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Tag: Hubble Space Telescope

  • Hubble Telescope Running in Safe Mode

    Hubble Telescope Running in Safe Mode

    After decades of peering into the cosmos, the Hubble Space Telescope is experiencing a major computer issue and is running in safe mode.

    On June 13, NASA detected a problem when Hubble’s computer halted. Attempts to restart it failed, with a degrading memory module identified as the problem. Further attempts to bring the memory module online also failed.

    NASA says the computer running Hubble’s instruments is a 1980s computer, with a full backup system as well. There are four memory modules that either computer can access, but attempts to have the primary computer switch to the backup modules failed.

    When the operations team attempted to switch to a back-up memory module, however, the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete. Another attempt was conducted on both modules Thursday evening to obtain more diagnostic information while again trying to bring those memory modules online. However, those attempts were not successful.

    It remains to be seen if NASA engineers will need to switch to the backup computer, but the longer the issue persists the more likely the switch will happen.

    It is fully redundant in that a second computer, along with its associated hardware, exists on orbit that can be switched over to in the event of a problem. Both computers can access and use any of four independent memory modules, which each contain 64K of Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) memory. The payload computer uses only one memory module operationally at a time, with the other three serving as backups.

    If engineers are not able to fix the problem remotely, NASA may need to send astronauts to the telescope to fix it.

  • Hubble Telescope to Search For New Kuiper Belt Objects

    Launched in early 2006, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with dwarf planet Pluto in a little over one year. The observatory will fly within 6,200 miles of Pluto, gathering data on the dwarf planet and its companion moons. After its encounter with Pluto, New Horizons will continue to fly further into the Kuiper Belt where thousands of icy objects orbit the sun from a distance of billions of miles. Now NASA is beginning the work of searching for a follow-up target for New Horizons research.

    NASA this week announced that the Hubble Space Telescope will be used to search the Kuiper Belt to help determine New Horizon’s post-Pluto future. Astronomers using the telescope will target a small portion of the sky where New Horizons will be heading in the future. The telescope will turn at the predicted speed for Kuiper belt objects, making the objects appear stationary against a streaked backdrop of stars in the constellation Sagittarius.

    “I am pleased that our science peer-review process arrived at a consensus as to how to effectively use Hubble’s unique capabilities to support the science goals of the New Horizons mission,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

    The Kuiper Belt search announcement comes just weeks after Hubble imagery was used to expand the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo. These and other applications demonstrate the incredible discoveries that astronomers have managed to coax out of the Hubble telescope well beyond its originally-planned scientific goals. The Hubble will soon be succeeded by the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2018.

    “The planned search for a suitable target for New Horizons further demonstrates how Hubble is effectively being used to support humankind’s initial reconnaissance of the solar system,” said Mountain. “Likewise, it is also a preview of how the powerful capabilities of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will further bolster planetary science. We are excited by the potential of both observatories for ongoing solar system exploration and discovery.”

    Image via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

  • Hubble Space Telescope: Deep Field Image Brightened With Ultraviolet Light

    The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is one of the most iconic and impressive images ever taken of deep space. The image, taken of a tiny section of the southern sky, shows thousands of galaxies, putting the vastness of space into perspective for humans. Now astronomers have improved upon this classic image, adding a wider range of colors to the mix.

    Astronomers working with NASA and the ESA this week revealed an updated image of the HUDF. The new image combines older images of the field with a new one layering on ultraviolet light seen in the field. Previously the HUDF image was composed of visible light and near-infrared light images taken of the field in 2003 and 2012.

    Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014

    The 2014 image will now allow astronomers to study even younger galaxies located in the HUDF. By looking at the ultraviolet spectrum, astronomers will be able to identify which galaxies have hotter, larger, younger stars and therefore the galaxies that are in the midst of greater star formation.

