NASA - Hubble Space Telescope updates

[russianhalo117]

Useful HST discussion threads:

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope discussion
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=57319.0

HST Reentry
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37027.0

Other HST discussion threads can be added by a mod or a PM to me referencing this this post.

[Star One]

Hubble Reveals Ultra-Relativistic Jet:

[bolun]

Hubble Inspects A Pair of Space Oddities

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 — also known as Wild's Triplet — which lies around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image — which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy — seem to be connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it was formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton

[bolun]

Hubble Hunts an Unusual Galaxy

The galaxy merger Arp-Madore 417-391 steals the spotlight in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Arp-Madore catalogue is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies have been distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving the cores of the two galaxies nestled side by side.

Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to capture this scene — the instrument is optimised to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the ancient Universe. Hubble’s ACS has been contributing to scientific discovery for 20 years, and throughout its lifetime it has been involved in everything from mapping the distribution of dark matter to studying the evolution of galaxy clusters.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton

[bolun]

Revisiting a Celestial Fireworks Display

Shreds of the luridly coloured supernova remnant DEM L 190 seem to billow across the screen in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The delicate sheets and intricate filaments are debris from the cataclysmic death of a massive star that once lived in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. DEM L 190 — also known as LMC N49 — is the brightest supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud and lies approximately 160 000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Dorado.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Kulkarni, Y. Chu

[jbenton]

Some scientists analyzed 3 decades of Hubble data and found an extremely faint glow in the images. The leading hypothesis is a sphere of cometary dust surrounding the Inner Solar System and reflecting part of the Sun's light:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/hubble-detects-ghostly-glow-surrounding-our-solar-system

[Star One]

Hubble’s Inside The Image:  Carina Nebula:

[bolun]

Hubble helps discover a new type of planet largely composed of water

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.

Link to Science paper (PDF)

[Star One]

Intracluster light is already abundant at redshift beyond unity

Abstract
Intracluster light (ICL) is diffuse light from stars that are gravitationally bound not to individual member galaxies, but to the halo of galaxy clusters. Leading theories1,2 predict that the ICL fraction, defined by the ratio of the ICL to the total light, rapidly decreases with increasing redshift, to the level of a few per cent at z > 1. However, observational studies have remained inconclusive about the fraction beyond redshift unity because, to date, only two clusters in this redshift regime have been investigated. One shows a much lower fraction than the mean value at low redshift3, whereas the other possesses a fraction similar to the low-redshift value4. Here we report an ICL study of ten galaxy clusters at 1  z  2 based on deep infrared imaging data. Contrary to the leading theories, our study finds that ICL is already abundant at z  1, with a mean ICL fraction of approximately 17%. Moreover, no significant correlation between cluster mass and ICL fraction or between ICL colour and cluster-centric radius is observed. Our findings suggest that gradual stripping can no longer be the dominant mechanism of ICL formation. Instead, our study supports the scenario wherein the dominant ICL production occurs in tandem with the formation and growth of the brightest cluster galaxies and/or through the accretion of preprocessed stray stars.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05396-4

[Targeteer]

The old girl isn't dead yet...

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-004.html

For the First Time Hubble Directly Measures Mass of a Lone White Dwarf



Summary
Astronomers Use a Trick of Nature to 'Weigh' a Dead Star

A famous 1923 short poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" written by Robert Frost ends with: "So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay."

Though Frost was talking about a day on Earth, this also applies to the next 5 billion years, when the golden Sun will eventually burn out and collapse down to a seething white hot cinder of its former glory. Astronomers call the stellar remnant a white dwarf. An estimated 10 billion of these stellar corpses are scattered across our galactic graveyard.

Though the Sun's ultimate fate is far into the future, astronomers want to learn a lot about the white dwarfs now. White dwarfs give us clues into how stars evolve over billions of years. Astronomers collect a lot of information by dissecting the light from a white dwarf through spectroscopy. And, knowing a dwarf's mass is one of the most important factors in a star's evolution. But it's not easy to weigh a white dwarf, or any other kind of star. There aren't any bathroom scales in space.

Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation allowed for Earth's mass to be estimated by watching the orbit of the Moon. The same Newtonian equations can be used to measure the mass of a white dwarf orbiting a companion star. But astronomers used Hubble to make a completely different mass estimate for a white dwarf that doesn’t have a stellar companion that's needed for applying Newtonian physics.

They had to turn to more modern physics – Einstein's general relativity — that explains how a massive object's gravity warps space. This creates a pothole in the fabric of space that bends the light of a background star as a foreground object is passing in front of it. The greater the deflection on the sky, the more massive the bypassing body. But the amount of deflection in infinitesimally small, and requires Hubble's sharp vision – and some patience. This precision measurement was done for the nearby, fast moving white dwarf LAWD 37. Astronomers measured a mass of 0.56 times our Sun's mass. And, this nicely agrees with theories about what a typical white dwarf should weigh.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf — the surviving core of a burned-out Sun-like star.

Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent the mass of our Sun. This agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of the white dwarf's mass and corroborates current theories of how white dwarfs evolve as the end product of a typical star's evolution. The unique observation yields insights into theories of the structure and composition of white dwarfs.

Until now, previous white dwarf mass measurements have been gleaned from observing white dwarfs in binary star systems. By watching the motion of two co-orbiting stars, straightforward Newtonian physics can be used to measure their masses. However, these measurements can be uncertain if the white dwarf's companion star is in a long-period orbit of hundreds or thousands of years. Orbital motion can be measured by telescopes only over a brief slice of the dwarf's orbital motion.

For this companion-less white dwarf, researchers had to employ a trick of nature, called gravitational microlensing. The light from a background star was slightly deflected by the gravitational warping of space by the foreground dwarf star. As the white dwarf passed in front of the background star, microlensing caused the star to appear temporarily offset from its actual position on the sky.

The results are reported
in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
. The lead author is Peter McGill, formerly of the University of Cambridge (now based at the University of California, Santa Cruz).

McGill used Hubble to precisely measure how light from a distant star bent around the white dwarf, known as LAWD 37, causing the background star to temporarily change its apparent position in the sky.

Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, the principal Hubble investigator on this latest observation, first used microlensing in 2017 to measure the mass of another white dwarf, Stein 2051 B. But that dwarf is in a widely separated binary system. "Our latest observation provides a new benchmark because LAWD 37 is all by itself," Sahu said.

The collapsed remains of a star that burned out 1 billion years ago, LAWD 37 has been extensively studied because it is only 15 light-years away in the constellation Musca. "Because this white dwarf is relatively close to us, we’ve got lots of data on it — we've got information about its spectrum of light, but the missing piece of the puzzle has been a measurement of its mass," said McGill.

The team zeroed in on the white dwarf thanks to ESA's Gaia space observatory, which makes extraordinarily precise measurements of nearly 2 billion star positions. Multiple Gaia observations can be used to track a star's motion. Based on this data, astronomers were able to predict that LAWD 37 would briefly pass in front of a background star in November 2019.

Once this was known, Hubble was used to precisely measure over several years how the background star's apparent position in the sky was temporarily deflected during the white dwarf's passage.

"These events are rare, and the effects are tiny," said McGill. "For instance, the size of our measured offset is like measuring the length of a car on the Moon as seen from Earth."

Since the light from the background star was so faint, the main challenge for astronomers was extracting its image from the glare of the white dwarf, which is 400 times brighter than the background star. Only Hubble can make these kinds of high-contrast observations in visible light.

"The precision of LAWD 37's mass measurement allows us to test the mass-radius relationship for white dwarfs," said McGill. "This means testing the theory of degenerate matter (a gas so super-compressed under gravity it behaves more like solid matter) under the extreme conditions inside this dead star," he added.

The researchers say their results open the door for future event predictions with Gaia data. In addition to Hubble, these alignments can now be detected with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Because Webb works at infrared wavelengths, the blue glow of a foreground white dwarf looks dimmer in infrared light, and the background star looks brighter.

