Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

If the habitability of planets in our solar systemis ruled out, auroras remain one characteristic that can be found on many planets; all they need is a blanket of magnetosphere around them. While auroras on Earth are widely studied, this glowing phenomenon has been spotted on other planets like Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune.

Recently, NASA shared a visual captured by the Hubble telescope wherein the auroras were seen glowing over the north pole of Jupiter.

Scientists studying auroras on Earth have found that they are caused when the solar particles pushed by strong solar winds interact with the Earth's magnetosphere. Our planet, similar to an ozone layer, has a covering of magnetosphere, which forms by the magnetic fields emerging from Earth's core and offers protection against harmful solar radiation. However, when the solar winds are strong enough, they push the solar particles through the magnetosphere and when they interact with the Earth's atmosphere, auroras are created.

Interestingly, the solar particles giveoff the green and red light when they interact with oxygen and blue and purple light when they interact with nitrogen. However, scientists have found after observations through Hubblethatauroras on Jupiter are bigger and more energetic than those on Earth. But the most interesting fact aboutJupiter's auroras is that, unlike the Earth's, they are always there. Astronomers say thatthis is because the planet grabs charged particles from its surroundings including those being spilled out by its Moon, Io.

According to NASA, Hubble has observed Jupiter for months in the past and the video above has been created using the Hubble telescope's Imaging Spectrograph.

While much was not known about this phenomenon, the Juno spacecraft, which entered the gas giant's orbit in 2016 has helped scientists double down on its unique characteristics. Ever since its operations began five years ago, Juno has acted as the eyes and ears of NASA and has beamed back loads of data helping advance the study of planets in the outer solar system.

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NASA shares Hubble view of Jupiter's auroras 100 times more energetic than those on Earth - Republic World

A comet near the Sun has just been roasted to death. Some amazing details have emerged courtesy the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers observe comets to study their properties and trajectories to find out what they are made up of and also if they pose any threat to the Earth. However, this time, astronomers actually saw something shocking! A comet approaching the Sun was killed by it virtually right in front of astronomers' eyes, so to speak. These observations were truly unprecedented. This incident will also help astronomers to understand why comets orbiting close to the sun seem to disappear.

The disintegrated comet near the sun is known as 323P/SOHO which was first discovered in 1999 by the NASAs European Space Agency probe Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), that constantly observes the Sun. The 323P/SOHO is known to be one of those rare near-sun comets, which pursue an elliptical orbit around the Sun. Scientists believe that there are many such comets that exist, but only a couple of them have been observed yet. And this recent observation of the comet roasted to death near the Sun can explain why, University of Hawai'i News report says. Also read: NASA: Hubble Telescope reveals unknown facts about this LARGEST Comet!

The Subaru Telescope has been tracking the comet since December 2020, even though it was only a small dot moving across space. This time, it seems it got too close to the Sun. After its close pass, the Hubble Space Telescope picked it up, but it looked very different. The results showed a long tail of ejected dust streaming from the comet. This visible change in the comet indicated its disintegration because of the extreme heat coming from the Sun. The comet also was found to be changing its colour as well as spinning rapidly, completing one rotation in just half an hour. Also read: Hubble Telescope captures giant star 32x larger than Sun, but it will die first! Check breathtaking NASA photo

"The intense radiation from the Sun caused parts of the comet to break off due to thermal fracturing, similar to how ice cubes crack when you pour a hot drink over them. This mass loss mechanism could help explain what happens to the near-Sun population and why there are so few of them left," the research team said in a statement.

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Sun just killed a comet! Hubble Space Telescope reveals shocking details - HT Tech

AZoQuantum speaks with Dr. Charles Steinhardt about his research that has characterized the nature of stars in distant galaxies and shown how they differ from our own. These findings pave the way for new discoveries concerning the life and death of galaxies as well as cosmic phenomena like black holes.

I am an associate professor at the Cosmic Dawn Center, funded by the Danish government to bring together an international team to take advantage of new telescopes that allow us to study the first stars and galaxies. A key part of our mission is to use the recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Euclid space telescope to study galaxies that are currently too faint for us to even detect.While waiting for the new observatories, members of our center are leading several current deep surveys.