    “The lack of information from ultraviolet light made studying galaxies in the HUDF like trying to understand the history of families without knowing about the grade-school children,” said Harry Teplitz, principal investigator for the Hubble Space Telescope and an astronomer at Caltech. “The addition of the ultraviolet fills in this missing range.”

    The Hubble Space Telescope has been the workhorse of visible-light astronomy for over two decades. Along with the decade-old Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have surveyed much of the sky in visible and infrared light. Astronomers are currently waiting on the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018, which will be more powerful than both the Hubble and the Spitzer telescopes.

    “Ultraviolet surveys like this one using the unique capability of Hubble are incredibly important in planning for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope,” said Rogier Windhorst, a Hubble team member and an astronomer at Arizona State University. “Hubble provides an invaluable ultraviolet light dataset that researchers will need to combine with infrared data from Webb. This is the first really deep ultraviolet image to show the power of that combination.”

    Image via NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)

  • Hubble Spots Cloudy Atmospheres on Two Nearby Exoplanets

    Hubble Spots Cloudy Atmospheres on Two Nearby Exoplanets

    On the eve of a new year, astronomers have just revealed that two nearby exoplanets are covered in an atmosphere thick with clouds.

    Two new papers, both to be published in the journal Nature, examine the planets GJ 436b and GJ 1214b. GJ 436b is located just 36 light-years from our solar system and is thought to be a “warm Neptune” – a gas giant similar to our outer-most planet, but much closer to its sun. GJ 1214b is just 40 light-years away and is dubbed a “super-Earth” for its size and position relative to its star.

    Researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe these planets as they passed in front of their respective suns. Instead of the revealing chemical spectra that astronomers would normally find as starlight filters through the atmosphere of planets, the studies’ authors instead found spectra with no chemical markers.

    “Either this planet [GJ 436b] has a high cloud layer obscuring the view, or it has a cloud-free atmosphere that is deficient in hydrogen, which would make it very unlike Neptune,” said Heather Knutson, lead on the GJ436b observations and an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. “Instead of hydrogen, it could have relatively large amounts of heavier molecules such as water vapor, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide, which would compress the atmosphere and make it hard for us to detect any chemical signatures.”

    Follow-up observations of GJ 1214b found evidence that it too had a thick layer of clouds on top of an atmosphere made up of mainly of water vapor or hydrogen. The GJ1214b observations have also ruled out the possibility that the planet’s atmosphere cloudless but dominated by common chemicals such as water vapor, nitrogen, or carbon dioxide.

    “Both planets are telling us something about the diversity of planet types that occur outside of our own solar system; in this case we are discovering we may not know them as well as we thought,” said Knutson. “We’d really like to determine the size at which these planets transition from looking like mini-gas giants to something more like a water world or a rocky, scaled-up version of the Earth. Both of these observations are fundamentally trying to answer that question.”

    Image via NASA/ESA/L. Kreidberg and J. Bean (University of Chicago)/H. Knutson (California Institute of Technology)

  • Water Vapor Detected on Jupiter’s Moon Europa

    Water Vapor Detected on Jupiter’s Moon Europa

    New research published this week in the journal Science Express has revealed that there is water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter‘s moon Europa. The vapor was detected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope over the moon’s south pole.

    Though the water vapor has been detected on Europa, the exact cause of the vapor has yet to be determined. The report’s authors believe that the likeliest cause is eruptions of water on the moon’s surface. Scientists have believed for years that Europa has oceans of water underneath its outer crust of ice.

    “By far the simplest explanation for this water vapor is that it erupted from plumes on the surface of Europa,” said Lorenz Roth, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute. “If those plumes are connected with the subsurface water ocean we are confident exists under Europa’s crust, then this means that future investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of Europa’s potentially habitable environment without drilling through layers of ice. And that is tremendously exciting.”

    Roth and his colleagues believe that cracks in Europa’s ice crust could be the source of the water vapor. Such a phenomenon has already been seen on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

    Europa’s water vapor is slightly different in that the vapor action was only detected when the moon was further away from its host planet. This suggests that Jupiter’s gravity is causing large tidal shifts on Europa, which could provide more evidence that Europa has water oceans underneath its surface.

