Tag Archives: "Hubble"

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STScI: NASA’s Hubble Spots Twin Tails in New Image After DART Impact

STScI: NASA’s Hubble Spots Twin Tails in New Image After DART Impact

Two tails of dust ejected from the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system are seen in new images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, ...
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STScI: Webb, Hubble Capture Detailed Views of DART Impact

STScI: Webb, Hubble Capture Detailed Views of DART Impact

Two of NASA’s Great Observatories, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a ...
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STScI: Hubble Sees Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Slowly Recovering After Blowing Its Top

STScI: Hubble Sees Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Slowly Recovering After Blowing Its Top

Analyzing data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories, astronomers have concluded that the bright red supergiant star ...
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STScI: Hubble Determines Mass of Isolated Black Hole Roaming Our Milky Way Galaxy

STScI: Hubble Determines Mass of Isolated Black Hole Roaming Our Milky Way Galaxy

Astronomers estimate that 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but they have never ...
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STScI: Hubble Confirms Largest Comet Nucleus Ever Seen

STScI: Hubble Confirms Largest Comet Nucleus Ever Seen

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers. The estimated ...
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STScI: Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen

STScI: Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the ...
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STScI: Galaxy Collision Creates 'Space Triangle' in New Hubble Image

STScI: Galaxy Collision Creates ‘Space Triangle’ in New Hubble Image

A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from ...
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STScI: Hubble Finds a Black Hole Igniting Star Formation in a Dwarf Galaxy

STScI: Hubble Finds a Black Hole Igniting Star Formation in a Dwarf Galaxy

Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest ...
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STScI: Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Are Speeding Up

STScI: Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Are Speeding Up

Researchers analyzing Hubble's regular "storm reports" found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the storm, known ...
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About 5,000 years ago a comet swept within 23 million miles of the sun, closer than the innermost planet Mercury. The comet must have been a spectacular sight to those young civilizations across Eurasia and North Africa that were arising at the end of the Stone Age. However, this nameless space visitor is not recorded in any known historical account. So how do astronomers know that there was such an interplanetary intruder? Enter comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4), which first appeared near the beginning of 2020. ATLAS quickly met an untimely death in mid-2020 when it disintegrated into a cascade of small icy pieces. Such a comet’s self-destruction happens once or twice a decade. Astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland reports that ATLAS is a broken-off piece of that ancient visitor from 5,000 years ago. Why? Because ATLAS follows the same orbital “railroad track” as that of a comet seen in 1844. This means the two comets are siblings from the parent comet that broke apart very long ago. The link between the two comets was first noted by amateur astronomer Maik Meyer. Such comet families are common. The most dramatic visual example was in 1994 when the doomed comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) was pulled into a string of pieces by Jupiter’s gravitational pull. This “comet train” was short-lived. It fell piece by piece into Jupiter in July 1994. But comet ATLAS is just “weird,” says Ye, who observed it with Hubble about the time of the breakup. Unlike its hypothesized parent comet, ATLAS disintegrated while it was farther from the Sun than Earth, at a distance of over 100 million miles. This was much farther than the distance where its parent passed the Sun. “This emphasizes its strangeness,” said Ye. “If it broke up this far from the sun, how did it survive the last passage around the sun 5,000 years ago? This is the big question,” said Ye. “It’s very unusual because we wouldn’t expect it. This is the first time a long-period comet f

STScI: Comet ATLAS May Have Been a Blast from the Past

In a new study using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland in ...
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STScI: Hubble Finds First Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter's Moon Ganymede

STScI: Hubble Finds First Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. This water ...
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3 Hubble images

Healing Hubble

Hubble is one of the most successful science experiments ever. Although Hubble is currently not observing, the good news is ...
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