The open star cluster NGC 2002 glitters with stars in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope released on Dec. 5, 2022. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and G. Gilmore (University of Cambridge); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))
Stars in the NGC 2002 cluster glitter in a new Hubble Space Telescope image of deep space.
The cluster lies about 160,000 light-years away from Earth inside the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a galaxy that orbits our own Milky Way. NASA shared the Hubble Space Telescope image on Dec. 5.
In the center of the cluster sit five red supergiants, or stars that have begun fusing helium because their inner hydrogen fuel has run out. These stars are heavier and have sunk inwards. Lighter stars have drifted to the outer edges of the cluster.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
NGC 2002 is known specifically as an “open cluster,” which means its 1,100 stars are loosely bound to each other and may diffuse away from the cluster over the next few million years. The relative sparseness of the star cluster allows scientists to observe each individual star within. It’s also a relatively young cluster, aged only 18 million years.
Because of its youth, NGC 2002 provides a natural laboratory in which scientists can observe the earliest stages of a star’s life. Understanding the birth, evolution and death of stars is vital to our wider understanding of the universe. Stars are the building blocks of the universe, providing places for planets to form (and for life to evolve!). To better understand our sun, solar system and galaxy, scientists turn to observing stars all over the universe.
NGC 2002’s home, the LMC, is one of the best places for scientists to observe stars at a variety of ages. The LMC is a 7,000-light-year wide dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way about 163,000 light-years away. It’s one of the closest galaxies to us, which allows scientists to observe individual stars of every age within the galaxy.
While the James Webb Space Telescope is getting a lot of press lately, its predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope continues to impress; this time of the galaxy NGC 6956, a near-perfect example of a barred galaxy located about 214 million light-years away from Earth.
Barred galaxies, which get their name from the very prominent “bar” of stars that cut across the galactic nucleus, are among the most common type of galaxies in the known universe, making up an estimated 70% of all galaxies (opens in new tab). Bar structures are also far more common in galaxies with active galactic nuclei, as gas and other material is fed in toward the galactic core along these bars.
This process helps to eventually destabilize the bar (opens in new tab), however, as the more mass that is funneled to the galactic core, the more unstable the bar becomes, eventually softening the bar into the more traditional spiral formation — like that of NGC 2985 (opens in new tab) — that most people think of when thinking of a spiral galaxy.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
The full new view of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 6956 unveiled on Dec. 15, 2022 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope team. The galaxy is 214 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Delphinus. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jones (University of California – Santa Cruz); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))
According to a image description by NASA (opens in new tab), this most recent photo of NGC 6956 was to look at Cepheid variable stars, which are stars whose luminosity cycles between bright and dim at regular intervals. This periods of brightening and dimming are directly related to a star’s actual brightness, we are able to calculate these variations in apparent brightness to the stars actual brightness, which allows us to determine their distance from us.
This is a crucial way for astronomers to determine the distance of extragalactic objects like NGC 6956, since there are few other ways to do so that we currently know of. There are other interesting features of NGC 6956, like a visible Type Ia supernova, which is the product of a white dwarf star exploding as a result of accreting matter from a companion star.
This type of supernova is another key method for determining the distance of far-away galaxies, since astronomers are able to measure how quickly a supernova dims to help measure its distance from Earth. And while filling in the galactic map in an accurate manner is useful in itself, repeated measurements of the distance of these extragalactic objects is an important tool for understanding the current rate of expansion in the universe.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope can deliver New Year cheer with science.
One such case is a new image from the 32-year old observatory, published on Dec. 1. Here, the Hubble Space Telescope sees the quintessential colors of the holiday season, as bright blue-white stars shine against dusty swaths shaded red.