    For now the information on Europa’s water vapor plumes is limited. Researchers were able to detect them only very faintly using Hubble’s imaging spectrograph, which recorded the ultraviolet light that serves as the evidence for water in the moon’s atmosphere.

    “We pushed Hubble to its limits to see this very faint emission. These could be stealth plumes, because they might be tenuous and difficult to observe in the visible light,” said Joachim Saur, co-author of the paper and a planetary scientist at the University of Cologne.

    (Image courtesy NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI)

  • Ultra Bright Black Hole Discovered

    An ultraluminous black hole that exists in the neighboring Pinwheel Galaxy has been discovered by astronomers, which shines twice as bright as previously thought possible.

    The ultra-bright object, which exists in a system called ULX-1, that resides about 22 million light-years from Earth, may alter traditional thinking regarding how black holes radiate energy. Joel Bregman of the University of Michigan said in a statement, “As if black holes weren’t extreme enough, this is a really extreme one that is shining as brightly as it possibly can. It’s figured out a way to be more luminous than we thought possible.”

    The ULX-1 system, which includes the bright black hole, along with a companion star, is short for “ultraluminous X-ray source.” A team led by Jifeng Liu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, has been studying ULX-1 using the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and two NASA spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

    ULX-1 generates extreme amounts of high-energy X-ray light, which is emitted by material on a downward spiral into the black hole’s maw. The light is so intense that astronomers initially figured that ULX-1 was an intermediate-mass black hole. Though, the latest findings suggest that the black hole is actually quite small by black hole standards. “Our findings may turn the trend of taking ultraluminous X-ray sources as promising intermediate black hole candidates,” Liu said in a statement.

    Spectroscopic analysis has shown that the companion star in ULX-1 is a big, hot type known as a Wolf-Rayet star, coming in at 19 times the mass of the sun. It was also found that the star and the black hole orbit each other once every 8.2 days. This rate of orbit allowed Liu’s team to estimate the black hole’s mass at being between 20 to 30 times that of the sun. These measurements put ULX-1 at a stellar-size black hole range, not an intermediate one.

    Though no middleweight black hole has been found regarding ULX-1, researchers believe that this intermediate-mass class makes up the building blocks of the supermassive black holes that exist in the center of most, if not all, galaxies.

    Researchers likewise aren’t sure how the ULX-1 system manages to put off so much light. “Our work shows, based on our conclusion of a stellar mass black hole, that our understanding of the black hole radiation mechanism is incomplete and needs revision,” Liu said.

    The full study appears in the journal Nature.

    Image via Twitter.

  • Three Ancient Galaxies Spotted Merging

    Astronomers this week revealed that they have spotted three ancient galaxies that appear to be merging. The observations, which were made using both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) are recorded in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

    The three galaxies are located inside a large gas cloud that is located almost 13 billion light-years from our solar system. This means the galaxies are seen as they were less than one billion years after the big bang. Astronomers believe that the galaxies might have eventually merged, forming a larger galaxy similar to the ones we are more familiar with today.

    “This exceedingly rare triple system, seen when the Universe was only 800 million years old, provides important insights into the earliest stages of galaxy formation during a period known as ‘Cosmic Dawn,’ when the Universe was first bathed in starlight,” said Richard Ellis, a member of the research team and an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. “Even more interesting, these galaxies appear poised to merge into a single massive galaxy, which could eventually evolve into something akin to the Milky Way.”

    The gas cloud, which researchers have dubbed “Himiko” was first spotted in 2009 and was seen as a single gas cloud. However, the size of the cloud is, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, almost ten times larger than the nebulous galaxies that are found that early in the universe. This led to the new observations, which revealed that three distinct sources of light within the larger cloud.