Based on Gaia's predictive powers, Sahu is observing another white dwarf, LAWD 66, with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The first observation was done in 2022. More observations will be taken as the deflection peaks in 2024 and then subsides.

"Gaia has really changed the game – it's exciting to be able to use Gaia data to predict when events will happen, and then observe them happening," said McGill. "We want to continue measuring the gravitational microlensing effect and obtain mass measurements for many more types of stars."

In his 1915 theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted that when a massive compact object passes in front of a background star, the light from the star would bend around the foreground object due to the warping of space by its gravitational field.

Exactly a century before this latest Hubble observation, in 1919, two British-organized expeditions to the southern hemisphere first detected this lensing effect during a solar eclipse on May 19th. It was hailed as the first experimental proof of general relativity – that gravity warps space. However, Einstein was pessimistic that the effect could ever be detected for stars outside our solar system because of the precision involved. "Our measurement is 625 times smaller than the effect measured at the 1919 solar eclipse," said McGill.

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 conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

[Targeteer]

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-009?news=true

Hubble Finds Saturn's Rings Heating Its Atmosphere
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Hubble Finds Saturn's Rings Heating Its Atmosphere
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March 30, 2023 10:00AM (EDT) Release ID: 2023-009
Against a black background, Saturn appears as a blue-and-white banded body encircled by a faint, deep blue system of rings. The planet and its rings are canted at about a 45 degree angle to the viewer. A dramatically dark blue equatorial region circles the middle of the planet like a belt. Above the rings and the equatorial region is an extended, whitish, latitudinal band that is 30 percent brighter than the surrounding regions. This brightness of this fat band diminishes gradually toward the northern latitudes. There, it is interrupted by what looks like a bright whitish cap around the north polar region. This is an aurora. A dark, pinpoint spot appears at the very top, center of the auroral cap. This represents the footprint of the spin axis of the planet. A small fraction of the southern hemisphere can be seen between the rings and the equatorial region, but it is dimmer than the northern hemisphere. From this angle, the southern hemisphere actually appears truncated above the south pole.
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Summary
A Rain of Icy Particles Is Affecting the Giant Planet's Weather

The planet Saturn is easily recognizable for its opulent ring system that can easily be seen through a small telescope. Astronomers have now found that the rings are not as placid as they look. The icy rings particles are raining down onto Saturn's atmosphere. This is heating the upper atmosphere. It took a collection of 40 years' worth of Saturn observations, gleaned from four NASA planetary missions to come to this conclusion. Hubble Space Telescope observations were used to tie together all the evidence, collected in ultraviolet light. These results may be applied to determine if similar ring systems encircle planets orbiting other stars. Their rings would be too far away to be seen, but ultraviolet light spectroscopy of the planets could yield clues.

Against a black background, Saturn appears as a blue-and-white banded body encircled by a faint, deep blue system of rings.

Saturn Lyman-alpha Image
Full Article

The secret has been hiding in plain view for 40 years. But it took the insight of a veteran astronomer to pull it all together within a year, using observations of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and retired Cassini
probe, in addition to the Voyager 1 and 2
spacecraft and the retired International Ultraviolet Explorer
mission.

The discovery: Saturn's vast ring system is heating the giant planet's upper atmosphere. The phenomenon has never before been seen in the solar system. It's an unexpected interaction between Saturn and its rings that potentially could provide a tool for predicting if planets around other stars have glorious Saturn-like ring systems, too.

The telltale evidence is an excess of ultraviolet radiation, seen as a spectral line of hot hydrogen in Saturn's atmosphere. The bump in radiation means that something is contaminating and heating the upper atmosphere from the outside.

The most feasible explanation is that icy ring particles raining down onto Saturn's atmosphere cause this heating. This could be due to the impact of micrometeorites, solar wind particle bombardment, solar ultraviolet radiation, or electromagnetic forces picking up electrically charged dust. All this happens under the influence of Saturn's gravitational field pulling particles into the planet. When NASA's Cassini probe plunged into Saturn's atmosphere at the end of its mission in 2017, it measured the atmospheric constituents and confirmed that many particles are falling in from the rings.