These stars are located outside the Milky Way, in a patch of sky located within a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). As the name suggests, it looks like a round smudge in the southern sky. But in fact, this celestial smear is an irregularly-shaped, small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is located roughly 150,000 light years (opens in new tab) away from Earth. But despite this distance, Hubble is able to make out fantastic details.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
This image is the full view of the open star cluster BSDL 2757 in the dwarf galaxy Large Magellanic Cloud near our own Milky Way as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Bianchi (Johns Hopkins University); Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))
Take for instance, the glittering stars Hubble can see there. They belong to a particular region within LMC, called BSDL 2757. It is an open cluster, a group of stars loosely held together by their mutual gravity. Astronomers like to study star clusters because they hold information about how stars – the most basic units of the cosmos – come to exist. Open clusters are particularly interesting because the hundreds of stars within one cluster likely share the same origin (opens in new tab). That is to say, they evolved from the same molecular cloud of star stuff.
The blue, green and orange colors seen here are optical light, according to Hubble Space Telescope officials in the image description (opens in new tab) published last week. Dozens of bright stars shine in these shades against what looks like a rust-colored canvas.
But the red regions are not optical light. Rather, they represent information that Hubble gathered in infrared wavelengths of light. These are just beyond what human eyes can see. Their value is that they showcase sources of heat. In this case, the red represents interstellar dust wafting around in the open cluster.
Astronomers are studying open cluster BSDL 2757 to investigate stellar evolution.
“The researchers studied growing, early-stage stars that are still accumulating mass from the clouds that envelop them,” NASA officials write in the Hubble image description.
“As gas and dust spirals toward a budding, young star, it releases ultraviolet light. By analyzing how this light interacts with dust, astronomers can better understand the dust’s properties in different environments.”
Hubble’s successor is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb). The observatory launched Christmas Day last year, and its team released its first official science data this past summer. JWST is specially designed to study the universe’s infrared wavelengths, and can offer scientists more data on the material that appears here as the red backdrop.
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NASA is looking deeper into the possibility of using a private spacecraft to lift the Hubble Space Telescope to new heights, giving the influential space observatory a new lease on life.
On Dec. 22, the space agency issued a Request for Information regarding a non-exclusive SpaceX study earlier this year that suggested how the Hubble Space Telescope could be “reboosted” into a higher orbit.
NASA’s request for information, which you can read here, comes as it continues to consider the space telescope’s future and will remain open until Jan. 24, 2023.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time
Since the start of Hubble’s operations in 1990, the orbit of the space telescope 335 miles (540 kilometers) above Earth has been decaying. Reboosting it to an orbit that is both higher and more stable could add years to Hubble’s operating lifetime delaying the point at which NASAmust deorbit or dispose of the telescope.
During its five space shuttle missions to the service Hubble, NASA used the shuttle to reboost the telescope. The last shuttle servicing mission to Hubble was in 2009. NASA retired its shuttle fleet in 2011.
The idea to raise Hubble to a higher orbit using a Dragon spacecraft at no cost to the government was first developed between SpaceX and Polaris Program, a private program of space missions using SpaceX’s Dragon and Starshipvehicles funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. The unfunded agreement between SpaceX and NASA to study the feasibility of reboosting Hubble was then signed in September 2022.
The SpaceX study was designed to help NASA, which currently has no plans to operate or fund a new Hubble servicing mission, determine the commercial possibility of such a mission. The SpaceX study also aimed to lay out the technical challenges of such a servicing endeavor.
The fact the study is non-exclusive means that other companies are free to propose their own Hubble servicing studies based on the use of different rockets or spacecraft.
These studies will collect data from Hubble itself and from SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to assess the possibility of safely rendezvousing and docking with the space telescope before shunting it to a higher stable orbit. The studies are expected to take around 6 months to complete.
“This study is an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships,” associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, Thomas Zurbuchen, said in a statement. (opens in new tab) “As our fleet grows, we want to explore a wide range of opportunities to support the most robust, superlative science missions possible.”
The operation to reboost Hubble would demonstrate how older satellites and spacecraft could be given extended operating lives, especially those in near-Earth orbits like the space telescope.
