One of the Hubble Space Telescope’s main science instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has gone offline, and the chances of getting back online don’t look so good.
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Hubble Sees a Hypergiant Star Nearing Death
VY Canis Majoris, located about 5,000 light-years away, is no ordinary star; it’s a supergiant, containing 30 to 40 times the mass of our own Sun. And it’s so luminous it’s also considered a hypergiant, shining 500,000 times as bright as the Sun. And it’s big… really big. If this star lived in our Solar System, its surface would extend out to the orbit of Saturn.
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Hubble Helps Make a 3-D Map of Dark Matter
A team of astronomers has created a three-dimensional map of dark matter distribution across the Universe. This map gives some of the best evidence that normal matter, like you and me, stars and planets, accumulate around the densest regions of dark matter.
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Happy Hubble Holidays
The fine folks at the Hubble Space Telescope released this photograph today to celebrate the holidays. I’m not sure which holiday specifically, but anytime is a good time to release beautiful new photographs from Hubble.
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Heavy Stars Embedded in NGC 6357
This Hubble photograph shows star cluster Pismis 24, which lies at the heart of emission nebula NGC 6357. The stars are some of the most massive ever seen in our galaxy, each of which weighs at least 100 times the mass of our Sun. Astronomers originally thought it was two stars, each of which exceeded the theoretical limits on stellar size. Hubble discovered that it’s actually three stars, bringing the reality back in line with theory.
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Spitzer and Hubble View Orion
This beautiful photograph is of a region in the Orion Nebula called the Trapezium. It was taken by merging images together from two of the Great Observatories: Hubble and Spitzer. The swirls of green are ultraviolet and visible images revealed by Hubble, while the reds and oranges are infrared detected by Spitzer. At the heart of the photograph lurk 4 massive stars, each of which is 100,000 times brighter than our own Sun. The nebula is located about 1,500 light years from the Earth, and can be seen in small telescopes or binoculars.
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Super-Supermassive Black Hole
The Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomical Observatory teamed up to produce this composite image of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. The cluster contains dozens of galaxies held together by gravity. A truly supermassive black hole lurks at the heart of this cluster, containing more than a billion solar masses. The red areas are twin jets of material streaming away from the black hole.
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NASA is Go for Hubble Repair
Finally some good news for the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA announced a new space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the aging space telescope. This fifth and final visit to Hubble is tentatively scheduled for Fall 2008. Astronauts will install two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will help probe large-scale structures in the Universe, and the Wide Field Camera 3, a very sensitive instrument capable of seeing from infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths.
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Echos of Light
The strange variable star V838 Monocerotis flared up nearly 5 years ago, and astronomers have been trying to figure out what’s going on ever since. As the light from the flare up propagates out from the star, it illuminates the surrounding cloud of dust. This light reflects off the dust, and we see this echo here on Earth. This latest photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the changes that have happened over the last year. One interesting feature are the whorls and eddies in the dust, which could be caused by powerful magnetic fields.
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Nearly a Thousand Years After the Death of a Star
In 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded the temporary brightening of a star in the constellation Taurus. Nearly 1000 years later, we look in the same region and see the exploded remnants of a dead star: the Crab Nebula. This composite photograph of the Crab Nebula was made by merging images from Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows only a hail of high-energy particles and expanding debris cloud that once was a massive star.
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