I am the co-lead of the BUFFALO Hubble Space Telescope (HST) survey, which takes advantage of gravitational lensing by massive galaxy clusters to magnify faint galaxies behind those clusters, allowing Hubble to detect galaxies that otherwise would have been too faint to see.

I have been drawn to studying galaxy evolution because of several deep problems which have popped up over the past couple of decades.One of the most intriguing is how rapidly massive galaxies appear to have formed.It turns out that the most massive galaxies form their stars, central supermassive black hole, etc. very early in the history of the Universe, and these processes almost entirely stop and the galaxy dies.

We are now finding massive, dead galaxies less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and massive star-forming galaxies nearly one billion years earlier.In fact, these galaxies are so massive, so early, that it is difficult to understand how they formed in such a short time after the Big Bang.If we continue to see these massive galaxies at even earlier times using JWST, we would be forced to introduce new physics (e.g., a version of dark matter which is very clumpy) to explain how they formed.

However, its also possible that we have been overestimating their masses. Our work on the distribution of stars in high-redshift galaxies is an attempt to figure out whether this is a possible explanation.If these galaxies are much less massive than currently believed, then the problem goes away, without needing any sort of new physics.

This has been one of the notoriously difficult problems over the past century of astronomy.In principle, it might seem simple: we can observe the stars around us, count them, and figure out their distribution.However, it rapidly gets far more complex. Stars have different lifetimes -- the most massive stars die more quickly, so the mass distribution changes considerably over time.As a result, astronomers typically focus on measuring the initial mass function (IMF), which is the mass distribution of stars at the time they formed.It is thought that the IMF might change much less over time, or even be entirely constant.

However, measuring it requires us to make many reliable, well-calibrated, and difficult measurements.We need to understand selection effects, calibrate distance measurements, find dust properties, etc.And then once thats done, we also need to figure out the age of the stellar population in different parts of the Milky Way.For example, the center of our galaxy likely formed earlier than the region around the Sun.

Image Credit:arvitalyaart/Shutterstock.com

The first measurement of the IMF was done in 1955 by Edwin Salpeter, and his simple power-law approximation is still used in some studies today.Several more recent measurements are also in common use, and different studies will often assume different IMFs.This is in some sense like reporting their results in different units and can make it difficult to compare them with each other.

In distant galaxies, we cannot see individual starsand we just get the total emitted light from the entire galaxy, all mixed together.Further, massive stars are very rare.However, the luminosity of a main sequence star grows between the cube and the fourth power of its mass, so those rare, massive stars actually give off most of the light.

For example, most of the stellar mass in the Milky Way is in stars smaller than the Sun, but most of the mass comes from stars larger than the Sun. So, the light that we see is dominated those rare, massive stars, and most of the stellar mass is essentially invisible.

We are only seeing the very tip of the iceberg, and then we use what we see to infer what the rest of the iceberg looks like.Of course, we have one good sample galaxy that allows us to measure the IMF our own.So, we have typically ended up assuming that the IMF is Universal, for all galaxies and at all times.After all, if there is only one iceberg that we can examine, its natural to assume that all icebergs are made of the same type of ice. We cant be certain that this is true, but without additional measurements, its the most logical assumption.

We find that nearly every galaxy has a different IMF than the Milky Way, forming a greater fraction of high-mass stars than previously believed.Further, as we go back in time towardthe Big Bang, the fraction of high-mass stars continues to increase.One implication is that this was probably true of the Milky Way as well it likely formed a higher fraction of massive stars in the past than it does today.

Although this is contrary to what we have been assuming, in retrospect, perhaps this is not so surprising.We can think of star formation as a contest between gravity, which acts to bring gas together and form a star, and thermodynamics, which tells us there is a pressure acting to make that gas expand instead.When a cloud does collapse, another contest between thermal fluctuations and gravity determines whether the cloud fragments into several, smaller stars.

So, if we change the temperature, density, or other key properties of star-forming clouds, we might expect to change the IMF. We observed that galaxies have a variety of shapes, live in different environments, have different chemical compositions, and we even measured different dust temperatures. So, it is natural to think that the conditions in star-forming regions vary from galaxy to galaxy, and thus that the IMF should vary as well.

