20 Years of Hubble April 24, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, pics, space . Add a comment
Source: Hubblesite.org. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
Today we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hurrah! Although it’s clearly impossible, as I haven’t aged more than, oh, 10 years since then.
The folks at NASA and ESA have released a set of gorgeous new images and videos of the Carina Nebula, a region of active star formation in our Galaxy.
The European Hubble team have also taken the occasion to launch a rather nice looking new website, check it out here.
The same team are organising a competition to find the most artistic, funniest, weirdest, largest and smallest manifestations of Hubble and its images in popular culture – that’s a fun idea. Anyone can join the Flickr group and submit images, and the category winners get some cool prizes. Read more here.
Google joined in the celebration with a lovely doodle for the day:
Not a planet, still interesting February 7, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, pics . Add a comment
Despite Mike Brown‘s best efforts, Pluto is not dead (yet). These cool new images of the tiny non-planet taken with the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is by no means a boring lump of icy rock. When comparing these images, taken in 2002-2003, to a previous set dating back to 1994, scientists noticed some striking changes. This would suggest that Pluto, just like many bodies in the solar system, shows seasonal activity and all kinds of interesting chemistry as it moves along its looong orbit around the Sun.
Image: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute)
Puffing up elliptical galaxies October 3, 2009
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, science . 4comments
Elliptical galaxies are the boring uncles of the galaxy family: they’re amorphous blobby things, ubiquitous in the Universe, that contain a fairly uniform population of old, red stars. Without the interstellar gas and dust that is needed to harbour pretty sites of star formation, they are supremely unphotogenic. But they have far more going on beneath their featureless surface: the complex dynamics inside many ellipticals show evidence of a turbulent past and, with many of the most massive known galaxies in our local Universe being ellipticals, they clearly play an important role in galaxies’ evolution.
Studies seem to suggest that high-redshift elliptical galaxies are more compact than their present-day counterparts (figure from Glazebrook, 2009)
Observational surveys of elliptical galaxies at high redshift have in recent years revealed a further interesting fact: ellipticals at high redshift appear to be much smaller in size than those in our local Universe, but have about the same mass and density of stars. In a recent ApJ paper, Ivana Damjanov of the University of Toronto and collaborators describe how a sample of elliptical galaxies at redshifts 1 to 2 looked 2-3 times smaller than those in the local Universe. The first surprise lies in that they evolve at all between redshift 2 and 0. In our current understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, ellipticals are the “red and dead” endpoints of evolution.
Revamped Hubble breaks new ground September 13, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, new astronomy, science . Add a comment
Going, going, gone? Candidate z~7-8 galaxies, seen to "drop out" in the z filter around 1 micron (adapted from Oesch et al., 2009)
Quick on the heels of NASA’s showcasing of the first images taken by a reborn Hubble Space Telescope come a pair of papers posted to astro-ph showing a glimpse of Hubble’s potential new power. These papers, by a collaboration of US, Swiss and Dutch astronomers, report the detection of galaxies using Hubble’s new optical/infrared camera WFC3 out to staggeringly high redshifts of 8-9. If confirmed, this shows that Hubble can now detect radiation from galaxies when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old. The first anything at those distances was spotted just a few months ago, when satellite SWIFT caught a gamma-ray burst that was confirmed to have erupted at redshift of 8.2.
Hubble lives, long live Hubble! September 9, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, pics, science, space . Add a comment
Following months of commissioning and calibrating Hubble‘s new instruments installed during the servicing mission earlier this year, NASA today released the first set of images from the revamped observatory. Each of the images show one of the gourmet pieces of the visible Universe, like the group of interacting galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, above. The image is a composite made up of many from different filters all taken with the new wide-field camera, WFC3. Brilliant!
For the full set of images released today, hop over here.