"Though the slow disintegration of the rings is well known, its influence on the atomic hydrogen of the planet is a surprise. From the Cassini probe, we already knew about the rings' influence. However, we knew nothing about the atomic hydrogen content," said Lotfi Ben-Jaffel of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris and the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, author of a paper
published on March 30 in the Planetary Science Journal.

"Everything is driven by ring particles cascading into the atmosphere at specific latitudes. They modify the upper atmosphere, changing the composition," said Ben-Jaffel. "And then you also have collisional processes with atmospheric gasses that are probably heating the atmosphere at a specific altitude."

Ben-Jaffel's conclusion required pulling together archival ultraviolet-light (UV) observations from four space missions that studied Saturn. This includes observations from the two NASA Voyager probes that flew by Saturn in the 1980s and measured the UV excess. At the time, astronomers dismissed the measurements as noise in the detectors. The Cassini mission, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, also collected UV data on the atmosphere (over several years). Additional data came from Hubble and the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which launched in 1978, and was an international collaboration between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and the United Kingdom's Science and Engineering Research Council.

But the lingering question was whether all the data could be illusory, or instead reflected a true phenomenon on Saturn.

The key to assembling the jigsaw puzzle came in Ben-Jaffel's decision to use measurements from Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). Its precision observations of Saturn were used to calibrate the archival UV data from all four other space missions that have observed Saturn. He compared the STIS UV observations of Saturn to the distribution of light from multiple space missions and instruments.

"When everything was calibrated, we saw clearly that the spectra are consistent across all the missions. This was possible because we have the same reference point, from Hubble, on the rate of transfer of energy from the atmosphere as measured over decades," Ben-Jaffel said. "It was really a surprise for me. I just plotted the different light distribution data together, and then I realized, wow— it's the same."

Four decades of UV data cover multiple solar cycles and help astronomers study the Sun's seasonal effects on Saturn. By bringing all the diverse data together and calibrating it, Ben-Jaffel found that there is no difference to the level of UV radiation. "At any time, at any position on the planet, we can follow the UV level of radiation," he said. This points to the steady "ice rain" from Saturn's rings as the best explanation.

"We are just at the beginning of this ring characterization effect on the upper atmosphere of a planet. We eventually want to have a global approach that would yield a real signature about the atmospheres on distant worlds. One of the goals of this study is to see how we can apply it to planets orbiting other stars. Call it the search for 'exo-rings.'"

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 conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
About This Release
Credits

RELEASE: NASA, ESA, STScI

MEDIA CONTACT:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland

SCIENCE CONTACT:

Lotfi Ben-Jaffel
Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, Paris, France
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory–University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
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Related Links and Documents

    Science Paper: The science paper by Lotfi Ben-Jaffel et al., PDF (2.07 MB)
    NASA's Hubble Portal

RELEASE IMAGES
Against a black background, Saturn appears as a blue-and-white banded body encircled by a faint, deep blue system of rings.

Saturn Lyman-alpha Image
Pagination

[Targeteer]

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-010.html

Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars
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Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars
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April 06, 2023 10:00AM (EDT) Release ID: 2023-010
This illustration shows a black field speckled with white, yellow and red galaxies. A black hole near the bottom left corner of the image plows through space, leaving a diagonal trail of newborn stars stretching back to the black hole’s parent galaxy in the upper right corner. The black hole is represented by a black half-sphere. It is encircled by an elongated disk of material compressed on the lower left side and trailing off on the upper right side. The material closest to the black hole appears pink, white and streaky. Beyond this, the leading edge of the disk, near the bottom, left corner, is milky violet. The disk trails off behind the black hole, becoming black. Beyond the disk, a diagonal "contrail" of blue and pink stars extends toward the blue-and-pink parent galaxy. The bridge of stars trails off, becoming narrower as it approaches the galaxy. For more details, read the Extended Text Description.
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Summary
A Bizarre 200,000-Light-Year-Long Bridge Links a Galaxy to Its Escaping Black Hole

The universe is so capricious that even the slightest things that might go unnoticed could have profound implications. That's what happened to Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film. For Hubble's electronic cameras, cosmic rays skimming along the detector look like "scratches." But once spectroscopy was done on the oddball streak van Dokkum realized it was really a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars located over halfway across the universe! van Dokkum and his colleagues believe that it stretches between a runaway monster back hole and the galaxy it was ejected from. The black hole must be compressing gas along its wake, which condenses to form stars. Nothing like it has ever been seen anywhere else in the universe before.

