Over the many years the Hubble Space Telescope has spent orbiting the Earth, it has had its share of issues. The space telescope has also taken some of the most spectacular images of the cosmos humans have ever seen. One of the most beautiful images Hubble has taken is of the Veil Nebula.
Former astronaut and history-maker Dr. Kathy Sullivan joined NASA for an inspection of the next major LEGO set. This is the LEGO NASA Space Shuttle Discovery, complete with built-in and deployable Hubble Space Telescope. As part of the NASA STS-31 mission, Dr. Sullivan played an essential part in the planning of Hubble and deployment of the space telescope with Discovery. Now she's here to make sure the LEGO set is on-point.
One of the most beautiful planets in our solar system is Saturn, with its extensive ring system and colorful atmosphere. NASA has been observing Saturn with the Hubble Space Telescope and watching the seasons change on the massive planet. The telescope has been giving astronomers a look at the turbulent atmosphere as Saturn's northern hemisphere, currently in summer, transitions to the fall.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a rocky exoplanet orbiting a distant star that shows evidence of volcanic activity that's actively reforming the atmosphere. The planet is known as GJ 1132 b, and scientists believe it has a similar density, size, and age as Earth. One of the most interesting things about GJ 1132 b is that scientists believe it started as a gaseous world with a thick atmosphere.
Since Hubble first went into operation, it has taken some of the most breathtaking images of the cosmos humanity has ever seen. The image seen below is one of its latest incredible photos, and this one is of a galaxy called NGC 2336. NASA describes the galaxy as "quintessential," saying that it's big, beautiful, and blue.
NASA researchers have published a new study that sheds light on the reason why the red supergiant VY Canis Majoris has grown dim, citing a phenomenon similar to the one that caused Betelgeuse to grow temporarily dim last year. The new findings were made possible using data gathered by the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
Today, NASA shared a rather interesting update about the goings-on of the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers with the Paris Institute of Astrophysics (IAP) were using the telescope to study globular cluster NGC 6397, where they were looking for an intermediate-mass black hole. Globular systems, as NASA describes them, are "extremely dense stellar systems, which host stars that are closely packed together," with NGC 6397 in particular only about 7,800 light-years away from Earth.
The Hubble space telescope has been in orbit for decades, and while still extremely useful, it's aging, and NASA is preparing to replace it. One of the key observations that the Hubble space telescope makes are images known as Hubble ultra-deep fields. The upcoming Roman space telescope will be much more capable of taking ultra deep field images than Hubble.
One key answer for helping scientists figure out how many galaxies there are in the universe is how dark space is. Astronomers have been able to estimate the total number of galaxies in the universe by counting everything visible in a Hubble deep field. Then they multiply that by the total area of the sky. The problem with that process is that there are some galaxies that are too faint and far away to be directly detected.
The image seen below was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and is of a galaxy cluster called GAL-CLUS-022058s. It's located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax. It's the largest, and one of the most complete, Einstein rings ever discovered in the universe. It has been nicknamed the "Molten Ring."
NASA has trained the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope on a galaxy cluster known as Abell 2261. The galaxy cluster is about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers believe that Abell 2261, like most large galaxies in the universe, should have a massive black hole at its center. The black hole expected to be somewhere in the range of 3 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the Sun can't be found.
There's a storm raging on the surface of Neptune that is wider than the Atlantic Ocean. The storm responds in the northern hemisphere of the planet and was first spied by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018. Observations made in 2019 showed that the storm was drifting southward towards the equator of the planet.