The Tiny Moon Phobos Is Photographed During Its Quick Trip Around MarsWhile photographing Mars, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet. Discovered in 1877, the diminutive, potato-shaped moon is so small that it appears star-like in the Hubble pictures. Phobos orbits Mars in just 7 hours and 39 minutes, which is faster than Mars rotates. The moon’s orbit is very slowly shrinking, meaning it will eventually shatter under Mars’ gravitational pull, or crash into the planet. Hubble took 13 separate exposures over 22 minutes to create a time-lapse video showing the moon’s orbital path.
The star, harbored in a very distant spiral galaxy, is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth.
Marking the Hubble Space Telescope’s 28th anniversary in orbit, the observatory peered into the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a favourite target for amateur astronomers, generating this spectacular view of a vast, chaotic stellar nursery some 4,000 light-years away. At the centre of the photo is a giant star 200,000 times brighter, and 32 times more massive, than the sun, blasting out powerful stellar winds and torrents of ultraviolet radiation.
Seventeen years ago, astronomers witnessed a supernova go off 40 million light-years away in the galaxy called NGC 7424, located in the southern constellation Grus, the Crane. Now, in the fading afterglow of that explosion, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first image of a surviving companion to a supernova. This picture is the most compelling evidence that some supernovas originate in double-star systems.“We know that the majority of massive stars are in binary pairs,” said Stuart Ryder from the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Sydney, Australia, and lead author of the study. “Many of these binary pairs will interact and transfer gas from one star to the other when their orbits bring them close together.”
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have detected helium in the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-107b. This is the first time this element has been detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System. The discovery demonstrates the ability to use infrared spectra to study exoplanet extended atmospheres.
Supersharp Images from New VLT Adaptive OpticsESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has achieved first light with a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography — and has captured remarkably sharp test images of the planet Neptune, star clusters and other objects. The pioneering MUSE instrument in Narrow-Field Mode, working with the GALACSI adaptive optics module, can now use this new technique to correct for turbulence at different altitudes in the atmosphere. It is now possible to capture images from the ground at visible wavelengths that are sharper than those from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The combination of exquisite image sharpness and the spectroscopic capabilities of MUSE will enable astronomers to study the properties of astronomical objects in much greater detail than was possible before.