This image from NASA Hubble telescope shows one of the most distant galaxies known, called GN-108036, dating back to 750 million years after the Big Bang that created our universe. The galaxy light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/University of Tokyo

Perhaps more surprising is the ways in which the IMF still ends up being somewhat Universal.What we find is that although the IMF changes over time, if we examine only star-forming galaxies at the same redshift, they have much more similar IMFs.In other words, despite all of the differences between galaxies, there might be a single, Universal IMF at any given time.However, that IMF changes over time, and galaxies form fewer and fewer massive stars as time goes on.

We rely on two key advances, one astronomical and the other computational.First, we are using COSMOS, a multi-wavelength survey that has been built up over two decades of observations and thanks to the work of over 100 astronomers.

This survey is a unique resource combining measurements in approximately 30 parts of the spectrum over two square degrees of sky, finding over two million objects.It includes infrared measurements from telescopes such as Herschel and Spitzer which no longer exist, todays leading ground-based and space telescopes, and in the near future COSMOS will add observations with JWST.

In effect, we have replaced detailed measurements of one galaxy, the Milky Way, with a much smaller amount of information about a very large number of galaxies in order to get enough information to measure the IMF.

The other is an advance in the computational techniques needed to analyze these large datasets.First, we use models to predict what the spectrum should look like for galaxies with various redshifts, masses, ages, star formation histories, dust content, and other parameters.Then, we test these synthetic spectra against the measured fluxes to find which parameters produce the best match.

The problem is that the search space rapidly gets very large, and because small changes in parameters can produce significant changes in the predicted spectrum, we really need to search almost all of the possible combinations.If there are, for example, eight parameters in our model, then even just ten possibilities for each would mean 100 million combinations.Our work relies on a more recently-developed method to search the space more efficiently.

It has now become efficient enough that we can add more parameters, which has allowed us to try to measure the IMF.

Most of the black holes in the Milky Way are formed in the deaths of massive stars. So, learning that massive stars were more common in the past implies that there should be more black holes than previously thought.The same should be true for other products of massive stars, ranging from supernovae to the production of heavier elements and interstellar dust.

Because we are trying to fit more parameters to the spectrum than in previous studies, we need more/higher quality information in order to be successful.In practice, this means we can only use around the 10% brightest COSMOS galaxies, for which the measurements are the least noisy.It has been possible to measure the IMF for a few individual examples of galaxies out to a redshift of 6, less than one billion years after the Big Bang.

However, we can only get useful measurements for large numbers of the most massive galaxies out to a redshift of around 4, half a billion years later, and we can only get useful measurements for more typical galaxies out to a redshift of 2 -another two billion years later.

With upcoming telescopes, we hope to be able to use the same methods to look at even more distant galaxies.In addition to JWST, there are also deeper ground-based surveys coming in the next few years which should provide high-quality measurements at much earlier times.

More Interviews from AZoQuantum: What Can the James Webb Space Telescope Tell Us About Dark Matter?

This has been one of the most exciting results for us because it potentially solves a problem that has puzzled me since I first started working on galaxy evolution.One of the things that we observe about galaxies is that more massive galaxies typically seem to evolve more quickly than less massive ones.Further, while galaxies are actively growing, galaxies of the same mass appear to all grow in very similar ways, so that galaxies at the same mass and same time have nearly identical star-formation rates.When we look in the more local Universe, we find a similar answer for dead galaxies.Virtually all of the most massive galaxies have died, while almost all of the less massive ones continue to form stars.

The puzzle is that the same studies at higher redshift get a different answer: the first galaxies to die are not quite the most massive, but rather somewhere in the middle of the distribution.And, not all galaxies at that mass are dead, but only some of them.So, galaxy death has many different properties other than galaxy growth.This might imply that galaxies die because of some external factors, rather than as the natural result of the rest of their evolution.

However, using our updated IMF measurements, we now find that star-forming galaxies are less massive than previously thought.At the same time, we were correctly estimating the masses of dead galaxies.With these new measurements, we now find that the dead galaxies are the most massive at all times, not just at low redshift.Thus, galaxy death has the same properties as galaxy growth: it is Universal and hierarchical. As a result, galaxies might die simply as the natural endpoint of the same processes that cause them to grow.