    What astronomers did not find, however, could end up being their most interesting observation. The team did not detect any carbon in Himiko, which is one of the first elements created by young stars.

    “When this dust is heated by ultraviolet radiation from massive newborn stars, the dust then re-radiates at radio wavelengths,” said Kotaro Kohno, a member of the research team and an astronomer at the University of Tokyo. “Such radiation is not detected in Himiko.”

    Kohno and his colleagues currently believe that this could signal that Himiko is, in fact, a primordial galaxy made up mostly of hydrogen and helium gas. This would make it one of the first primordial galaxies to be caught during its early formation.

    (Image courtesy NASA/Hubble; NAOJ/Subaru)

  • Hubble Finds Young Milky Way-Like Galaxies

    Hubble Finds Young Milky Way-Like Galaxies

    Astronomers this week detailed findings showing how our own galaxy, the Milky Way, may have looked when it was first forming.

    The research, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal, shows that the Milky Way was likely once a blue-hued, gas-filled, low-mass object. It then gained mass and became a flat disc shape with a slight bulge in its center. Over time, the galaxy and the supermassive black hole at its center grew and formed the spiral shape that we observe today.

    “You can see that these galaxies are fluffy and spread out,” said Shannon Patel, another co-author of the study and an astronomer at Leiden University. “There is no evidence of a bulge without a disk, around which the disk formed later.”

    The research used the Hubble Space Telescope to perform deep-sky surveys of 400 galaxies chosen from a catalog of more than 100,000 galaxies for their similarities to the Milky Way. Astronomers were able to observe those Milky Way-like galaxies and place them each along an 11 billion year-long development path. They found evidence that our galaxy’s peak star formation period occurred when the universe was only 4 billion years old, with stars forming at a rate of around 15 per year.

    “For the first time, we have direct images of what the Milky Way looked like in the past,” said Pieter van Dokkum, a co-author of the study and an Astronomer at Yale University. “Of course, we can’t see the Milky Way itself in the past. We selected galaxies billions of light-years away that will evolve into galaxies like the Milky Way. By tracing the Milky Way’s siblings, we find that our galaxy built up 90 percent of its stars between 11 billion and 7 billion years ago, which is something that has not been measured directly before.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/ESA)

  • Hubble Telescope Spots Six-Tailed Asteroid

    Hubble Telescope Spots Six-Tailed Asteroid

    Astronomers today announced that an asteroid with six “comet-like” tails has been discovered. The asteroid, currently named P/2013 P5, was imaged twice in September by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its strange tails were seen changing position over the course of just a few days. A paper describing the asteroid was published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    Astronomers currently hypothesize that these tails are made of dust that is expelled from the asteroid. The paper’s authors believe that the asteroid has begun rotating so fast that parts of its surface are now breaking off from its surface.

    “We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it,” said David Jewitt, lead investigator on the paper and an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It’s hard to believe we’re looking at an asteroid.”

    Modeling of the asteroid and its orbit have shown that its tails could have been formed by a series of “dust-ejection events” that happened between April and September of this year. Solar winds are believed to have strewn the dust into tail-like structures. That same radiation is also believed to have increased the asteroid’s rate of rotation, causing surface dust to slide together and eventually off of the asteroid all together.

    P/2013 P5’s nucleus is only approximately 1,400 feet wide, making the asteroid’s gravitational pull very weak. It is thought to be a piece of a larger asteroid that broke off around 200 million years ago.

    “We were completely knocked out,” said Jewitt. “This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many more to come.”

    (Image courtesy NASA, ESA, D.Jewitt/UCLA)

  • Neptune’s 14th Moon Was Discovered on July 1st

    Neptune’s 14th Moon Was Discovered on July 1st

    Neptune is the 8th planet from the sun at nearly 2.8 million miles, or 30 times as far away as earth, and makes a rotation around the sun every 165 years. It was the first planet to be located through mathematical predictions rather than through regular observations of the sky on September 23, 1846, by Johann Gotfried Galle.

