the Universe, quickly forming disk galaxies, and that these disks survive until the present day because recent mergers are far less common than our current theories suggest. Alternatively, it could be that only some classes of galaxies are built up by mergers, or even that mergers are simply far less likely to destroy disk structures than we previously thought.

Whatever the case, it indicates that we may need to refine current theoretical ideas about how galaxies assemble and evolve through mergers, which is one of the key predictions of our widely-accepted model of the Universe (the Lambda cold dark matter, or CDM, model). Some articles based on this work have gone a step further, stating that this research disproves CDM, or even the Big Bang. However, despite the homage to noughties emo-pop in the title of this paper, theres really no reason to panic. Tuning and re-tuning theories to fit new data is a normal part of the scientific process. In fact, this paper is exciting: it tells us that we still do not truly know where galactic structure came from, but that new science carried out using this new telescope will finally give us a chance to understand the origins and lives of galaxies.

Astrobite edited by Aldo Panfichi

Featured image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI

About Roan HaggarI'm a PhD student at the University of Nottingham, working with hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters to study the evolution of infalling galaxies. I also co-manage a portable planetarium that we take round to schools in the local area. My more terrestrial hobbies include rock climbing and going to music venues that I've not been to before.

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JWST takes a peek at the first ever galaxies - Astrobites

Stare into the core of the Phantom Galaxy.

New images from humanity's most powerful space telescopes the legendary Hubble telescope and its successor the James Webb Space Telescope reveal unprecedented detail in this magnificent distant spiral galaxy. It's 32 million light-years away.

The over 30-year-old Hubble telescope views light we can see (visible light), while the Webb telescope views a type of light with longer wavelengths (called "infrared light") that isn't visible to us. Together, these instruments gather bounties of data that reveal new insights about what lies in the distant cosmos.

The middle image below shows the combined views of the Hubble and Webb telescopes. What you can see:

The areas of bright pink in the reddish spirals are active star-forming regions

The bright blue dots are other stars

The core of the galaxy glows cyan and green. These are older stars clustered around the galactic center.

At center is a view of the Phantom Galaxy with combined data of the Hubble and Webb telescopes.Credit: ESA / Webb / NASA / CSA / J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team / Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

In the Webb image by itself (the top image of this story or the right-side image in the comparison above), it's easy to see the many stars (shown in blue) amassed in the galaxy's core. A lack of gas at the heart of the Phantom Galaxy makes this view exceptionally clear.

Hubble continues to capture dazzling views of distant stars and galaxies. Meanwhile, Webb, stationed 1 million miles away from Earth, is expected to reveal new insights about the universe. Here's how Webb will achieve unparalleled things:

Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope will peer at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

"We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, told Mashable last year.

Infrared view: Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely-packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.

"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.

Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment, called spectrometers, that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?

"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes Lpez-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.

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Scientists harness powers of Webb and Hubble in stunning galactic image - Mashable

As it turns out, the idea of space being a completely silent vacuum is a misconception. And were now learning thanks to a recording released by NASA, not only does space have a sound its a goddamn Lovecraftian horror.

The 34-second clip sending social media into a frenzy is a remixed sonification of the black hole located at the centre of a galaxy cluster dubbed Perseus. For reference, Perseus is approximately 240 million light years away from Earth (just in case any of you were thinking about ducking over real quick).

RELATED: NASAs James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Galaxy From 4.6 Billion Years Ago

Since 2003, the black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound, explained NASA.

This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the clusters hot gas that could be translated into a note one that humans cannot hear some 57 octaves below middle C.

So how is it possible that our woefully human ears are (finally) registering the audio being emitted by Perseus?

RELATED: Hubble Telescope Photo Shows One Galaxy Ripping Solar Systems From Another

The US space agency added: The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the centre. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch.

Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency (a quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.) The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions.

In other words, this isnt a completely faithful representation of what youd experience in the aural sense if you were to hypothetically get up close and personal with a black hole. Although in that scenario, sound accuracy would probably be the least of your problems.

Still, anyone having trouble staying awake in the dead of night should definitely give the NASA space sound recording a listen.

