Tag Archives: Hubble Space Telescope

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How (and When) to Watch the Massive K2 Comet Pass Earth

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Photo: Jim Cumming (Shutterstock)

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What is K2?

The comet C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS)—or “K2″ for short—was first spotted five years ago, in May 2017 by the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA reports. The agency shared an image of the comet taken on June 20th, 2022, when it was (relatively) near open star cluster IC 4665 and bright star Beta Ophiuchi, near a starry edge of the Milky Way.

This is the first time the K2 comet has made its way to the inner Solar System from the dim and distant Oort cloud, NASA explains. When it was first observed in May 2017, it was the most distant active inbound comet ever discovered—roughly 2.4 billion kilometers from the Sun, between the orbital distances of Uranus and Saturn.

How big is K2?

When the K2 comet first became visible on the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists estimated that it had a nucleus nearly 11 miles in diameter. But according to research from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the comet’s nucleus is estimated to have a radius between nine and 50 miles. Either way, it’s pretty damn big.

And that’s not counting the size of K2’s tail—the trail of gasses and dust behind the comet—also known as a “coma.” According to early estimates, K2’s tail is anywhere between 81,000 and 500,000 miles across. For some perspective, that’s somewhere between the width of one and six Jupiters.

When will K2 be visible?

Your best chance of seeing the K2 comet will be the night of July 14th, which is when it will make its closest approach to Earth. Even though it’s huge, you’ll likely need at least a small telescope to spot the comet. Look for a fuzzy patch of light (which is the tail).

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If you’d prefer to watch the comet pass Earth from the comfort of your own home, the Virtual Telescope Project will be live-streaming it starting at 6.15 pm on July 14. But don’t worry too much if you miss K2 on the 14th—it should be visible with a telescope until September.

The closest it will get to the Sun will be in December.

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Astronomers’ brought to tears by first images from Webb Telescope’s

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Nearly six months after the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have started receiving images from the powerful telescope, showing the far reaches of the universe. 

NASA won’t share some of these images with the public until July 12, but astronomers have provided us a glimpse of what to expect. 

NASA’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, said the “first light” images “moved me, as a scientist, as an engineer, and as a human being.” “First light” generally refers to the first time a telescope is used to make scientific observations after it has undergone tests and calibrations. 

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s scientific programs leader said during a Wednesday news conference he was nearly moved to tears by the images. 

“It’s really hard to not look at the universe in a new light and not just have a moment that is deeply personal,” he said. “It’s an emotional moment when you see nature suddenly releasing some of its secrets. And I would like you to imagine and look forward to that.” 

The European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space on Christmas Day 2021. In the intervening months, the telescope – considered the world’s most powerful – has opened its sun shield and traveled nearly one million miles from Earth. 

As the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb took nearly two decades to design, build, and test prior to its launch.

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NASA Releases Video Game to Celebrate Upcoming Space Telescope

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A sampling of the gameplay.
Gif: NASA/Gizmodo

NASA is drumming up excitement for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with a super-retro 8-bit inspired video game, and it’s honestly really fun. In the game, players are Roman Space Telescope operators that have to collect different celestial objects ranging from exoplanets to dark matter.

What is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope?

Once launched, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will become a powerful tool in NASA’s arsenal for unravelling the secrets of the universe. The goal of the astronomical project is to study dark energy and dark matter, which make up about 95% of the known universe. The telescope will also be used to search for exoplanets, much like the James Webb Telescope.

NASA says the Roman Space Telescope will operate much like Hubble, but it’ll function with technology that’s three decades more advanced than its predecessor. That should allow Roman to capture infrared images that are 200 times larger than images collected by Hubble. While NASA hasn’t set a firm launch date yet, the telescope passed a design review in September 2021, and NASA aims to begin science operations no later than May 2027.

The Roman Space Observer Game

NASA released the Roman Space Observer Game last week much to the delight of space and vintage enthusiasts alike. With the 80s being so in right now, the Roman Space Observer Game fits right in as it’s a retro-style arcade game. Think Asteroids, but instead of blasting space rocks, players collect exoplanets and black holes. NASA said on the game’s homepage: “Our goal for this game is to inform and inspire players about the amazing cosmic objects in our universe and what Roman may be able to see in a fun and engaging way.”

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The game is named after the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to launch later this decade.
Graphic: NASA

I played the game for a bit and I had an absolute blast. I was given control of the Nancy Grace Space Telescope and had to catch as many astrophysical objects as possible in one minute using the telescope’s sights. Galaxies, supernovae, rogue planets, and even the James Webb Telescope zoom in and out of the view of the Roman Space Telescope while a kitschy soundtrack full of “bleeps” and “bloops” played in the background. There are also blobs of dark matter and black holes that zip across the screen, but those proved to be much harder to snag since they blended in with the black background, which probably explains why they’re worth so many more points.

