Hubble Archives - Page 4 of 4

January 19, 2022

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 ...

September 28, 2021

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 ...

August 19, 2021

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 ...

July 26, 2021

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 ...

July 16, 2021

Healing Hubble

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

May 20, 2021

STScI: Hubble Tracks Down Fast Radio Bursts to Galaxies’ Spiral Arms

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have traced the locations of five brief, powerful radio blasts to the spiral arms ...

April 23, 2021

STScI: Hubble Captures Giant Star on the Edge of Destruction

In celebration of the 31st anniversary of the launching of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers aimed the renowned observatory at ...

December 15, 2020

STScI: Dark Storm on Neptune Reverses Direction, Possibly Shedding a Fragment

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope watched a mysterious dark vortex on Neptune abruptly steer away from a likely death ...

December 10, 2020

STScI: Hubble Pins Down Weird Exoplanet with Far-Flung Orbit

Astronomers analyzing Hubble images of the double star, HD 106906, have discovered a planet in a huge 15,000-year-long orbit that ...

November 12, 2020

NEUTRON-STAR COLLISION RELEASES PUZZLING BURST OF INFRARED LIGHT

STScI: NASA’s Hubble Sees Unexplained Brightness from Colossal Explosion

Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays unleashed more energy in a half-second than ...

November 5, 2020

STScI: Hubble Launches Large Ultraviolet-Light Survey of Nearby Stars

To better understand stellar evolution, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, has launched an ambitious new initiative ...

October 1, 2020

STScI: Hubble Watches Exploding Star Fade into Oblivion

Disappearing Supernova in Distant Galaxy Captured in Hubble Movie ...

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