“SpaceX and the Polaris Program want to expand the boundaries of current technology and explore how commercial partnerships can creatively solve challenging complex problems,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX. “Missions such as servicing Hubble would help us expand space capabilities to ultimately help all of us achieve our goals of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary civilization.”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped a pair of “dazzlingly different” images of a brilliant star cluster some 160,000 light years away.
Globular cluster NGC 1850, in the constellation Dorado, is approximately 63,000 times the mass of the sun, is 100 million years old and is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, NASA said in a news release.
A birthplace for billions of stars, the Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The agency said that the telescope used filters with specific assigned colors to study particular wavelengths of light emanating from NGC 1850 and its surrounding stars.
NASA’S MARS ROVER DEPOSITS FIRST SAMPLE ON RED PLANET FOR POSSIBLE RETURN TO EARTH
These Hubble images show the star cluster NGC 1850 in multiple wavelengths.
One image with blue nebulosity includes near-infrared light as well as visible light, while the other with red nebulosity covers the near-ultraviolet to the beginnings of the infrared spectrum.
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NGC 1850 is a spherical collection of densely packed stars held together by mutual gravitational attraction, the release said.
However, unlike most globular clusters, its stars are relatively young.
This Hubble image shows the star cluster NGC 1850, located about 160,000 light-years away. For this image, two filters were used with the camera to gather data, one at visible wavelengths, the other at near-infrared wavelengths.
According to scientists, the theory is that the first generation of stars in the globular cluster ejected matter into the surrounding cosmos when they were born.
IMAGE FROM NASA’S WEBB TELESCOPE REVEALS EARLY STELLAR FORMATION IN ‘RARE’ FIND
However, the density of the cluster was so high that the matter could not escape its gravitational pull, causing it to stay nearby, and the gravity of the cluster also pulled in hydrogen and helium gas from its surroundings.
For this Hubble image, five filters were used with the camera to gather data. Two of the filters were at near-ultraviolet wavelengths, two more at visible light wavelengths and the final one was in the near-infrared.
The sources of gas created a second generation of stars, increasing both the density and size of the globular cluster.
The presence of a black hole was found in NGC 1850 and there are also around 200 red giants and many brighter blue stars.
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Surrounding the cluster is a pattern of nebulosity, diffuse dust and gas theorized to come from supernova blasts.
The Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes join forces to give us this dazzling and colorful view of spiral galaxy NGC 1566: a swirling scaffolding of dense dusty filaments, shining star clusters, and bright bursts of star formation, with a supermassive black hole at its blazing heart.
NGC 1566 is a rare bird among galaxies: Gas and dust are still falling into the supermassive black hole at its center, fueling powerful outbursts of radiation that, in shorter wavelengths of light, make the galaxy’s center blaze brighter than all the rest of its stars combined.
Of the thousands of galaxies astronomers have found, cataloged, and studied so far — and the tens of billions in the universe — only about 10 percent have actively-feasting supermassive black holes at their centers. And NGC 1566 is the second-brightest of these. At 40 million light years from Earth, it’s also one of the closest, making it a prime target for astronomers.
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera captured a near-infrared view of NGC 1566 back in 2014, which revealed long, swirling arms ablaze with stars and laced with dark strands of interstellar dust. Even in visible and near-infrared light, the galaxy’s core is bright.
This image, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, shows a near-infrared view of NGC 1566.STScI
More recently, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) aboard the James Webb Space Telescope took another long look at NGC 1566, this time in the even longer wavelengths of mid-infrared light (the longest infrared wavelengths, called far-infrared, are beyond our reach now that NASA has retired its airborne far-infrared telescope).
Image editor Judy Schmidt turned the raw data into an eerily gorgeous image, which shows off the almost skeletal scaffolding of dust that gives the galaxy its shape and structure.
This image, taken in mid-infrared, shows the dusty backbone of NGC 1566.STScI/Judy Schmidt
The reddish parts of the dust filaments are areas where new stars are forming, making it easy to see the link between dense patches of dust and bursts of star formation. Dust that’s near dense star clusters appears more bluish in the image.