It sounds easy, but its actually incredibly challenging and I spent way too much time living the dream of a NASA telescope operator. I’m not a video game expert by any means, but I do love science and I think that the Roman Space Observer Game is a super fun way to engage the public on the namesake telescope’s mission to study some of the more mysterious parts of our universe.

More: NASA to Test GPS-Like Navigation System at the Moon for the First Time

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Webb Space Telescope’s First Full-Color Images Are Just Weeks Away

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Long before Webb even launched from French Guiana, we’ve been waiting for this moment: the first full-color images from this cutting-edge space telescope. NASA announced yesterday that those pictures will be available on July 12, along with some spectroscopic data.

“The release of Webb’s first full-color images will offer a unique moment for us all to stop and marvel at a view humanity has never seen before,” said Eric Smith, a Webb program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA release.

Webb launched on December 25 and arrived at its observation point in space—a place called L2, a million miles from Earth—one month later. Since then, NASA scientists (as well as scientists at the European and Canadian space agencies, who are partners on the telescope mission) have been hard at work preparing the machine to do science.

The telescope’s primary science goals are to study the birth of stars and the rise of planetary systems, to learn about the evolution of galaxies and local objects like exoplanets, and to investigate the earliest sources of light in the universe—the very first stars and galaxies.

“Our goals for Webb’s first images and data are both to showcase the telescope’s powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come,” said astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the same release. “They are sure to deliver a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”

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NASA has been tight-lipped about what Webb’s first color images will show, though we got a clue last month, when the agency released some remarkable shots of the Large Magellanic Cloud taken by Webb’s MIRI instrument and held a briefing on what is to come. From that press conference, we know that the images (called “early release observations”) will be of Webb science targets. But the exact subjects will remain a “surprise” until the images are released in July, Pontoppidan said last month.

The first images are only a month away, but many will follow thereafter. Only planned to last five years, the Webb mission may go for as long as 20 years, thanks to fuel saved during an ultra-precise launch.

More: NASA Releases Ridiculously Sharp Webb Space Telescope Images

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Hubble Space Telescope data suggests something strange happening with our universe, NASA says

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NASA says something strange is happening with our Universe and how quickly it’s expanding.

Scientists have been studying new data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

They say the expansion rate has become much quicker compared to the expectations.

“You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Observations also showed other galaxies are moving away from our Milky Way faster.

But scientists cannot yet figure out why, so all they’re saying for now is that something bizarre is underway.

“The cause of this discrepancy remains a mystery. But Hubble data, encompassing a variety of cosmic objects that serve as distance markers, support the idea that something weird is going on, possibly involving brand new physics,” officials said in a news release.

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Hubble Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going on in the universe

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Decades worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope has produced a new, more accurate measurement of the expansion rate of the universe.

The new examination of data from the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope attempts to identify how quickly the universe expands, and how much that expansion is accelerating through a number called the Hubble Constant (named after astronomers Edwin P. Hubble and Georges Lemaître who first attempted to measure it in 1929).

Different confusing results

The number is a notoriously tough one to pin down because different observatories looking at different areas of the universe have produced different results. Now a new study of Hubble’s most recent effort may have just found the right answer, according to a press release by NASA published Thursday. 

“You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers,” said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Riess leads a scientific collaboration investigating the universe’s expansion rate called SHOES, which stands for Supernova, H0, for the Equation of State of Dark Energy. “This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is likely Hubble’s magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble’s life to even double this sample size,” Riess said.

Riess is leading the biggest and likely last major update on the Hubble constant with new results more than doubling the prior samples of cosmic distance markers. His team also reviewed all of the prior data that takes into account over 1,000 Hubble orbits.

“The Hubble constant is a very special number. It can be used to thread a needle from the past to the present for an end-to-end test of our understanding of the universe. This took a phenomenal amount of detailed work,” said Dr. Licia Verde, a cosmologist at ICREA and the ICC-University of Barcelona, speaking about the SHOES team’s work.

The team analyzed 42 of the supernova milepost markers with Hubble that are seen exploding at a rate of about one per year. Riess said, “We have a complete sample of all the supernovae accessible to the Hubble telescope seen in the last 40 years.” Like the lyrics from the song “Kansas City,” from the Broadway musical Oklahoma, Hubble has “gone about as far as it can go!”

What did the team finally conclude?

The SHOES team produced a Hubble Constant estimate of 73. This turned out to be higher than previous research that combined the Standard Cosmological Model of the Universe and measurements by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission to predict a value for the Constant of 67.5 plus or minus 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

Who is right? It turns out it doesn’t matter so much. This confusion is exciting for astronomers like Riess. “Actually, I don’t care what the expansion value is specifically, but I like to use it to learn about the universe,” Riess concluded.