The most exciting part of this work scientifically has been realizing that we could actually measure something meaningful about the IMF with this technique.It was particularly rewarding when we first saw how the change in galaxy masses could provide an explanation for the puzzling stellar mass distribution of dead galaxies at early times.

Despite spending years thinking about solutions, I had never considered the possibility that we might be measuring the masses of some types of galaxies correctly but the others incorrectly.Yet, the moment I saw a plot of the new mass distributions, it immediately felt like not just a solution, but the sort of solution that in retrospect probably should have been obvious, if I were just a little bit more clever!

The other rewarding aspect of this work has been the very heavy student involvement.Astronomy is wonderfully accessible for student researchers, and I run a summer undergraduate research program at the Cosmic Dawn.The initial work on this project was done by Hagan Hensley, following his freshman and sophomore years at Caltech, and several summer students in successive summers have been key parts of the project.The final implementation of these techniques was led by Albert Sneppen, who at the time was a bachelors student at the University of Copenhagen and is now working on his Masters at the Cosmic Dawn Center.

It is always rewarding to work with students as part of their first research experiences, and even more so when their work ends up leading to impactful results.

We have several follow-up studies in the works.Some of these involve pushing our results to the most distant galaxies using near-future surveys and JWST.Others involve trying to take our new observational IMF measurements and build improved astrophysical models to explain them.In particular, finding that the IMF is approximately Universal at a fixed timeyet time-dependentseems to require a good explanation. Knowing which IMF corresponds to which time should also be a strong constraint on possible models.

Dr. Steinhardts research is inspired by astrophysical phenomena whose explanation has been cast into doubt, either by new theoretical ideas or new observations. His research interests include galaxy evolution, machine learning, astrostatistics, quasar formation and accretion, dark matter, dark energy, and astrophysical measurements of fundamental constants.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily represent the views of AZoM.com Limited (T/A) AZoNetwork, the owner and operator of this website. This disclaimer forms part of the Terms and Conditions of use of this website.

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Uncovering the Mass of Distant Stars - AZoQuantum

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could conduct a mega-exposure similar to but far larger ... [+] than Hubbles celebrated Ultra-Deep Field Image.

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) will, on July 12, 2022, become an instant icon when NASA and ESA publish a collection of first light photos.

However, its another as yet little talked about space telescope that could become the successoras proven by a simulation by scientists of the kind of mega-exposures it will be able to capture.

The simulation was generated using a new synthetic catalog of galaxies to create a mock universe. Go visit the teams interactive website and you can zoom and pan across the full-resolution image (its incredible!).

Its a NASA infrared space telescope currently in development and scheduled to launch no later than May 2027. Its Galactic Exoplanet Survey its expected to find 100,000 exoplanetsincluding Earth-like exoplanetsand help astronomers understand how the Universe expands.

Although the Roman is often compared to the Hubble because it will have the same size mirror at 2.4-meters, Romans wide-angle lens will give it 100 times the field of view that will allow it to map the Milky Way and other galaxies 100 times faster than Hubble.

However, its wide-field space telescope could work in its favor. Roman has the unique ability to image very large areas of the sky, which allows us to see the environments around galaxies in the early universe, said Nicole Drakos, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz, who led the study published in The Astrophysical Journal that contained the simulation. Our study helps demonstrate what a Roman ultra-deep field could tell us about the universe, while providing a tool for the scientific community to extract the most value from such a program.

As a reminder, heres the iconic Hubble Ultra Deep Field, as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope almost 20 years ago. It transformed our view of the early universe, revealing galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes ... [+] galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

Its one of the deepest images of the cosmos ever obtained and shows almost nearly 10,000 galaxies. Requiring 800 exposures taken 11.3 days and 400 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope around Earth, it was taken between September 24, 2003 and January 16, 2004.