This illustration shows a black field speckled with white, yellow and red galaxies. A black hole, near the left, bottom corner of the image, plows through space, leaving a diagonal trail of newborn stars stretching back to the black hole's parent galaxy.

Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Illustration
Full Article

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."

Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.

When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view of the universe with Hubble's exquisite resolution. As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable "star streaks" elsewhere in the universe. This may require machine learning using algorithms that are very good at finding specific weird shapes in a sea of other astronomical data, according to van Dokkum.

The research paper
will be published on April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters
.

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 conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

About This Release
Credits

RELEASE: NASA, ESA, STScI

RELEASE IMAGES
This illustration shows a black field speckled with white, yellow and red galaxies. A black hole, near the left, bottom corner of the image, plows through space, leaving a diagonal trail of newborn stars stretching back to the black hole's parent galaxy.

Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Illustration
A Hubble image of a black, deep-space field is speckled with galaxies and one, lone star. In the center of the image is a small, white-bordered, boxed area that contains one, long, thin, diagonal streak of whitish-blue stars and two galaxies. To the right of the small box is a larger, white-bordered box that contains a magnified view of the contents of smaller box.

Runaway Black Hole Near RCP28
A Hubble photograph of a curious linear feature on a deep-space field. The photograph is overlaid with a color key, scale bar, compass arrows, and two, white-bordered boxes showcasing the feature.

Runaway Black Hole Compass Image
Pagination

[Star One]

Hubble Catches Possible Runaway Blackhole:

[bolun]

Apr 20, 2023

Hubble Celebrates 33rd Anniversary With a Peek Into Nearby Star-Forming Region

Astronomers are celebrating NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's 33rd launch anniversary with an ethereal photo of a nearby star-forming region, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud, and located approximately 960 light-years away.

Hubble's colorful view, showcased through its unique capability to obtain images from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, unveils an effervescent cauldron of glowing gasses and pitch-black dust stirred up and blown around by several hundred newly forming stars embedded within the dark cloud. Hubble just scratches the surface because most of the star birthing firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust – essentially soot – that are thicker toward the bottom of the image. The blackness in the image is not empty space, but filled with obscuring dust.

To capture this image, Hubble peered through a veil of dust on the edge of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen – the raw material for fabricating new stars and planets under the relentless pull of gravity. The image underscores the fact that star formation is a messy process in our rambunctious universe.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-celebrates-33rd-anniversary-with-a-peek-into-nearby-star-forming-region

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI; Image Processing: Varun Bajaj (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Jennifer Mack (STScI)

[Targeteer]

Cross posting due to HST collaboration

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/all-eyes-on-the-ice-giants


Aug 11, 2023
All Eyes on the Ice Giants

NASA’s New Horizons Team Calls for the Amateur Astronomical Community to Augment the Mission’s Observations of Uranus and Neptune

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft plans to observe Uranus and Neptune from its location far out in the outer solar system this fall, and the mission team is inviting the global amateur astronomy community to come along for the ride – and make a real contribution to space science – by observing both ice giants at the same time.

In September – in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope – New Horizons will turn its color camera toward Uranus and Neptune. From New Horizons’ position in the Kuiper Belt, more than 5 billion miles from Earth, these unique images acquired from “behind” the two giant planets will provide new insights into the atmospheres above and the energy balance within both worlds.

“By combining the information New Horizons collects in space with data from telescopes on Earth, we can supplement and even strengthen our models to uncover the mysteries swirling in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Even from amateur astronomer telescopes as small as 16 inches, these complementary observations can be extremely important.”