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NASA Releases Ridiculously Sharp Webb Space Telescope Images

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NASA held a press conference Monday morning to discuss the precise alignment of the Webb Space Telescope and the spacecraft’s upcoming scientific operations. The space agency also released images from the telescope that put Webb’s progress on dazzling display.

“I’m delighted to report that the telescope alignment has been completed with performance even better than we had anticipated,” said Michael McElwain, a Webb observatory project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA press conference. “This is an extraordinary milestone for humanity.”

Webb sits at an observational point called L2 nearly 1 million miles from Earth, where it will look further back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope. (Hubble will continue to operate alongside Webb once the latter is operational).

The $10 billion telescope’s primary science goals are to study how stars are born and give rise to planetary systems, to investigate the evolution of galaxies, exoplanets, and objects in our solar system, and to look at the universe’s earliest light, in the hopes that we can figure out how the first stars and galaxies emerged.

The preparation and testing of the telescope’s science instruments (a process called commissioning) will take about two months to complete. Only once the commissioning is complete can Webb begin taking the scientific images that will define its tenure in space.

But some images are already being collected, to make sure the telescope is functioning properly. Webb’s coldest instrument—the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)—recently took a test image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that was previously imaged by the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera.

Webb’s image of the same region makes Spitzer’s look like a finger painting, showing interstellar gas clearly distributed across the star field. The stars—blots, in Spitzer’s view—are seven-pointed beacons of light in the MIRI test.

“This is a really nice science example of what Webb will do for us in the coming years,” said Christopher Evans, a Webb project scientist with the European Space Agency, in the press conference. Evans said that Spitzer was useful for surveys of objects like the Large Magellanic Cloud, but (as you may notice) its images were limited by their resolution. Webb is way less limited. “This is just going to give us an amazing view of the processes in a different galaxy for the first time, cutting through the dust,” Evans said.

Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) is also a big upgrade on previous space telescope technology. Evans said that older space observatories have only been able to see spectra one target at a time; NIRSPEC will be able to observe 100 targets simultaneously. That’s a boon for the many thousands of scientists all hoping to use Webb data in their research.

Webb’s next steps will focus on taking images of its science targets, known as early release observations. These will not only be the first images of Webb science targets, but they will be the first images processed into full color. (Webb sees the cosmos in the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, but the images will be translated into visible light.)

Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in the briefing that the chief differences between the most recent images and the ones to come are that the former were taken to test the telescope’s ability to see clearly, whereas the latter will test the telescope’s ability to image science targets. Pontoppidan wouldn’t elaborate on what Webb team will capture in the early release observations—the targets are a “surprise,” he said.

From these early results, it appears that Webb will be something of an intergalactic palantir, dropping scientists into various parts of deep space that were previously inaccessible. It’s the next best thing to actually being there for the universe’s infancy.

The telescope was designed to operate for five years at minimum, but its ultra-precise launch back in December means the telescope may have enough fuel to stay in position for more than 20 years. Buckle up.

More: Webb Space Telescope Could Get a Good Look at the Next ‘Oumuamua

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Brilliant! NASA photo shows planet being BORN; Hubble Telescope indicates it is 9x of Jupiter

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An awesome NASA photo, taken by Hubble Telescope, shows a planet being born. It is virtually in the womb.

Hubble Telescope, operated by NASA as well as the Subaru Telescope have captured the a STUNNING formation of a planet. The NASA photo shows a planet virtually in the womb itself for all intents and purposes. It is gas giant in the earliest stages of birth. The study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy states that the baby exoplanet was photographed about 508 light-years outside of our solar system. The lead author of this study and astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Nasa-Ames Research Center said, “We find evidence for a Jovian protoplanet around AB Aurigae orbiting at a wide projected separation (~93 au), probably responsible for multiple planet-induced features in the disk.” However, it is still very early on in its ‘birthing’ process.

A planet that is still in the process of formation is known as a protoplanet. The Hubble Space Telescope has identified two structures located at 430–580 au, the candidate sites of planet formation. AB Aurigae, however, is nearly three times as far as Neptune from the Sun and 93 times farther than Earth’s distance.

There’s one more piece of evidence that suggests the formation of an exoplanet through a top-down gravitational collapse of clouds of gas, instead of the more commonly-observed gradual accumulation of dust and rocks.

Astronomers have also proposed that planet may be forming due to cooling down of the disk around its sun. This may cause gravity to fragment into one or more massive clumps that form into planets. The planet is already nine times the mass of the giant planet Jupiter and is one of the largest gas giant exoplanets astronomers have ever observed. Had it been slightly larger, it would have fallen into the category of a brown dwarf, or a celestial body between a planet and a star.

Notably, if our own Jupiter had been much larger than what it is, it could have had a shot at becoming a Sun itself. However, it never reached that kind of mass and is now categorised as a failed star. Jupiter has the same ingredients as a Sun- hydrogen and helium.