The galaxies in this image are of all different ages, sizes, shapes and colours. About 100 are the among the most distant known, some of them existing when the universe was just 800 million years old.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field gave us a glimpse of the universes youth, but it was too small to reveal much information about what the cosmos was really like back then as a whole, said Brant Robertson, an astronomy professor at the University of California Santa Cruz and a co-author of the study. Its like looking at a single piece of a 10,000-piece puzzle.

He thinks Roman could give us 100 ore pieces of that puzzle, thus giving a fuller picture of what the early universe was like and opening up new scientific opportunities.

So what could Roman produce to rival that iconic image? Heres the synthetic image that visualizes what a Roman ultra-deep field could look like:

his synthetic image visualizes what a Roman ultra-deep field could look like.

And heres an annotated version:

This synthetic image visualizes what a Roman ultra-deep field could look like. The 18 squares at the ... [+] top of this image outline the area Roman can see in a single observation, known as its footprint. The inset at the lower-right zooms into one of the squares of Roman's footprint, and the inset at the lower-left zooms in even further. The image, which contains more than 10 million galaxies, was constructed from a simulation that produced a realistic distribution of the galaxies in the universe. Roman could peer across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history, reaching back to when the universe was only about half a billion years old. Such distant galaxies are extremely faint, so Roman would have to stare at one spot in space for several days to collect enough light from them. The missions wide field of view will provide an incredible amount of data, helping astronomers find rare objects in the epoch of reionization. The large area Roman will observe will also show differences in galaxy properties based on their surrounding environment, allowing astronomers to better understand how early galaxies formed.

The 18 squares at the top of this image outline the area Roman can see in a single observation, with insets in the lower half of the image zooming-in

Excitingly this simulated image contains 10 million galaxies back to when the universe was only about half a billion years old.

Each of the 18 images would take about a week to expose for in order to capture the incredibly faint light.

It will enable astronomers to delve into the epoch of reionization, a period when the first light from stars and galaxies spread ultraviolet energy around a universe then just a half a billion years old.

Formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) until being re-named the Roman after Nancy Grave Roman, NASAs first chief astronomer who was also known as the mother of the Hubble telescope.

According to NASA, the Roman has an expected development cost of $3.2 billion and a maximum cost of $3.9 billion.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Hubbles Most Iconic Images Will Be Smoked By NASAs New Space TelescopeBut Its Not Webb - Forbes

On this week's episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:

Astronomers make the music of the cosmos, by turning data into sound

During the pandemic, scientists with NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory found a new way to connect people especially those who are blind or partly blind with the beauty of space. Kim Arcand, a visualization scientist for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian, and Matt Russo, a University of Toronto astrophysicist, translated data captured by telescopes into musical sounds. The result is 'sonic visualizations' of galaxy clusters, supernovas, black holes and more. The project is called A Universe of Sound.

Quirks and Quarks12:01Astronomers make the music of the cosmos, by turning data into sound

VIDEO: A sonification of a black hole from the Universe of Sound project.

Evidence suggests that humans omletted Australian Thunderbirds to extinction

The earliest human inhabitants of Australia ate the eggs of the two-metre tall thunder bird, which may have contributed to the giant flightless bird's extinction 50,000 years ago. Researchers confirmed that egg shell fragments found in human fire pits likely came from thunderbird eggs. To researchers like Beatrice Demarchi, a biomolecular archaeologist from the University of Turin, this indicates that humans played a role in the bird's demise. Her research was published in the journal PNAS.

Quirks and Quarks8:00Evidence suggests that humans omletted Australian Thunderbirds to extinction

New Hubble image proves there's life in the old space telescope

The spanking new James Webb telescope may be the new kid on the block, but a gigantic panoramic image of the cosmos in the near-infrared just produced by the 31 year old Hubble telescope is what astronomers are excited about this week. It's the largest near-infrared image ever taken, and captures the evolution of distant galaxies going back 10 billion years. The work which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal was led by Lamiya Mowla, Dunlap Fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

Quirks and Quarks7:18New Hubble image proves theres life in the old space telescope

Why removing invasive species can help ecosystems battle climate change

A large scale study of ecosystems around the world suggests that the best way to protect many of them from the impacts of climate change like drought and rising temperatures is to make sure they're left undisturbed by invasive species. A recent study published in PNAS by ecologist Jenica Allen and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, including showed that invasive species often are more damaging to an ecosystem than the impacts of climate change, and removing the disruptive influence of invasive species left ecosystems much better able to handle climate disruption.