    Neptune had 13 known moons until NASA’s recent discovery, using the Hubble Space Telescope. The largest of Neptune’s moons is Triton, which rotates in a direction opposite of it’s planet and measures approximately 1,680 miles across. Because it rotates in this manner, many scientists believe that Triton was originally a dwarf planet that was sucked into Neptune’s orbit. “This capture would have gravitationally torn up any original satellite system Neptune possessed,” Hubble officials wrote in a statement. “Many of the moons now seen orbiting the planet probably formed after Triton settled into its unusual retrograde orbit about Neptune.”
    The newly discovered moon, classified as S/2004 N 1, is now considered to be the smallest known moon to be rotating around Neptune, measuring approximately 12 miles across. It is so small that

    S/2004 N 1 was discovered on July 1, 2013, while Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute was studying Neptune’s segments of rings, or arcs. “The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” Showalter said. “It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.” There was a small white dot that appeared in over 150 photographs of Neptune, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, from 2004 to 2009. Showalter tracked the movements of this dot throughout all of the photographs that were taken, before finally making the shocking discovery. He also determined that the small moon orbits the planet every 23 hours.

    The procedure I devised predicts where any given moon ought to move from one image to the next, and then combines the images with a ‘twist’ that compensates for the expected motion. I developed this procedure (and I am certainly not the first) to study some peculiar arcs in the rings of Neptune. However, I soon realized it could be useful for moons as well. It was only when I expanded my analysis out to regions well beyond Neptune’s ring system that an extra little dot turned up, over and over again.

  • New Neptune Moon Found by Hubble Space Telescope

    New Neptune Moon Found by Hubble Space Telescope

    NASA this week revealed that a new moon has been spotted orbiting the furthest planet from the sun, Neptune.

    The moon, the 14th known to be orbiting Neptune, has been labeled S/2004 N 1. The small rock is the smallest of Neptune’s known moons at approximately 12 miles across. It is located around 65,400 miles from Neptune, between the orbits of Neptune moons Larissa and Proteus, and orbits Neptune once every 23 hours.

    The moon is so small that it was missed by the Voyager 2 probe when it surveyed Neptune in 1989. It was spotted by the Hubble telescope in pictures taken from 2004 to 2009, but also went unnoticed until this month. Mark Showalter, an Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, was studying the ring segments around Neptune when he “on a whim” extended his analysis beyond Neptune’s ring system. He spotted a small white dot, S/2004 N 1, which he was then able to find in 150 archival Hubble Space Telescope photos to plot its orbit.

    “The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” said Showalter. “It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete – the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.”

  • Hubble Telescope Spots a Blue Planet

    Hubble Telescope Spots a Blue Planet

    Astronomers have been finding and cataloging exoplanets for years now, but NASA this week announced that the Hubble Space Telescope has helped determined the color of a planet orbiting a star 63 light-years from our solar system.

    The planet, HD 189733b, has been found to be blue in color. Astronomers determined this using Hubble’s imaging spectrograph, which was able to measure color changes in the planet while it passed behind its star.

    “We saw the light becoming less bright in the blue but not in the green or red,” said Frederic Pont, a member of the research team and an astrophysicist at the University of Exeter. “Light was missing in the blue but not in the red when it was hidden. This means that the object that disappeared was blue.”

    If it were possible to see the planet in visible light, the planet might resemble a blue dot similar to Earth. Seem up close, however, the planet would be very different from our own. Astronomers describe HD 189733b as a “turbulent” world where temperatures reach 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and glass rains from the sky. The blue color does not come from an ocean but from silicate particles hight in the planet’s atmosphere.

    HD 189733b was discovered in 2005 and is what Astronomers call a “hot Jupiter.” The planet orbits only 2.9 million miles from its star and is gravitationally locked. This means differing temperatures on each side of the planet cause massive storms and winds that can reach 4,500 miles per hour.