“I had to increase the saturation tremendously to make it colorful at all. The separation is not very much otherwise,” Schmidt stated on Twitter. Turning raw data from a telescope like Webb or Hubble into an actual image is a mixture of science, accurately representing the different wavelengths of light captured by the telescope, and art, making creative choices to produce an image that’s both beautiful and interesting. Even the Space Telescope Science Institute’s teams of professional image processors, who turned raw Webb data into the mind-blowing images released over the summer, have to wrangle with similar challenges.
Earlier this month, another image editor, Mehmet Hakan Özsaraç (definitely not to be confused with the similarly-named and extremely problematic TV celebrity doctor guy), merged the Hubble and Webb data to create this stunning image of NGC 1566, which reveals the layered details of the galaxy’s structure, from dust to star clusters.
This image combines Webb and Hubble data to show a more complete view of NGC 1566’s structures.STScI/Mehmet Hakan Özsaraç
If you look closely at the center of the galaxy, you can also see the faint shape of a bar structure across its middle. NGC 1566 isn’t quite a fully-fledged barred spiral galaxy with the elaborate structure of (for example) the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy; instead, it’s what astronomers call an intermediate spiral galaxy.
Another key thing the image shows us is that image editors, who aren’t professional astronomers but have become experts at producing images from raw telescope data (Özsaraç describes himself as “a medical doctor who colors space”), are making real contributions to astronomy.
Researchers have found evidence for the existence of a new type of planet they have called a “water world,” where water makes up a large fraction of the entire planet. These worlds, discovered in a planetary system 218 light-years away, are unlike any planets in our Solar System.
The team, led by Caroline Piaulet of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the University of Montreal, published a detailed study of a planetary system known as Kepler-138 in the journal Nature Astronomy on 15 December.
Piaulet, who is a member of Björn Benneke’s research team at the University of Montreal, observed the exoplanets Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 d with both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. She found that the planets could be composed largely of water.
Artist’s illustration of Kepler 138 planetary system
Water wasn’t directly detected, but by comparing the sizes and masses of the planets to models, they conclude that a significant fraction of their volume — up to half of it — should be made of materials that are lighter than rock but heavier than hydrogen or helium (which constitute the bulk of gas-giant planets like Jupiter). The most common candidate material is water.
“We previously thought that planets that were a bit larger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth, and that’s why we called them super-Earths,” explained Benneke. “However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138 c and d, are quite different in nature and that a large fraction of their entire volume is likely composed of water. It is the best evidence yet for water worlds, a type of planet that was theorised by astronomers to exist for a long time.”
With volumes more than three times that of Earth and masses twice as big, planets c and d have much lower densities than Earth. This is surprising because most of the planets just slightly bigger than Earth that have been studied in detail so far all seemed to be rocky worlds like ours. The closest comparison, say researchers, would be some of the icy moons in the outer Solar System that are also largely composed of water surrounding a rocky core.
“Imagine larger versions of Europa or Enceladus, the water-rich moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, but brought much closer to their star,” explained Piaulet. “Instead of an icy surface, they would harbour large water-vapour envelopes.”
“The secure identification of an object with the density of the icy moons of the Solar System, but significantly larger and more massive, clearly demonstrates the great diversity of exoplanets,” added team member Jose-Manuel Almenara of Grenoble Alpes University in France. “This is expected to be the outcome of a variety of formation and evolution processes.”
Researchers caution that the planets may not have oceans like those on Earth directly at the planet’s surface. “The temperature in Kepler-138 d’s atmosphere is likely above the boiling point of water, and we expect a thick dense atmosphere made of steam on this planet. Only under that steam atmosphere could there potentially be liquid water at high pressure, or even water in another phase that occurs at high pressures, called a supercritical fluid,” Piaulet said.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will also facilitate valuable follow-up research. “Now that we have securely identified the ‘water-world’ Kepler-138 d, the James Webb Space Telescope is the key to unveiling the atmospheric composition of such an exotic object,” shared team member Daria Kubyshkina of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. “It will give us critical information enabling us to compare the composition of the icy moons of the solar system with that of their larger and heavier extrasolar counterparts.