Quirks and Quarks7:35Why removing invasive species can help ecosystems battle climate change

A paleontologist reconstructs what Earth sounded like through its long history

The next best thing to traveling back in time to learn about the past via a time machine is to pay a mental visit using fossil evidence. Paleontologist Michael Habib from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County takes us on a journey to explore the evolution of how the sounds of life arose on Earth.

Quirks and Quarks15:47A paleontologist reconstructs what Earth sounded like through its long history

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Jun 11: Music from the cosmos, thunderbird extinction, Hubble gets the big picture and more - CBC.ca

Uranus and Neptune have a lot in common, but they still look different in terms of colour! Now, NASA's Hubble Telescope has found the reason behind it.

Neptune and Uranus share many common features - they have similar masses, sizes, and atmospheric compositions, and a lot more, but still, have you ever wondered why the planets look so different? Skywatchers must have noticed while staring into the night sky that Uranus looks so pale unlike Neptune, which is in a deep blue colour. Well, thanks to NASA's Hubble Telescope, astronomers may now know why Uranus and Neptune are different colours.

Astronomers now have an explanation for this distinctive difference in colours of Neptune and Uranus despite sharing several commonalities.

Researchers designed a single atmospheric model that matches observations of both planets using data from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, the Gemini North telescope, and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. According to the model, the abundance of haze on Uranus builds up in the planet's stagnant, sluggish atmosphere, giving it a lighter tone than Neptune. Also read: NASA Hubble Telescope discovers a giant Galaxy; Sized 2.5x LARGER than our Milky Way Galaxy!

The new research suggests that a layer of concentrated haze that exists on both planets is thicker on Uranus than on Neptune, causing Uranus to look whiter than Neptune. The atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus would seem nearly identically blue if there was no haze in their atmospheres due to blue light scattered in their atmospheres. Also Read: NASA Hubble Space Telescope spots Hidden Galaxy behind Milky Way Galaxy!

Three layers of particles at various heights make up the team's model. The middle layer, which is a layer of haze particles thicker on Uranus than on Neptune, is the primary layer that impacts the colours. Methane ice condenses onto the particles in this layer on both worlds, dragging them deeper into the atmosphere in a shower of methane snow, according to the study. The research team believes Neptune's atmosphere is more effective at mixing up methane particles into the haze layer and producing this snow because it has a more active, turbulent atmosphere than Uranus'. This removes additional haze and keeps Neptune's haze layer thinner than Uranus', allowing Neptune's blue colour to shine out.

"We hoped that developing this model would help us understand clouds and hazes in the ice giant atmospheres," Dr. Mike Wong, an astronomer at the University of California and a member of the team behind this result, has commented.

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Why Uranus and Neptune colours are different: NASA's Hubble Telescope has the answer - HT Tech

NASAs Hubble Telescope shared a breathtaking photo of a massive star that is 32 times larger than the Sun. Know details.

It is stunning and spooky at the same time! NASA's Hubble Telescope has again left everyone mesmerized with a new glimpse of a giant star. Though there are millions of stars that you can witness in a clear sky every night, there is one massive bright star in our solar system. Of course, we are talking about the Sun! But this giant star photo captured by the Hubble Space Telescope is 32 times more massive and 200,000 times brighter than even our very own Sun.

NASA took to Instagram to share the photo taken by the Hubble Telescope of the giant star named Herschel 36 at the centre of the Lagoon Nebula. It is essentially a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius, located around 4,000 light-years away. The NASA post shared the secrets of Lagoon Nebula that it may have lost serenic in image, but in reality, it is far from it! NASAs Hubble Telescope shows a 3D structure of the Nebula measuring about 4 light-years across.

"At the center of this image is a massive star 200,000 times brighter than the Sun Though it may look like a serene cosmic landscape, the Lagoon Nebula is full of turbulent gasses, roaring stellar winds, and intense radiation emanating from a massive star," NASA wrote in the post.

