The Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out white dwarf stars in a nearby star cluster. According to astronomers from the European Space Agency, the new discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in such clusters. The pair of […]
Using multiple images from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of our deepest-ever view of the Universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the hybrid image contains around 5,000 galaxies – some from a time when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old. Garth Illingworth, principal investigator […]
Hoping to eventually identify Earth-like planets in other solar systems, astronomers plan to point the Hubble telescope at the Moon’s Tycho crater (pictured) during the upcoming transit of Venus across the Sun (June 5-6) and analyze the reflected Venusian atmospheric spectra. The Moon-mirror approach is necessary, explain NASA scientists, as Hubble cannot look at the […]
Astronomers have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe – a mini-galaxy at a distance of 13.2 billion light years that formed only 480 million years after the Big Bang. Writing about their observations in Nature, the team […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies by uncovering a primordial population of ultra-blue galaxies whose light is reaching us now after 13 billion years – just 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang. Estimating the age of the newly found galaxies was made possible by combining Hubble’s Ultra […]
A British space scientist has worked out that sending texts (SMS) via cell phone works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr Nigel Bannister, from the University of Leicester, made the calculations for the UK television program The Mobile Phone Rip-Off. To arrive at his finding, Bannister […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a trove of 500 infant galaxies, formed around one billion years after the big bang. The astronomers involved say the sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early universe and could add significantly to our understanding of the origin of galaxies, which only a decade ago […]
The number that specifies the expansion rate of the universe, the Hubble constant, has been independently determined using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The new result agrees with figures obtained using other methods and also extends their validity to greater distances, allowing astronomers to probe earlier epochs in the evolution of the universe. “The reason this […]
Astronomers got a preview of what Deep Impact’s fourth of July rendezvous with the comet Tempel 1 may look like with images captured by the Hubble space telescope. The pictures have captured Tempel 1’s icy nucleus – roughly the size of central Paris – ejecting material in a spectacular display. The ejaculation of dust and […]