Recently, another team at the University of Montreal found a planet called TOI-1452b that could potentially be covered with a liquid-water ocean, but Webb will be needed to also confirm this.
In 2014 data from the NASA Kepler Space Telescope allowed astronomers to announce the detection of three planets orbiting Kepler-138, a red dwarf star in the constellation Lyra. This was based on a measurable dip in starlight as each planet momentarily passed in front of the star.
Benneke and his colleague Diana Dragomir, from the University of New Mexico, came up with the idea of re-observing the planetary system with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes between 2014 and 2016 to catch more transits of Kepler-138 d, the third planet in the system, in order to study its atmosphere.
The secure identification of an object with the density of the icy moons of the solar system, but significantly larger and more massive, clearly demonstrates the great diversity of exoplanets, which is expected to be the outcome of a variety of formation and evolution processes. A new exoplanet in the system
While the earlier Kepler space telescope observations only showed transits of three small planets around Kepler-138, Piaulet and her team were surprised to find that the Hubble and Spitzer observations required the presence of a fourth planet in the system, Kepler-138 e.
This newly found planet is small and farther from its star than the three others, taking 38 days to complete an orbit. The planet is in the habitable zone of its star, a temperate region where it receives just the right amount of heat from its cool star to be neither too hot nor too cold to allow the presence of liquid water.
The nature of this additional, newly found planet, however, remains an open question because it does not seem to transit its host star. Observing the exoplanet’s transit would have allowed astronomers to determine its size.
With Kepler-138 e now in the picture, the masses of the previously known planets were measured again via the transit timing-variation method, which involves tracking small variations in the precise moments of the planets’ transits in front of their star caused by the gravitational pull of other nearby planets. The researchers had another surprise: they found that the two water worlds Kepler-138 c and d are “twin” planets, with virtually the same size and mass, while they were previously thought to be drastically different. The closer-in planet, Kepler-138 b, on the other hand, is confirmed to be a small Mars-mass planet, one of the smallest exoplanets known to date.
“As our instruments and techniques become sensitive enough to find and study planets that are farther from their stars, we might start finding a lot more of these water worlds,” Benneke concluded.
More information
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.
Link to Science paper (PDF)
The international team of astronomers in this study consists of C. Piaulet (University of Montréal, Canada), B. Benneke (University of Montréal, Canada), J. M. Almenara (Grenoble Alpes University, France), D. Dragomir (University of New Mexico, USA), H. A. Knutson (California Institute of Technology, USA), D. Thorngren (University of Montréal, Canada), M. S. Peterson (University of Montréal, Canada), I. J. M. Crossfield (The University of Kansas, USA), E. M.-R. Kempton (University of Maryland, USA), D. Kubyshkina (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), A. W. Howard (California Institute of Technology, USA), R. Angus (American Museum of Natural History, USA), H. Isaacson (University of California – Berkeley, USA), L. M. Weiss (University of Notre Dame, USA), C. A. Beichman (Infrared Processing and Analysis Center–Caltech, USA), J. J. Fortney (University of California, USA), L. Fossati (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), H. Lammer (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), P. R. McCullough (Johns Hopkins University, USA; Space Telescope Science Institute, USA), C. V. Morley (University of Texas, USA) and I. Wong (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; 51 Pegasi b Fellow). Image credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI)
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As far as we know, nobody lives in our neighbour, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC.) So it’s okay to point our telescope there and gaze at it.
The SMC is a dwarf galaxy that’s only 200,000 light-years away. That makes it one of the Milky Way’s nearest galaxies. Since it’s so close, astronomers study it a great deal, and the Hubble has imaged it many times.