NASA further shared that the massive star is still young in a cosmic sense. Herschel 36 star is roughly 1 million years old, and is flinging off its natal cocoon of material ionized gasses like hydrogen and nitrogen. That red material seen in the image captured by NASAs Hubble Telescope as red is actually hydrogen and green material shows the presence of nitrogen.

Astonishingly, the star is expected to live for just another five million years. In comparison, our Sun is already more than five billion years old but it is expected to live for another five billion years. Shocking, no?

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Hubble Telescope captures giant star 32x larger than Sun, but it will die first! Check breathtaking NASA photo - HT Tech

Illustration: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), and A. Mellinger

When we gaze out into the night sky, all may appear calm, but looks can be deceiving. Though we may not feel it, our galaxythe Milky Wayis hurtling through the universe at an astonishing 1.3 million miles per hour. And, it's on a crash course with its neighborthe Andromeda Galaxy. While these spiral galaxies are 2.5 million light years apart, that won't always be the case.

The Andromeda Galaxy, which is far larger than the Milky Way, is hurtling toward us at 68 miles per second. And while that might seem fast, given the distance between these galaxies it will still take 4 billion years for them to collide. Eventually, in about 6 billion years, they will transform from two separate spiral galaxies into one giant spherical galaxy. This new galaxy, which is sometimes called Milkomeda or Milkdromeda, will also see the merger of the supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of the Milky Way and Andromeda.

Though the thought of such a large collision sounds scary, scientists point out that due to the distance between stars, it is unlikely that individual stars will collide. And our solar system? That should be safe too. Researchers have estimated that it will likely be swept to the outskirts of the new galaxy, though this is also a small chance that it could be ejected completely from Milkomeda. Either way, it's unlikely that humans will be around to see this spectacular light show, as at this point the Sun will have grown so hot that it will have terminated life on Earth.

What's incredible about the Andromeda-Milky Way Collision is that we've known about it for hundreds of years. In the early 1900s, astronomer Vesto Slipher predicted that the Andromeda Galaxy was headed directly toward the Milky Way. Since that time, many astronomers have created simulations to see if these galaxies would meet head-on or simply skirt past each other. In 2012, data from the Hubble Telescope confirmed that there would definitely be a collision.

It's important to remember that these types of collisions are quite normal and expected. In fact, the Milky Way was already involved in a large collision about 10 billion years ago and larger galaxies often absorb smaller galaxies in their orbit. While we may not be around to see the formation of Milkomeda, it's incredible to look at the simulations and know that we're using science to predict the future.

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NASA Says About 300 Million Habitable Planets Could Exist in the Milky Way

Spectacular Time-Lapse Footage Taken by Worlds First Spacecraft To Touch the Sun

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The Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies Are Set to Collide in 4 Billion Years - My Modern Met

Scientists have a new, more accurate, measurement of the expansion of the universe thanks to decades worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The new analysis of data from the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope continues the observatory's longstanding quest to better understand how quickly the universe expands, and how much that expansion is accelerating.

The number astronomers use to measure this expansion is called the Hubble Constant (not after the telescope but after astronomer Edwin Hubble who first measured it in 1929). The Hubble Constant is a tough one to pin down given that different observatories looking at different zones of the universe have delivered different answers. But a new study expresses confidence that Hubble's most recent effort is precise for the expansion it sees, although there is still a difference from other observatories.

The new study confirms previous expansion rate estimates based on Hubble observations, showing an expansion of roughly 45 miles (73 kilometers) per megaparsec.(A megaparsec is a measurement of distance equal to one million parsecs, or 3.26 million light-years.)

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

"Given the large Hubble sample size, there is only a one-in-a-million chance astronomers are wrong due to an unlucky draw ... a common threshold for taking a problem seriously in physics," NASA said in a statement on Thursday (May 19), paraphrasingNobel Laureate and study lead author Adam Riess.

Riess has affiliations at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) that manages Hubble, as well as the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Riess and collaborators received the Nobel in 2011 after Hubble and other observatories confirmed that the universe was accelerating in its expansion. Riess calls this latest Hubble effort a "magnum opus" given that it draws upon practically the telescope's entire history, 32 years of space work, to deliver an answer.

