Celebrating Hubble’s 32nd Birthday with a Galaxy Grouping

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge. Credit: NASA, ESA and STScI

A Record Broken: Hubble Finds the Most Distant Star Ever Seen

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) — the most distant individual star ever seen. This sets up a major target for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in its first year.

The star nicknamed Earendel (indicated here with an arrow) is positioned along a ripple in spacetime that gives it extreme magnification, allowing it to emerge into view from its host galaxy, which appears as a red smear across the sky. The whole scene is viewed through the distorted lens created by a massive galaxy cluster in the intervening space, which allows the galaxy's features to be seen, but also warps their appearance—an effect astronomers call gravitational lensing. The red dots on either side of Earendel are one star cluster that is mirrored on either side of the ripple, a result of the gravitational lensing distortion. The entire galaxy, called the Sunrise Arc, appears three times, and knots along its length are more mirrored star clusters. Earendel's unique position right along the line of most extreme magnification allows it to be detected, even though it is not a cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Welch (JHU), D. Coe (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI)

A Cosmic Draw

It is now widely accepted amongst astronomers that an important aspect of how galaxies evolve is the way they interact with one another. Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery. 

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS / Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

Hubble Space Telescope Poster

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

How does The Hubble telescope orient itself in space?

Source: Robert Frost, Quora

Hubble Redeployment

Encyclopedia of Space and Astronomy

In February 1997 a second servicing operation (HST SM-02) was successfully accomplished by the STS-82 space shuttle Discovery mission. As part of this HST servicing mission, astronauts installed the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). These instruments replaced the Goddard High-Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) and the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), respectively. The STIS observes the universe in four spectral bands that extend from the ultraviolet through the visible and into the near-infrared. Astronomers use the STIS to analyze the temperature, composition, motion, and other important properties of celestial objects. Operating at near-infrared wavelengths, the NICMOS is letting astronomers observe the dusty cores of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and investigate interesting proto-planetary disks around stars.

Hubble celebrates 25 years in orbit

hubble25th.org

On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off from Earth with the Hubble Space Telescope nestled securely in its bay. The following day, Hubble was released into space, ready to peer into the vast unknown. Since then, Hubble has reinvigorated and reshaped our perception of the cosmos and uncovered a universe where almost anything seems possible within the laws of physics. Hubble has revealed properties of space and time that for most of human history were only probed in the imaginations of scientists and philosophers alike. Today, Hubble continues to provide views of cosmic wonders never before seen and is at the forefront of many new discoveries.

Shortly after Hubble was deployed in 1990, the observatory’s primary mirror was discovered to have a flaw that affected the clarity of the telescope’s early images. Astronauts repaired Hubble in December 1993. Including that trip, there have been five astronaut servicing missions to Hubble. The first servicing mission occurred Dec. 2-13, 1993. Subsequent servicing missions occurred on Feb. 11-21, 1997; Dec.19-27, 1999; March 1-12, 2002; and May 11-24, 2009.

Hubble M31 PHAT Mosaic

The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird's-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disk. It's like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And, there are lots of stars in this sweeping view – over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.

NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler

A Jupiter-mass exoplanet detected by microlensing

Some years ago Hubble Space Telescope for the first time identified the parent star of a distant planet discovered through gravitational microlensing.

This is an artist's concept of a gas giant planet orbiting a red dwarf K star (system name OGLE-2003-BLG-235L/MOA-2003-BLG-53L). The planet has not been directly imaged, but its presence was detected in 2003 microlensing observations of a field star in our galaxy. Gravitational microlensing happens when a foreground star amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. Follow-up observations by Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 separated the light of the slightly offset foreground star from the background star. This allowed the host star to be identified as a red dwarf star located 19,000 light-years away. The Hubble observations allow for the planet's mass to be estimated at 2.6 Jupiter masses. The characteristics of the lensing event show that the planet is in a Jupiter-sized orbit around its parent red star. The rings and moon around the gas giant are hypothetical, but plausible, given the nature of the family of gas giant planets in our solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

The Whirlpool Galaxy done slicing

The Whirlpool Galaxy is the prototype of a grand-design spiral galaxy seen face-on. It lies with its smaller, yellowish companion in the Canes Venatici constellation, about 31 million light-years away.

The Whirlpool Galaxy (or M51 or NGC 5194) in all its glory, with the companion galaxy NGC 5195 (top right). Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

The arc that shouldn't exist

Seeing is believing, except when you don't believe what you see. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years. The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the monster cluster's powerful gravity, an effect called gravitational lensing.

These images, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, show an arc of blue light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant star-forming galaxy whose light is distorted by the monster cluster's powerful gravity, an effect called gravitational lensing. The "lensed" galaxy existed 10 billion to 13 billion years ago. The arc, located within the small box, is barely visible in the Hubble image of the cluster, named IDCS J1426.5+3508. A close-up image of the arc is shown in the inset. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Gonzalez, A. Stanford, and M. Brodwin

The Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy UGC 5497

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured this view of the dwarf galaxy UGC 5497, which looks a bit like salt dashed on black velvet in this image.

Wide field image of the region around UGC 5497 (the galaxy is marked with a red circle). Credit: SDSS-III                     

Playing with NGC 1569

The nearby dwarf galaxy NGC 1569, about 11 million light years from us, is a hotbed of vigorous star birth activity which blows huge bubbles and super-bubbles that riddle the main body of the galaxy. The galaxy's vigorous "star factories" are also manufacturing brilliant blue star clusters. This galaxy had a sudden and relatively recent onset of star birth 25 million years ago, which subsided about the time the very earliest human ancestors appeared on Earth.

The image of NGC 1569 published on February 2004 on the ESA Hubble website. Credit: European Space Agency, NASA & Peter Anders (Göttingen University Galaxy Evolution Group, Germany)

NGC 3314, a random superposition of distant galaxies

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a highly detailed image of a pair of overlapping galaxies called NGC 3314. While the two galaxies look as if they are in the midst of a collision, this is in fact a trick of perspective: the two just happen to appear in the same direction from our vantage point.

This image shows the central region of a wide field of view around the overlapping galaxy pair NGC 3314. Our galaxy pair is that kind of "flying saucer" near the bottom center of the image. Credit: NASA, ESA, Digitized Sky Survey 2 (Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin)

Using the Moon as a mirror

During the transit of Venus across the Sun's face on June 5-6, 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope will be looking in the opposite direction — at the Moon. Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to use the Moon as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere. Imprinted on that light are the fingerprints of the planet's atmospheric makeup. This is an experiment to see how well Venus's atmosphere can be studied spectroscopically, as a proxy for transit observations of extrasolar planets.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

Source: 

• Hubble Shoots The Moon During Venus Transit, News Release Number: STScI-2012-22, May 4, 2012

Tycho, Hubble and Venus

This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our Moon. Astronomers didn't aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun's face on June 5-6.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Ehrenreich (IPAG/CNRS/Université Joseph Fourier)