The SMC has a stellar population of hundreds of millions of stars, but this image shows a tiny fraction of them. It highlights a bright clump of stars that make up the open cluster NGC 376. The cluster is young, only about 28 million years old.
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NGC 376 looks like a bright cluster of gems in this image. Open clusters are loosely-attached to one another gravitationally and are sparsely populated. They’re the opposite of the other type of cluster, the globular cluster.
This is arguably the best wide-angle view of the Small Magellanic Cloud. NGC 376 is somewhere in there. Image Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/D. Nidever (Montana State University) Acknowledgment: Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
But something’s happening to the cluster, and its loosely-bound quality is to blame.
NGC 376 is on its way to being a non-cluster. Astronomers say it’s dissolving into the Small Magellanic Cloud. It may have already lost 90% of its mass, according to a 2011 study. This can happen to open clusters following their rapid star formation phase. All that star formation can disperse the clusters’ gas. Rapid gas dispersal can form filamentary gas structures in some cases, and kinematic studies show that NGC 376 is forming a tail, though it’s not visible in this image.
Extremely young open star clusters (< 10 my> are prone to rapid dispersal by stellar winds. NGC 376 isn’t that young, but it may still be heading to a similar fate. Some astronomers call this “infant mortality,” though the stars in the cluster don’t die. But as the gas in the cluster becomes more diffuse, fewer stars can form.
The loss of gas also lowers the gravitational binding between the stars in the cluster. As a result, a large fraction of stars in NGC 376 have exceeded escape velocity and aren’t bound to the cluster any longer.
Not all of Hubble’s images are valuable for their aesthetic quality. Usually, the space telescope captures images for strictly scientific purposes. In this one, an ACS/WFC (Advanced Camera for Surveys/Wide-Field Camera) colour-composite image of NGC 376, the red circle defines the area within the core radius, and the solid yellow circle marks the area within the tidal radius. The solid green circle shows the extent of the cluster’s tail, which isn’t visible in this image. Image Credit: E. Sabbi et al 2011 ApJ739 15
NGC 376 faces a rapid demise for an astronomical object. But it won’t be gone any time soon in human terms. Since the SMC is so close to us, objects like NGC 376 are easy to observe. Astronomers will learn much more about the fate of open clusters thanks to NGC 376’s proximity.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of a cosmic smokescreen located around 5,000 light-years from Earth – one light-year is more than 5.8 million miles.
The photograph features a star cluster within the rolling wall of dust and gas from the Lagoon Nebula, a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius.
The cluster, known as NGC 6530, includes at least 4,000 stars, making it one of the largest open clusters discovered.
These stars are nestled inside the swirling gasses of reds, blues and oranges of the nebula, one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible from mid-northern latitudes.
The cluster includes at least 4,000 starts, making it one of the largest in space
Hubble is a joint operation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which launched the telescope 1990.
It was first conceived in the 1940s, Hubble was initially called the Large Space Telescope.
‘Since launch, Hubble has overcome its troubled beginnings to perform innumerable science observations that have revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe,’ NASA shared in a statement.
‘From determining the age of the universe to observing dramatic changes on celestial bodies in our own solar system, Hubble has become one of humanity’s greatest scientific instruments.’
Astronomers studied NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).
The team was looking for new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula.
However, during the investigation, researchers feasted their eyes on a stunning smokescreen of dust and clouds studded with bright stars.
‘Hubble’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths — particularly with Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) — has made it an indispensable tool for understanding starbirth and the origin of exoplanetary systems,’ researchers shared in a statement.
‘In particular, Hubble was crucial to investigations of the proplyds around newly born stars in the Orion Nebula.’
In February, NASA shared another Hubble image showing a ‘space triangle’ where two galaxies collide, leading to a tsunami of star birth.
The duo is collectively known as Arp 143, made up of the glittery, distorted star-forming galaxy NGC 2445, and the less flashy NGC 24444.