Hubble's data nailed down its observed expansion rate under a program called SHOES (Supernova, H0, for the Equation of State of Dark Energy.) The dataset doubles a previous sample of measurements and also includes more than 1,000 Hubble orbits, NASA stated. The new measurement is also eight times more precise than expectations for Hubble's capabilities.

Efforts to measure how fast the universe is expanding usually focus on two distance markers. One of them are the Cepheid stars, variable stars that brighten and dim at a constant rate; their utility has been known since 1912, when astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt marked their importance in imagery she was reviewing.

Cepheids are good for charting distances that are inside the Milky Way (our galaxy) and in nearby galaxies. For further distances, astronomers rely upon Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas have a consistent luminosity (inherent brightness), allowing for precise estimates of their distance based on how bright they appear in telescopes.

In the new study, NASA stated, "the team measured 42 of the supernova milepost markers with Hubble. Because they are seen exploding at a rate of about one per year, Hubble has, for all practical purposes, logged as many supernovae as possible for measuring the universe's expansion." (Again, Hubble has been in space for about 32 years, having launched on April 24, 1990; a mirror flaw that hindered early work was addressed by astronauts in December 1993.)

But the expansion rate still does not have full agreement across different efforts. The new study says Hubble's measurements are roughly 45 miles (73 kilometers) per megaparsec. But when taking into account observations of the deep universe, the rate slows down to about 42 miles (67.5 kilometers) per megaparsec.

Deep universe observations rely principally upon measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck mission, which observed the "echo" of the Big Bang that formed our universe. The echo is known as the cosmic microwave background. NASA said astronomers are "at a loss" to figure out why there are two different values, but suggested we may have to rethink basic physics.

Riess said it is best to see the expansion rate not for its exact value at its time, but its implications. "I don't care what the expansion value is specifically, but I like to use it to learn about the universe," Riess said in the NASA statement.

More measurements are expected to come in the forthcoming 20 years from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is completing commissioning work in deep space ahead of looking at some of the first galaxies. Webb, NASA said, will look at Cepheids and Type 1a supernovas "at greater distances or sharper resolution than what Hubble can see." That may in turn refine Hubble's observed rate.

A paper based on the research will be published in the Astronomical Journal. A preprint version is available on arXiv.org.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor Facebook.

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Hubble telescope refines universe expansion rate mystery - Space.com

A fresh image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a deep view of the eye of a galactic needle.

The spiral galaxy is nicknamed the "Needle's Eye", although more officially it is known as NGC 247 and Caldwell 62. NASA said May 10 the nickname is appropriate given this galaxy is a dwarf spiral, making it a relatively small group of stars compared to our own Milky Way.

The Hubble Space Telescope image portrays a hole on the other side of the galaxy, which NASA said puzzles astronomers. "There is a shortage of gas in that part of the galaxy, which means there isnt much material from which new stars can form," the agency wrote.

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

"Since star formation has halted in this area, old, faint stars populate the void. Scientists still dont know how this strange feature formed, but studies hint toward past gravitational interactions with another galaxy," the agency added.

The hole is not the only mystery this galaxy holds.

Below the disk of the galaxy, you can spit a few more smaller and distant galaxies beyond the Needle's Eye marker of 11 million light-years, a relatively close distance to us in galactic terms. But learning about those faraway galaxies is something astronomers are also trying to do.

"Bright red indicates areas of high-density gas and dust, and robust star formation rather close to the edge of the galaxy," NASA said. There's also a bright foreground star that happens to be in the field of view.

Embedded in the heart of the galaxy is an ultraluminous X-ray source, too, but it is unclear where that came from.

"Are they stellar-mass black holes gorging on unusually large amounts of gas? Or are they long-sought 'intermediate-mass' black holes, dozens of times more massive than their stellar counterparts but smaller than the monster black holes in the centers of most galaxies?" NASA asked.

Independent studies of the galaxy using other forms of light, such as X-rays with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, suggest the X-rays are coming from an intermediate-mass black hole's disk. But more studies will be required to decide for sure what is going on.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor Facebook.

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Hubble telescope looks deep into the Needle's Eye in this dwarf spiral galaxy photo - Space.com