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Webb Telescope Brings a Star Into Focus as It Completes ‘Image Stacking’ Alignment Phase

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The Webb telescope has completed the third stage in aligning its mirrors, a crucial process for getting state-of-the-art imagery out of this $10 billion space telescope. The feat comes right on time as the telescope heads into the second month of its three-month alignment period.

Since Webb arrived at its observation point in space, a place called L2, NASA team members have worked furiously to get the telescope ready to start doing science. That process has meant using one star, HD 84406, as a guidepost for aligning the 18 primary mirrors.

Engineers have brought 18 dots of starlight into a coherent pattern.
Image: NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale

The telescope fully deployed its mirrors in late January, saw its first light on February 4, and even snapped a sort-of selfie on February 11. The ultimate goal is to get the mirrors to match each other to about 50 nanometers, or 50 billionths of a meter. As Alise Fisher put it in a recent NASA blog, “if the Webb primary mirror were the size of the United States, each segment would be the size of Texas, and the team would need to line the height of those Texas-sized segments up with each other to an accuracy of about 1.5 inches.” Tweaks to the mirrors’ orientations are being made by humans here on Earth, a million miles from the telescope.

On February 18, the mirrors aligned enough to organize the 18 dots of light picked up by each of the 18 primary mirrors. The next step was to focus those 18 views of the same star into one point—literally by stacking the images on top of one another. That’s now done, as the image stacking alignment phase was completed February 25, three days ahead of schedule. HD 84406 as seen by Webb is now a single point of light, as it should be.

“We still have work to do, but we are increasingly pleased with the results we’re seeing,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in an agency release. “Years of planning and testing are paying dividends, and the team could not be more excited to see what the next few weeks and months bring.”

The mirrors are still functioning as single instruments, though, rather than one big telescope they need to be. Fine-tuning alignments are necessary. The fourth phase of mirror alignment, called coarse phasing, will now begin. That process involves pairing 20 different mirror segments to take in light together; the team can use those results to detect where differences in the segments’ heights are reducing the image sharpness.

Coarse phasing will take place in the next several weeks, after which will come fine phasing, telescope alignment across the rest of Webb’s instruments (right now the team is just tinkering with the primary mirror) and, at last, final corrections. More details of the alignment phases can be read about here.

Webb will expand our knowledge of the early universe, galaxies, and exoplanets, as well as some objects within our solar system. The telescope is not replacing the veteran Hubble Space Telescope; it will observe in the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, while Hubble primarily works in ultraviolet and visible light.

But Hubble launched back in 1990. Webb will peer into the cosmos alongside its predecessor, but it will look further back in time than any device before it, with technology that wasn’t possible 30 years ago.

A fully aligned, scientifically operational Webb is still some ways away—the ballpark estimate is mid-summer 2022—but the fact that nothing has gone wrong yet is a testament to the hours and effort invested by the scientists and engineers eager to give the world a whole new look at the ancient universe.

More: Webb Space Telescope Captures Selfie as It Aligns Its Gold Mirrors

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Webb Space Telescope’s Mirrors Are Fully Deployed

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The Webb Space Telescope completed its complex mirror deployment this week, and the observatory is getting tantalizingly close to completing its journey to L2, where it will orbit the Sun a million miles away from Earth.

Webb is traveling to the second Lagrange point, a position in space that will allow the telescope to use minimal fuel to stay in position. From L2, the telescope will observe the early universe and exoplanets in the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths. The telescope is expected to overhaul our understanding of the universe’s birth and evolution, as it will peer farther back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor, which was launched in 1990.

Webb rocketed to space on December 25 from French Guiana and has since traversed 860,000 miles. During this journey, the telescope been steadily unfurling; to make it practical to launch, engineers had to fold it up like a caterpillar in a chrysalis. In careful steps, it has unfurled its sunshield and deployed its mirrors, with the latter step fully completed this week.

Webb has 18 primary mirror segments (the primary mirror is the big honeycomb structure that stands perpendicular to the sunshield) and a secondary mirror; the mirror segments are adjustable and had to be individually shifted from their launch configuration to their positions for scientific observations. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson confirmed the completed mirror deployment on Wednesday.

Tiny incremental adjustments to the mirror positions will happen over the next several months to get everything into the right optical alignments for observation, according to the Webb deployment schedule. But now that deployment is done, only one major step remains: the fuel burn to insert the telescope at L2. This is the final fuel burn by Webb during its deployment schedule, though future burns will happen occasionally to correct the telescope’s orbit.

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The telescope should be orbiting L2 by January 23, after which it will have five months of commissioning to prepare it for scientific observations. The telescope’s million-mile journey is just the preamble to a brilliant scientific career, which could last some 20 years. 

More: New Video Shows Webb Space Telescope’s Goodbye to Earth



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