New photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope show some of the faintest stars ever seen in a globular cluster. The cluster is NGC 6397, which formed almost right at the beginning of the Universe, nearly 12 billion years ago. This means the stars in the formation are made of the primordial material that formed shortly after the Bang Bang. These dim stars are white dwarfs that were once more massive versions of our own Sun. They cool at a very predictable rate, giving astronomers another way to calculate the age of the Universe.
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Orion Revealed by Spitzer
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this image of the Orion Nebula using its Infrared Array Camera. In this infrared view, intricate structures made up of gas and dust in the nebula are revealed. Spitzer’s camera took 10,000 exposures of the region, which were combined on computer to make up the full image. The telescope has already uncovered nearly 2,300 planet-forming disks in the region, which would be hidden to visible light telescopes like Hubble.
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Hubble Finds an Exoplanet’s Parent Star
When a star flared briefly, astronomers knew it was because a dimmer star had passed directly in front, acting as a lens with its gravity to focus light. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the star. This was important, because the brief microlensing event also turned up the fact that this lensing star has a planet. Astronomers have used the power of the Hubble Space Telescope to find this dim star two years after the lensing event. Identifying the star is critical, because it allows astronomers to measure its unique characteristics, such as mass, temperature and composition.
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Hubble View of a Supernova Remnant
This Hubble Space Telescope photograph contains a supernova remnant located in the Small Magellanic Cloud – it’s bluish haze at the centre of the photo. The remnant is known as E0102, and it’s about 50 light-years away from the edge of a massive star forming region called N 76. The light from the supernova itself would have reached us about 2,000 years ago.
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First Pictures After Hubble’s Breakdown
After its brief breakdown last month, the Hubble Space Telescope’s main camera is gathering science data again. The Advanced Camera for Surveys stopped functioning after power supply problems, but engineers were able to switch to a backup power system and get it back online. This image was one of the first taken after the camera resumed operations on July 4th. It shows a galaxy cluster located 9 billion light-years away. Hubble located a supernova in June 2006, and then returned to see its afterglow in July.
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Hubble Camera is Back Online
NASA officials announced this morning that they were successfully able to restart the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. The camera initially failed on June 19 because of power problems. Engineers devised a solution to switch the camera and two other instruments to a backup power system, and began uploading commands on Thursday. The space telescope will resume normal operations on Sunday night.
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NASA Working on Solution for Hubble’s Camera
NASA officials announced today that the malfunctioning main camera for the Hubble Space Telescope should be back online by July 3. Ground controllers first learned of a problem with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on June 19, when a voltage spike caused the camera to shut down. Officials think a bad transistor might be responsible for the voltage problem, and believe they can resolve the problem without any degradation to Hubble’s performance.
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Two Dust Disks Around Beta Pictoris
Detailed photographs of nearby star Beta Pictoris by the Hubble Space Telescope show that it’s circled by two disks of dust. Astronomers believe that a planet with the mass of Jupiter is using its gravity to sweep up material from the primary disk. Additional material is attracted to the planet, and is shaped into a second disk. The dust disk was first discovered by ground telescopes in 1984, and then seen by Hubble in 1995.
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Extreme Star Birth in Merging Galaxies
The newest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the turbulent region where two galaxies are merging together. The galactic collision is known as Arp 220, and it’s one of the nearest, brightest examples of this in the sky. Hubble’s keen vision has located more than 200 massive star clusters, the largest of which is twice as big as anything we have in the Milky Way. Arp 220 should continue producing new start clusters until it runs out of gas in about 40 million years.
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Hubble View of NGC 5866
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this magnificent view of disk galaxy NGC 5866, seen nearly edge on from our vantage point. The galaxy’s dark dust lane is clearly visible, and it appears to be slightly warped, compared to the disk of starlight. This indicates that it probably brushed past another galaxy in the distant past. NGC 5866 is located in the constellation Draco, approximately 44 million light-years away; it’s similar in mass to the Milky Way, but only two-thirds the diameter.
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