With New Horizons and Hubble focused on the details of the planets' atmospheres and the transfer of heat from their rocky cores through their gaseous exteriors, observers on Earth can measure the distribution of bright features on Uranus or characterize any unusually bright features on Neptune. They can also track those features much longer than either spacecraft.

Following the campaign, observers can post their images – as well as the details of when they were made and in what filter passbands -- on X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook using the hashtag #NHIceGiants. The New Horizons team will see and collect the images and supporting information placed on these platforms using this identifying hashtag.

Full details on the campaign – including finder charts and observation tables – are available on the New Horizons website at (URL to come).

The Hubble images of Uranus and Neptune will be made publicly available in late September on the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, at archive.stsci.edu.  The New Horizons team expects to receive the images of Uranus and Neptune from the spacecraft by the end of 2023 and will make them available as well.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern, and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow New Horizons on its incredible voyage at http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.
Last Updated: Aug 11, 2023
Editor: Tricia Talbert

[bolun]

NASA’s Hubble Measures the Size of the Nearest Transiting Earth-Sized Planet

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has measured the size of the nearest Earth-sized exoplanet that passes across the face of a neighboring star. This alignment, called a transit, opens the door to follow-on studies to see what kind of atmosphere, if any, the rocky world might have.

The diminutive planet, LTT 1445Ac, was first discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2022. But the geometry of the planet's orbital plane relative to its star as seen from Earth was uncertain because TESS does not have the required optical resolution. This means the detection could have been a so-called grazing transit, where a planet only skims across a small portion of the parent star's disk. This would yield an inaccurate lower limit of the planet's diameter.

Hubble observations show that the planet makes a normal transit fully across the star's disk, yielding a true size of only 1.07 times Earth's diameter. This means the planet is a rocky world, like Earth, with approximately the same surface gravity. But at a surface temperature of roughly 500 degrees Fahrenheit, it is too hot for life as we know it.

The planet orbits the star LTT 1445A, which is part of a triple system of three red dwarf stars that is 22 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. The star has two other reported planets that are larger than LTT 1445Ac. A tight pair of two other dwarf stars, LTT 1445B and C, lies about 3 billion miles away from LTT 1445A, also resolved by Hubble. The alignment of the three stars and the edge-on orbit of the BC pair suggests that everything in the system is co-planar, including the known planets. 

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/nasahubble/status/1729977637961916738

NASA is working to resume science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope after it entered safe mode Nov. 23 due to an ongoing gyroscope issue. Hubble’s instruments are stable, and the telescope is in good health:

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-space-telescope-pauses-science-due-to-gyro-issue/

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope Pauses Science Due to Gyro Issue

NASA Hubble Mission Team
Goddard Space Flight Center

NOV 29, 2023
ARTICLE

NASA is working to resume science operations of the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope after it entered safe mode Nov. 23 due to an ongoing gyroscope (gyro) issue. Hubble’s instruments are stable, and the telescope is in good health.

The telescope automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty readings. The gyros measure the telescope’s turn rates and are part of the system that determines which direction the telescope is pointed. While in safe mode, science operations are suspended, and the telescope waits for new directions from the ground.

Hubble first went into safe mode Nov. 19. Although the operations team successfully recovered the spacecraft to resume observations the following day, the unstable gyro caused the observatory to suspend science operations once again Nov. 21. Following a successful recovery, Hubble entered safe mode again Nov. 23.

The team is now running tests to characterize the issue and develop solutions. If necessary, the spacecraft can be re-configured to operate with only one gyro. The spacecraft had six new gyros installed during the fifth and final space shuttle servicing mission in 2009. To date, three of those gyros remain operational, including the gyro currently experiencing fluctuations. Hubble uses three gyros to maximize efficiency, but could continue to make science observations with only one gyro if required.

NASA anticipates Hubble will continue making groundbreaking discoveries, working with other observatories, such as the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope, throughout this decade and possibly into the next.

Launched in 1990, Hubble has been observing the universe for more than 33 years. Read more about some of Hubble’s greatest scientific discoveries.

Image caption:

Hubble orbiting more than 300 miles above Earth as seen from the space shuttle.
NASA