  • “Strobe Light” Star Spotted by NASA Telescopes

    “Strobe Light” Star Spotted by NASA Telescopes

    NASA this week revealed that astronomers have discovered a mysterious object that acts like a strobe light. The object, named LRLL 54361, releases a flash of light every 25.34 days. Though other objects in the universe have been observed with similar patterns, this one is the most powerful yet seen.

    In a new paper published recently in the journal Nature, astronomers have proposed that the strobe effect is caused by interactions between two very young stars (protostars) that orbit each other (binary star). As material is dumped into the growing binary star, they believe that the flashes are caused by a blast of radiation unleashed when the stars closely approach each other in their orbits. Such an event, known as a pulsed accretion, has been observed before, but never with such regularity or in a system so young. The binary star is estimated to be no more than a few hundred thousand years old.

    “This protostar has such large brightness variations with a precise period that it is very difficult to explain,” said James Muzerolle, co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

    LRLL 54361 is located 950 light-years from Earth in a star-forming region named IC 348. The discovery of its strobe-like property was made using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the observations and reveal the structure of the system.

    Though the gas and dust surrounding the system prevents it from being observed directly, the Hubble was able to detect two “cavaties” in the material on opposite sides of a central dust disc. Astronomers believe the cavities were created by an outflow from near the binary star.

    (Image courtesy NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/NOAO/University of Arizona/ Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

  • Rogue Planet Orbit Spotted by NASA’s Hubble

    Rogue Planet Orbit Spotted by NASA’s Hubble

    New images of the Fomalhaut star system could show evidence of a “titanic planetary disruption.” Astronomers have found that the debris belt in the system is wider than was thought, and that a “rogue” planet has a precarious orbit that takes it straight through the dust ring. The debris belt spans a huge section of space from 14 to around 20 billion miles from Fomalhaut. The planet, Fomalhaut b, comes as close as 4.6 billion miles from its star before swinging out 27 billion miles away from it.

    “We are shocked. This is not what we expected,” said Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

    Kalas led a team that recalculated Fomalhaut b’s orbit from newer observations made last year using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. He and his colleagues say these new findings suggest that there could be other objects in the system that sent the planet on its wild trajectory. Hypotheses include an undiscovered planet that gravitationally ejected Fomalhaut b, or a dwarf planet that collided with it.

    “Hot Jupiters get tossed through scattering events, where one planet goes in and one gets thrown out,” said Mark Clampin of NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This could be the planet that gets thrown out.”

    If Fomalhaut b is in the same plane as the dust belt, it will enter the debris around 2032. Astronomers have also detected irregularities and gaps across the dust belt, suggesting that there are other planets to search for in the Fomalhaut system.

  • NASA Spots Weather Patterns on Brown Dwarf

    NASA Spots Weather Patterns on Brown Dwarf

    Astronomers this week announced that they have produced a “weather map” for a brown dwarf that shows planet-sized clouds driven by wind.

    Brown dwarfs are objects at the edge of becoming a star. They lack the mass to begin hydrogen fusion, and in some ways are similar to gas giant planets. The new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, will provide researchers with a better understanding of brown dwarfs and the atmospheres of the billions of planets outside our solar system.

    “With Hubble and Spitzer, we were able to look at different atmospheric layers of a brown dwarf, similar to the way doctors use medical imaging techniques to study the different tissues in your body,” said Daniel Apai, principal investigator on the research at the University of Arizona.

    Apai refers to the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, which were used simultaneously to observe a brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026. He and his colleauges found that its light varied every 90 minutes as the object rotated, depending in what wavelength of infrared light it was observed. These variations were discovered to be the different layers of the brown dwarf’s clouds, which swirl around the its atmosphere.

    “Unlike the water clouds of Earth or the ammonia clouds of Jupiter, clouds on brown dwarfs are composed of hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron, and other exotic compounds,” said Mark Marley, co-author of the study and a research scientist at NASA‘s Ames Research Center. “So this large atmospheric disturbance found by Spitzer and Hubble gives a new meaning to the concept of extreme weather.”