NGC 2445 has been distorted to appear triangular, with a flurry of bright lights as stars are formed rapidly from material shaken up by the collision.
US-based astronomers from the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle have analyzed the images captured by the 32-year-old observatory in low Earth orbit.
They explained that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm, where thousands of stars are bursting to life.
The galaxy is awash in starbirth because it is rich in gas, the fuel that makes stars, but has yet to escape the gravitational pull of partner NGC 2444, causing them to wage a cosmic tug-of-war, which NGC 2444 appears to be winning.
And in 2020, NASA and ESA announced they found evidence deep in Hubble’s data that suggests the formation of the first stars and galaxies occurred earlier than previously believed.
These stars are nestled inside the swirling gasses of reds, blues and oranges of the nebula, one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible from mid-northern latitudes
In February, NASA shared another Hubble image showing a ‘space triangle’ where two galaxies collide, leading to a tsunami of star birth
The new findings were uncovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, which astronomers used to study the first generation of stars, known as Population III stars, in the early universe.
The team probed the early universe from about 500 million to one billion years following the Big Bang by studying the cluster MACS J0416, nearly four billion light-years from Earth, and its parallel field with the Hubble.
Rachana Bhatawdekar of the ESA and the study’s lead said: ‘We found no evidence of these first-generation Population III stars in this cosmic time interval.’
This conclusion means these stars and the first galaxies are much older, as the Hubble could not identify them.
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Hubble detects changes in the rate of expansion that cannot be explained by current physics
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And NASA’s Hubble telescope spots oldest star ever detected – shining 12.9 BILLION years ago
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is still working and has made more than 1.5 million observations since its mission began in 1990
The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
It is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889.
He is arguably most famous for discovering that the universe is expanding and the rate at which is does so – now coined the Hubble constant.
The Hubble telescope is named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble who was born in Missouri in 1889 (pictured)
Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations since its mission began in 1990 and helped publish some 18,000 scientific papers.
It circles the Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude.
Hubble has the pointing accuracy of .007 arc seconds, which is like being able to shine a laser beam focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s head on a dime roughly 200 miles (320km) away.
The Hubble telescope is named after Edwin Hubble who was responsible for coming up with the Hubble constant and is one of the greatest astronomers of all-time
Hubble’s primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7 feet, 10.5 inches) across and in total is 13.3 meters (43.5 feet) long – the length of a large school bus.
Hubble’s launch and deployment in April 1990 marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo’s telescope.
Thanks to five servicing missions and more than 25 years of operation, our view of the universe and our place within it has never been the same.
This artist’s illustration shows the location and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)
Exhaust from Infalling Comets Makes Space a Dusty Place
Imagine walking into a room at night, turning off all the lights, and closing the shades. Yet an eerie glow comes from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The faint light is barely enough to see your hands before your face, but it persists.
Sounds like a scene out of “Ghost Hunters?” No, for astronomers this is the real deal. However, looking for something that’s close to nothing is not easy. Astronomers searched through 200,000 archival images from Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky. Like turning out the lights in a room, they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, planets, and even the zodiacal light. (Zodiacal light is a faint glow of diffuse sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust.) Surprisingly, a ghostly, feeble glow was left over. It’s equivalent to the steady light of ten fireflies spread across the entire sky.
Where’s that coming from?
One possible explanation is that a shell of dust envelops our solar system all the way out to
This artist’s illustration shows the location and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our solar system. Astronomers searched through 200,000 images and made tens of thousands of measurements from Hubble Space Telescope to discover a residual background glow in the sky. Because the glow is so smoothly distributed, the likely source is innumerable comets – free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. They fall in toward the Sun from all different directions, spewing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the Sun. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)
Hubble Space Telescope Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar System
Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. But how dark is dark?
