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Explanation: The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The featured image is a digital combination of images taken in different colors by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, highlighting many sharp features. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). M51 is a spiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a...

Our Milky Way galaxy is haunted. The vast gulf of space between the stars is plied by the dead, burned-out and crushed remnants of once glorious stars. These black holes cannot be directly seen because their intense gravity swallows light. Like legendary wandering ghosts, their presence can only be deduced by seeing how they affect the environment around them. Imagine crushing the mass of a fleet of battleships into something no bigger than a baseball. That only begins to describe the infinite density locked away into a black hole left over from a stellar explosion. The black hole is typically...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers. The estimated diameter is approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than found at the heart of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun. The behemoth comet, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is barreling this way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the...

Closeup of the region on the sky, 1/250 of a degree across, where the gravity of a foreground cluster of galaxies magnifies the distant background star—nicknamed Earendil—thousands of times. With a fortuitous lineup of a massive cluster of galaxies, astronomers discovered a single star across most of the entire observable Universe. This is the farthest detection of a single star ever. The star may be up to 500 times more massive than the Sun. The discovery has been published today in the journal Nature. Gazing at the night sky, all the stars that you see lie within our own galaxy,...

The Hubble Telescope snapped the object named Arp 282, which is an interacting galaxy pair composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 & the galaxy IC 1559. In ESA's own words, this incredible three-dimensional-looking picture by Hubble shows two galaxies interacting with each other as if engaging in a 'cosmic draw'. The interaction captured by the telescope is considered significant as astronomers believe that the interaction of galaxies with one another is an important aspect of their evolution. According to ESA, the object seen in the picture is named Arp 282, which is an interacting galaxy pair composed of the...

I have carried out a search for Planet 9 in the IRAS data. At the distance range proposed for Planet 9, the signature would be a 60 micron unidentified IRAS point source with an associated nearby source from the IRAS Reject File of sources which received only a single hours-confirmed (HCON) detection. The confirmed source should be detected on the first two HCON passes, but not on the third, while the single HCON should be detected only on the third HCON. I have examined the unidentified sources in three IRAS 60micron catalogues: some can be identified with 2MASS galaxies, Galactic...

It’s taken 25 years to build, has faced long delays, and cost many billions of dollars more than expected, but the countdown is finally on to launch the James Webb telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. In just six weeks, a powerful rocket is expected to carry into space the most ambitious space telescope ever built, one promising to revolutionize how we see the universe. At a news conference this week, scientists said that after more than a decade of delays, the James Webb telescope is finally ready to fly.

These two galaxies are so tight, the stellar formation encompassing them both actually has a name of its own. Say hello to Arp 91, a pair of spiral galaxies that are situated so close together (in relative terms, space is big) we can actually see their outer arms reaching out and colliding with one another. BFFs on an intergalactic scale. Like a good marriage, these galaxies may share a name but they are their own individuals as well. In the center of the frame is NGC 5953. Just above it and slightly to the right is NGC 5954. They're both...

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. This water vapor forms when ice from the moon's surface sublimates—that is, turns from solid to gas... ...Previous research has offered circumstantial evidence that Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, contains more water than all of Earth's oceans. However, temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface is frozen solid.... ...Roth and his team then took a closer look at the relative distribution of the aurora in the UV images. Ganymede's surface temperature varies strongly throughout the day,...

Explanation: What does the Andromeda galaxy look like in ultraviolet light? Young blue stars circling the galactic center dominate. A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, really is just next door as large galaxies go. Spanning about 230,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light in 2003. While its spiral arms stand out in visible light images, Andromeda's arms look more like rings in ultraviolet. The rings are sites of intense star formation and...

NASA's beloved Hubble Space Telescope has been facing one of its greatest challenges. A technical glitch left it in safe mode for over a month. This week, NASA said it finally tracked down the source of the issue and tried a new fix, and it seems to have worked. "NASA has successfully switched to backup hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope, including powering on the backup payload computer, on July 15," the space agency announced on Friday. The telescope has been in service for over 30 years. The Hubble team had been looking at the payload computer -- hardware dating...

A series of multi-day tests, which included attempts to restart and reconfigure the computer and the backup computer, were not successful, but the information gathered from those activities has led the Hubble team to determine that the possible cause of the problem is in the Power Control Unit (PCU).

The Hubble Space Telescope is currently offline. On Sunday 13 June, the telescope's payload computer went offline, and engineers here on Earth are currently performing operations to get it up and running again. The payload computer, as you might expect, is vital to Hubble's continued science operations. It's the 'brains' of the instrument, coordinating and controlling the various instruments with which Hubble is equipped. It also monitors the telescope for issues. Initially, NASA engineers speculated that the cause of the halt was a degrading memory module. An attempt to restart the computer failed, so, on Wednesday 16 June, the Hubble...

NASA is working to resolve an issue with the payload computer on the Hubble Space Telescope. The computer halted on Sunday, June 13, shortly after 4 p.m. EDT. After analyzing the data, the Hubble operations team is investigating whether a degrading memory module led to the computer halt.

March 7th, Hubble unexpectedly shut down its science observations. The automated systems that keep track of the spacecraft’s health triggered the switch, putting the telescope into “safe mode” due to what is being described as “a software error within the spacecraft’s main computer.” Unfortunately, that was just the beginning of the weirdness that Hubble’s handlers had to deal with over the past week. As NASA explains in a new blog post, The error occurred at approximately 4 a.m. EST. When the Hubble team checked in on the telescope to see what was going on they discovered that something was amiss...

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is recovering from a glitch that halted its science operations over the weekend, according to NASA. The telescope entered "safe mode" unexpectedly on Sunday morning (March 7), stalling the observatory's science observations due to an apparent software glitch. Science operations resumed late Thursday (March 11). While Hubble is partially back to work, NASA is still troubleshooting one instrument on the 30-year-old telescope, according to a statement released on Friday (Mar. 12). The WFC3 issue was an "unexpected error," according to NASA, that occurred when the telescope was transitioning from safe mode into pre-science after the...

About 41 light-years from Earth is an exoplanet that lost one atmosphere but has seemingly gained a new one. Scientists also believe the planet, known as GJ 1132 b, has evolved quite drastically from a gaseous world to a rocky one the size of Earth... ...Pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at GJ 1132 b revealed a surprise. The telescope showed that the planet has developed a toxic and hazy "secondary atmosphere" made of hydrogen, methane, hydrogen cyanide and a haze of aerosol, like the smog we have on Earth. So how did this poisonous atmosphere come to be?

THE Hubble space telescope has been taken offline with all observations halted until further notice. The Nasa team behind the $1.5billion contraption said that it was placed into "safe mode" at 4pm ET (9pm GMT) on Sunday due to a software bug. The telescope, which orbits about 547 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth, is not in danger of shutting down permanently, according to the official Hubble Twitter account. "All science systems appear normal and Hubble is safe and stable," the account tweeted on Monday. "The team is working [on] plans to safely return it to normal science operations." Launched in...

Scientists were expecting to find an intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397, but instead they found evidence of a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there. New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have led to the first measurement of the extent of a collection of black holes in a core-collapsed globular cluster. Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, in which stars are packed closely together. They are also typically very old — the globular cluster that is the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the Universe...

Explanation: These dark pillars may look destructive, but they are creating stars. This pillar-capturing image of the inside of the Eagle Nebula, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars. At each pillars' end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed. The Eagle Nebula, associated with the open star cluster M16, lies...