    This was the first time astronomers were able to study the variability of a brown dwarf’s atmosphere at different altitudes at the same time. Researchers are planning to do the same with other nearby brown dwarfs.

    “What we see here is evidence for massive, organized cloud systems, perhaps akin to giant versions of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter,” said Adam Showman, a theorist at the University of Arizona. “These out-of-sync light variations provide a fingerprint of how the brown dwarf’s weather systems stack up vertically. The data suggest regions on the brown dwarf where the weather is cloudy and rich in silicate vapor deep in the atmosphere coincide with balmier, drier conditions at higher altitudes – and vice versa.”

  • Globular Cluster Aging Revealed in New Study

    Globular clusters are spherical groupings of stars tightly bound by gravity. While these objects are usually 12 to 13 billion years old, a new study has found that clusters can appear to be vastly different ages, depending on the behavior of their member stars.

    Astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope and NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope to measure the age of the stars found in various globular clusters. The research will be published tomorrow in the journal Nature.

    “Although these clusters all formed billions of years ago,” said Francesco Ferraro, team leader of the research and an astronomer at the University of Bologna. “We wondered whether some might be aging faster or slower than others. By studying the distribution of a type of blue star that exists in the clusters, we found that some clusters had indeed evolved much faster over their lifetimes, and we developed a way to measure the rate of aging.”

    The blue star Ferraro refers to is known as a “blue stragler” and is formed when aging stars receive extra mass that allows them to shine brighter. These stars can form when one star pulls matter off of another, or as a result of stellar collisions.

    Since globular clusters form quickly, their member stars all have roughly the same age. The bright, high mass stars in the clusters burn out quickly, leaving what should only be low-mass, dim stars. The blue stragglers, then, gave researchers a chance to study how different globular clusters age.

    Astronomers mapped the location of blue stragglers in 21 different globular clusters. They found three different types of clusters. One group appeared young, with blue stragglers distributed throughout the clusters. Another group appeared old, with their blue stragglers having migrated into a clump near the center of the clusters. The third group was in-between the others, with blue stragglers near the center of clusters and other, further out ones still migrating inward.

    “Since these clusters all formed at roughly the same time, this reveals big differences in the speed of evolution from cluster to cluster,” said Barbara Lanzoni, co-author of the study and an astronomer at the University of Bologna. “In the case of fast-aging clusters, we think that the sedimentation process can be complete within a few hundred million years, while for the slowest it would take several times the current age of the Universe.”

  • NASA’s Hubble Takes Census of Early Galaxies

    Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered seven previously unseen galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago – a time when galaxies were just beginning to form. The new discovery has provided researchers with a “statistically robust” sample of early galaxies, revealing how abundant such galaxies were at the beginning of the universe.

    The images come from a Hubble survey of the Ultra Deep Field (UDF), a patch of sky that has been studied intensely. Astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC 3) instrument to obtain the “deepest” near-infrared images of any Hubble observation.

    The findings, which are collected in a paper that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, show a smooth decline in the number of galaxies when looking back to only 450 million years after the big bang. The observations support the hypothesis that galaxies formed continuously over time and could have provided enough radiation to re-ionize the universe.

    “Our study has taken the subject forward in two ways,” said Richard Ellis, the team leader of the research and an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. “First, we have used Hubble to make longer exposures. The added depth is essential to reliably probe the early period of cosmic history. Second, we have used Hubble’s available color filters very effectively to more precisely measure galaxy distances.”

    One of the galaxies spotted by the new Hubble survey could even be the furthest galaxy yet discovered. It’s redshift indicates its light has just reached Earth from only 380 million years after the big bang. The previous record holder, seen just 420 million years after the big bang, was announced just one month ago.