To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from
This photo shows the zodiacal light as it appeared on March 1, 2021, in Skull Valley, Utah. The Pleiades star cluster is visible near the top of the light column. Mars is just below that. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford
The researchers say that one possible explanation for this residual glow is that our inner solar system contains a tenuous sphere of dust from comets that are falling into the solar system from all directions, and that the glow is sunlight reflecting off this dust. If real, this dust shell could be a new addition to the known architecture of the solar system.
This idea is bolstered by the fact that in 2021 another team of astronomers used data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to also measure the sky background. New Horizons flew by Pluto in 2015, and a small Kuiper belt object in 2018, and is now heading into interstellar space. The New Horizons measurements were done at a distance of 4 billion to 5 billion miles from the Sun. This is well outside the realm of the planets and asteroids where there is no contamination from interplanetary dust.
New Horizons detected something a bit fainter that is apparently from a more distant source than Hubble detected. The source of the background light seen by New Horizons also remains unexplained. There are numerous theories ranging from the decay of dark matter to a huge unseen population of remote galaxies.
“If our analysis is correct there’s another dust component between us and the distance where New Horizons made measurements. That means this is some kind of extra light coming from inside our solar system,” said Tim Carleton, of Arizona State University (ASU).
“Because our measurement of residual light is higher than New Horizons we think it is a local phenomenon that is not from far outside the solar system. It may be a new element to the contents of the solar system that has been hypothesized but not quantitatively measured until now,” said Carleton.
Hubble veteran astronomer Rogier Windhorst, also of ASU, first got the idea to assemble Hubble data to go looking for any “ghost light.” “More than 95% of the photons in the images from Hubble’s archive come from distances less than 3 billion miles from Earth. Since Hubble’s very early days, most Hubble users have discarded these sky-photons, as they are interested in the faint discrete objects in Hubble’s images such as stars and galaxies,” said Windhorst. “But these sky-photons contain important information which can be extracted thanks to Hubble’s unique ability to measure faint brightness levels to high precision over its three decades of lifetime.”
A number of graduate and undergraduate students contributed to project SKYSURF, including Rosalia O’Brien, Delondrae Carter and Darby Kramer at ASU, Scott Tompkins at the University of Western Australia, Sarah Caddy at Macquarie University in Australia, and many others.
The team’s research papers are published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
References:
“SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements: II. First Limits on Diffuse Light at 1.25, 1.4, and 1.6 µm” by Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rosalia O’Brien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Darby Kramer, Ci’mone Rogers and Andi Swirbul, 4 October 2022, The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac8d02
“SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements. I. Survey Overview and Methods” by Rogier A. Windhorst, Timothy Carleton, Rosalia O’Brien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Scott J. Kenyon, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, John Chambers, Connor Gelb, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Isabela Huckabee, Darby Kramer, Teerthal Patel, Rushabh Pawnikar, Ewan Pringle, Ci’mone Rogers, Steven Sherman, Andi Swirbul and Kaitlin Webber, 15 September 2022, The Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac82af
“SKYSURF-3: Testing Crowded Object Catalogs in the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Mosaics to Study Sample Incompleteness from an Extragalactic Background Light Perspective” by Darby M. Kramer, Timothy Carleton, Seth. H. Cohen, Rolf Jansen, Rogier A. Windhorst, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, John W. MacKenty and Nor Pirzkal, 18 November 2022, The Astronomical Journal Letters. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac9cca
“SKYSURF-4: Panchromatic Full Sky Surface Brightness Measurement Methods and Results” by Rosalia O’Brien, Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rolf A. Jansen, Delondrae Carter, Scott Tompkins, Sarah Caddy, Seth H. Cohen, Haley Abate, Richard G. Arendt, Jessica Berkheimer, Annalisa Calamida, Stefano Casertano, Simon P. Driver, Connor Gelb, Zak Goisman, Norman Grogin, Daniel Henningsen, Isabela Huckabee, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton M. Koekemoer, Darby Kramer, John Mackenty, Aaron Robotham and Steven Sherman, 13 October 2022, Astrophysics > Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. arXiv:2210.08010
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