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NASA Captured The Sound Of Space (And It's Bloody Terrifying) - Boss Hunting

For centuries, science fiction writers have taken findings and theories from the most cutting-edge research and used them to feed their flights of fancy. The clouds on Mars and its similarity to Earth, when seen through a telescope (as early as 1610, by Galileo), have led to speculation about everything from little green men to the John Carter series. Billionaires like Elon Musk continue to harbour (rather expensive) notions of colonising the Red Planet. And quantum theory has led to many multiverses. Even something as simple as the earliest seafarers seeking to pierce the horizon continues to form the emotional bedrock of the Star Trek franchise. With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the limits of the horizon have been pushed exponentially.

Jupiter, children have been told for decades in their middle-school syllabus, is a gas giant. What the general public did not comprehend how could it was that in the swirling mass of storms on the planet (the largest of which could easily swallow up the Earth), encircled by hitherto invisible Saturn-like rings, there is beautiful, ferocious activity. Or, that the violent geological life is circumscribed by an almost heavenly halo. Looking at the stunning JWST images by NASA just weeks after it revealed the sound of a Black Hole there is no doubt that there will be enough fodder to feed the imagination for generations to come.

The JWST, like the Hubble telescope before it, is likely to enhance human understanding of the cosmos immeasurably. A horizon, of course, is a curious thing. It is simultaneously a challenge and a limit. It also tells us exactly what to aim for a theoretical meeting point in the distance. The immensity of what lies beyond can offer both hope and an escape. Thanks to the JWST, Jupiter is already calling.

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James Webb Telescope images of the planet open up new horizons of the imagination - The Indian Express

It's just as eerie as you'd expect a black hole to sound.

NEW YORK Have you ever wondered what a black hole sounds like?

It's about as haunting as you'd expect.

NASA's Exoplanets team tweeted out an eerie 34-second audio clip this week of a "data sonification" of the black hole in a galaxy cluster 240 million light-years from Earth.

Essentially, scientists turned data from the depths of space into a sound humans can hear.

"The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel," NASA tweeted. "A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound."

Even if space seems totally quiet, objects are still making noise there's just nothing for sound waves to vibrate.

Scientists have known since 2003 that the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster is associated with some sort of sound, NASA said, because there is so much gas in the surrounding galaxy cluster. Astronomers discovered the pressure waves sent out by the black hole were causing ripples in the hot gas. Those vibrations could be translated into a musical note, but the note is far too low for humans to hear, some 57 octaves below middle C.

So the signals were adjusted into the range of human hearing, scaled upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. NASA originally released the "remix" in May.

"Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency," NASA said.

NASA released another data sonification of a different black hole, Messier 87 one that isn't quite so spooky.

The "music" coming from M87 famous for being the first black hole captured in a direct image comes from X-rays, optical light from the Hubble Telescope and radio waves layered over each other. Radio waves are played out as the lowest tones, optical data as medium tones and X-rays as the highest tones.

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NASA released a clip of what a black hole sounds like and it's haunting - KING5.com

Multiple galaxies shine bright against the dark backdrop of space in a newly released Hubble Space Telescope image.

The image captures several spiral and irregular galaxies in the constellation of Hercules. The most noticeable galaxy, named LEDA 58109 or MCG+07-34-030, stands alone in the upper right of the image. It has a bright core and exhibits a spiral structure, similar to our own Milky Way galaxy.

Two other galactic objects lie to the lower left of LEDA 58109, and appear to overlap. One of the objects an active galactic nucleus (AGN) called SDSS J162558.14+435746.4 partially obscures the galaxy SDSS J162557.25+435743.5, according to a statement (opens in new tab) from the European Space Agency (ESA).

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

These two objects lie further away from Earth than LEDA 58109. In the new Hubble image, the galaxy SDSS J162557.25+435743.5 appears to peak out to the right from behind the AGN which is characterized by a much-higher-than-normal luminosity fueled by the accretion of matter by a supermassive black hole at the center of its host galaxy.

Typically, galaxies are classified as either spiral and elliptical. However, this new Hubble image captures a diverse number of galaxies, highlighting the complexity of classifying these collections of stars, dust and dark matter, according to the statement.

"The sample of galaxies here also illustrates the wide variety of names that galaxies have: Some relatively short, like LEDA 58109, and some very long and challenging to remember, such as the two galaxies to the left," ESA officials said in the statement. "This is due to the variety of cataloging systems that chart the celestial objects in the night sky. No one catalog is exhaustive, and they cover overlapping regions of the sky, so that many galaxies belong to several different catalogs."

The new image was shared on July 25.

Follow Samantha Mathewson on Twitter@Sam_Ashley13 (opens in new tab).Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or onFacebook (opens in new tab).

