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NASA’s New Horizons mission revolutionized our view of Pluto, revealing a vibrant, geologically active world full of surprises.
Hubble just chalked up another first.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning close-up image of comet NEOWISE, which recently captured the public’s imagination becoming visible in the night sky.
The story of the most prolific space telescope in history.
Hi, have you tried switching it off and on again?
Drawn by gravity, a dwarf galaxy pair is leaving the void for a more crowded region of the universe.
Captioned above is one of Hubble‘s most famous and beautiful space photos. The photo features NGC 609 – a magnificent star cluster, which Hubble captured complete with colored gas, dust and a slew of stars of various brightness. Pictures like these remind people of the tremendous gift they have – sight. How can one share […]
This year Hubble will embark on one its most ambitious projects yet, as it’s scheduled to glimpse farther away into the Universe than ever before. Six new “deep field” images are slated, and recently astronomers at Hubble have delivered the first to the public. The image reveals extremely faint, tiny galaxies that may be more […]
This oddball cosmic body, called P/2013 P5, has puzzled astronomers for a while. By mass and orbit, it can only be classed as an asteroid, but the fact that it trails gas or dust would make it a comet. In fact, this weird rock has six tails, which would maybe make it a supercomet! Researchers at […]
Each of NASA’s Great Observatories – Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra – have been designed to peer through the Universe in a characteristic manner. The telescopes have provided along the years massive amount of astronomical data and have helped scientists make important discoveries. What if you combine each of the telescopes’ strong points to assemble one […]
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, followed by observations done with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes, astronomers have identified what’s considered to be the densest galaxy found so far in the nearby part of the Universe. Classed as an “ultra-compact dwarf galaxy” and dubbed as M60-UCD1, the density of stars in the galaxy is about 15,000 greater […]
The “Ring Nebula” is a very popular target for amateur astronomers around the world since its bright glow and highly characteristic shape make it easily identifiable, even to those who have yet to learn even the most basic tricks of the trade. This fantastic cosmic cloud tells the story of a dying star and for […]
Hubble just never ceases to surprise. The latest astronomical find discovered using the ever resourceful space telescope is a never before encountered double ring pattern known as an Einstein ring. This very rare pattern is the result of a peculiar optical alignment in which three galaxies are perfectly aligned with each other, like beads on […]
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have come across the farthest supernova of its type found thus far – a type Ia supernova which exploded some 10 billion years ago. The discovery isn’t just about setting milestones, however. Supernovae act as beacons that help astronomers measure the expansion of the Universe, and this latest finding will help […]
Back in 2008, Hubble released a stunning image of a very bright star called Fomalhaut which spanned a huge disk of matter around it. The whole picture bared an uncanny resemblance to the eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies. Also at the time, scientists caught the glimpse of a tiny speck of light […]
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… at about 2 billion light years away from Earth lies radio-galaxy Hercules A, also known as 3C 348. At a first glance it looks just like another massive galaxy out there – at least when looking in the visible spectrum. In the radio wavelengths however, […]
Using the evergreen Hubble telescope, astronomers from NASA have been able to uncover a previously unseen population of ancient galaxies, observed as they appeared only 350 million to 600 million years after the big bang, when the Universe was still in its infancy. The galaxies are located in a patch of the sky called the […]
NASA scientists have announced they have discovered the farthest object discovered so far in the Universe, a 13.3 billion old galaxy or a mere 420 million years after the Big Bang. That’s not to say that its 13.3 billion light years away from Earth, since the Universe has expanded greatly since then and the actual […]
The great pics from Hubble just never end! This time, the brave telescope offered an impressive view of the center of globular cluster NGC 6362. The image of this spherical collection of stars takes a deeper look at the core of the globular cluster, which contains a high concentration of stars with different colors. Seeing […]
In a remarkable discovery, astronomers have found the oldest spiral galaxy to our knowledge – a three-armed spiral galaxy dating back nearly 11 billion years. It precedes any other previous record holder by about 2 billion years, basically sweeping away the competition. The spiral galaxy is so amazing that it caught astronomers completely by surprise, and […]
Using the Subaru and Keck optical/infrared telescopes on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, a 4,200 metre-high summit which houses the world’s largest observatory for optical, infrared and submillimeter astronomy, a team of Japanese astronomers claim in a recently published paper that they’ve discovered the earliest galaxy found thus far in the known Universe – it is 12.91 billion years […]
Now this is something that doesn’t happen everyday, especially from behalf of one of the most paranoid and money-gobbling organizations in the world, an US intelligence agency. According to a recent press release from NRO, the secretive government agency that flies spy satellites, two such functional and high-capable spy satellites were handed over to NASA as […]
Whenever a massive object, with an equally massive gravitational pull, like black holes or galaxy clusters, falls between an observer, say a telescope, and a distant target in the background to be observed, than a gravitational lens is formed. Light emitted from the distant object gets twisted by the massive object, and ends up distorted […]
An array formed by the greatest space telescopes in the world first discover, then photograph this ancient galaxy from the Universe’s dawn – the brightest such galaxy ever discovered by astronomers at such a distance. How far away you ask? Around 12,9 billion light years away, considering the Universe is estimated at 13.7 billion years […]
The ever faithful Hubble telescope has offered us yet another fantastic glimpse into the Universe’s hidden gems. Captioned below is the NGC 1846 globular cluster, which lies 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Doradus. The cluster is actually the product of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which neighbors our own Milky Way. Check out this very large, […]
The Hubble telescope has captured through an innovative technique, which harnessed light bent from a distant galaxy in a optical lens-like manner, a direct image of a disk of matter surrounding a black hole. The disk, made out of gas and dust, slowly swirls around a giant black hole’s center gradually getting consumed. Powered by […]
The Universe is in constant expansion, which is why it is commonly said to be infinite, so basically one can measure all he wants and still won’t find out how big the Universe is. An accurate measurement of this rate of expansion, however, is critical for space observations, and a young Australian student has recently […]
Astronomers have discovered a fourth moon orbiting Pluto via the famous Hubble telescope, NASA announced this Wednesday. Some of you might be wondering, just exactly how was it possible for astronomers to have missed it so far, considering NASA’s been tracking space rocks even from the edge of the solar system. The truth is, our […]
Tuesday at 6:51 a.m. EDT (1051 GMT) a small asteroid dubbed TD54 passed the Earth dangerously close, above a section of Southeast Asia by Singapore, being at its closest 28,000 miles from our blue planet. The asteroid, 2010 TD54 was first discovered on October 9th, by scientists in Arizona at a NASA-sponsored lab. A few […]
Last week at the latest TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, astronomer Dimitar Sassilov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a distinguished member of the Kepler space telescope science team, unveiled some incredible results gathered by our eyes and ears in the galaxy. Kepler’s most recent reported downloaded conferred some incredible statistics, among which most importantly the discovery of: […]