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Galactic diversity captured in new Hubble telescope photo - Space.com

The image shows a detailed portrait of the Triangulum, composed of 54 Hubble fields of view stitched together, revealing nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. Nasa said that the image was captured on July 28, 2019, that trace the jagged edge of the mosaic, which spans 19,400 light-years across with striking areas of star birth glowing bright blue throughout the galaxy.

Find out what Hubble saw on your birthday here

The Hubble spacecraft has been in space for 32 years now and has gone through several repairs and maintenance work when the Shuttle missions were ongoing. The flying observatory has completed one billion seconds of operations in Zero gravity and conducted more than 1.5 million scientific observations.

The telescope has been critical in discovering worlds hundreds of light-years away from Earth, outside of our Solar System. The telescope has been recovered from complete shutdown twice in 2021, showing the engineering and technological advancement of the system and the team behind it.

Deployed on April 25, 1990, Hubble, before the arrival of the Webb Telescope, was working in tandem with ESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which aims to find promising exoplanets. Scientists have said that the Webb Telescope and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will build upon the legacy left behind by Hubble.

Also Read | Russia could remain on International Space Station till 2028

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What did Hubble Telescope see on your birthday? Find out here - India Today

Those spectacular pictures of galaxies forming at a time very near the origin of the universe from the James Webb Space Telescope came at a pretty price: $9.7 billion, to be precise. It is fair to ask, Is the Webb telescope project worth the price?

The James Webb Space Telescope project began in 1996 with an expected launch in 2007 for a relatively low cost of $1 billion to $3.5 billion. But the project underwent a bewildering array of delays and unexpected scientific challenges. By the time the telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021, the cost spiraled to nearly $10 billion. One journal referred to Webb as the telescope that ate astronomy.

To be fair, that price tag covers the entire lifetime of the project, and it has been partly shouldered by the European and Canadian space agencies as well as NASA. The telescope is scheduled to be operational for more than five years in space but has enough fuel to last more than 10 years, if all goes well.

In assessing whether we are getting our moneys worth, consider what we stand to gain beyond the stunning pictures of the cosmos as it existed 13 billion years ago. The primary mission of JWST is to better understand the life history of the universe. The universe is ever-expanding since its origin in the Big Bang, casting light from distant objects in reddish tones. Unlike the Hubble Telescope, the Webb is an infrared telescope, making it uniquely sensitive to deep red light and 100 times more powerful. Webb can see much deeper into space and farther back in time than any instrument ever invented on Earth.

JWST will show us galaxies as they were when the universe was less than a billion years old. It will show us galaxies colliding and merging and revealing their chemical secrets. We are going to look straight into black holes and their escaping materials. These are the sights that will help unravel the history of our universe. What price is that alone worth?

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A secondary mission of the Webb telescope is to probe for an answer to the age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? Webb is already searching for Earth 2.0 exoplanets with environments similar to Earth capable of sustaining life as we know it. JWST will examine the atmospheres of exoplanets beyond our solar system for oxygen or methane gases that signal living organisms. Though not likely, maybe Webb will find evidence of other sentient beings. JWST offers the best shot to date at such discoveries.

This new eye on the universe will test, challenge and develop the science of physics. Hundreds of years ago, the first telescopes revealed that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Todays better understanding of how the universe works is what, for better or worse, brought us computers and cellphones. Who knows how Webb may retool human knowledge, but experience suggests it will most certainly affect our learning curve.

The James Webb Space Telescope project has enthralled the imaginations of people all over the globe. A recent online poll found that three in five Americans believe the Webb telescope has been a good investment. Only 13% of those polled thought it was a bad investment.

Most people were not even thinking about the price tag when the James Webb Space Telescope lit up our screens with remarkable detail of emerging stellar births and individual stars within the cosmic clouds of Carina Nebula, near the center of the universe. Astonishment in the face of incredible beauty, as one observer poetically described the image. And this is just a sneak preview of what is yet to come.

The Webb telescope is likely to change how we understand the universe, refine our knowledge of physics and cosmology, and rewrite our textbooks.

Even aside from the eventual scientific and economic spinoffs, simply better knowing our place in the universe cannot be measured in dollars. Yes, indeed, the James Webb Space Telescope is worth the price and so much more.

Craig Holman is a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Public Citizen or its members. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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Opinion: At $10 billion, the Webb telescope is a bargain - Daily Press