    The new survey also shines light on the debate over whether early galaxies could have provided enough radiation to re-ionize the universe by warming the cold hydrogen that formed after the big bang. Astronomers believe that e-ionization made the universe transparent to light.

    “Our data confirm re-ionization was a gradual process, occurring over several hundred million years, with galaxies slowly building up their stars and chemical elements,” said Brant Robertson, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. “There wasn’t a single dramatic moment when galaxies formed. It was a gradual process.”

    (Image courtesy NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team)

  • Hubble Photo Shows Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy

    The above photo is an image of the irregular galaxy NGC 5253, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Advanced Camera for Surveys. It combines both visible and infrared exposures. A larger version of the image can be viewed here.

    The galaxy is the closest known Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy (BCD), at a distance of around 12 million light-years from Earth. It sits in the constellation of Centaurus.

    BCD galaxies, according to NASA, have low dust content and lack an abundance of many elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. They do, however, have many star-forming regions due to molecular clouds that are similar to clouds in the early universe that formed the first stars. Astronomers consider galaxies such as NGC 5253 good places to study ancient star-forming processes.

    The center of the galaxy contains a star-forming region (“starburst”) where large, hot, young stars form and die rapidly. The stars glow blue in the image and traces of the starburst , produced by ionized oxygen gas, can also be seen. The central region is surrounded by an elliptical main body, which appears red in the image.

    According to NASA, the most current hypothesis on galaxy formation, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, predicts more satellite dwarf galaxies should be seen orbiting large galaxies such as our own that is currently observed. As such, this “Dwarf Galaxy Problem” makes BCD galaxies such as NGC 5253 an interesting anomaly.

    (Image courtesy ESA/Hubble & NASA)

  • NASA May Have Found A New Most Distant Galaxy

    NASA today announced that astronomers have found a candidate for the new most distant galaxy ever seen. This comes just after a similar announcement in September, when a different red blob took the record.

    The object, dubbed MACS0647-JD, is observed to have existed only 420 million years after the big bang. The light from the small galaxy has traveled 13.3 billion years to reach Earth.

    MACS0647-JD is the latest find from the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH) group, which uses massive galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses to magnify the distant galaxies behind them. The technique magnifies the brightness of these galaxies in the Hubble telescope’s images. Specifically, astronomers used the galaxy cluster MACS J0647+7015 to magnify the image of the newly discovered galaxy.

    “This cluster does what no man-made telescope can do,” said Marc Postman, head of the Community Missions Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy.”

    The new galaxy is only 600 light-years wide. As a comparison, the Milky Way galaxy is 150,000 light-years wide. Due to its size, astronomers have speculated that MACS0647-JD may be the early form of a larger galaxy.

    “This object may be one of many building blocks of a galaxy,” said Dan Coe, and a astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “Over the next 13 billion years, it may have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of merging events with other galaxies and galaxy fragments.”

    Coe is also the lead author of a new study on the galaxy which will appear in a December issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Coe and other CLASH researchers spent months ruling out other explanations for the object , including red stars, brown dwarfs, and red galaxies.

    NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was used to gain images of the galaxy at longer wavelengths and help determine the object’s great distance. Spitzer will be used in the future to estimate the age and dust content of the galaxy.

  • NASA Finds What Could be the Most Distant Galaxy Yet Seen

    NASA today announced that it has snapped a picture of what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen.

    Using the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, astronomers have captured an image of what could be a young galaxy from when the universe was just 500 million years old. The current age of the universe is calculated to be 13.7 billion years old, making the spotted object close to 13.2 billion years old. This galaxy, called MACS 1149-JD, was one of the first galaxies to form.

    “This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Wei Zheng, a principal research scientist in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of a paper on the galaxy sighting that has been published in the journal Nature. “Future work involving this galaxy, as well as others like it that we hope to find, will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the dark ages ended.”

    In the image above, the galaxy appears red because the light traveling from the galaxy has redshifted, or lengthened in wavelength. Astronomers use this redshift, which is the result of the expansion of the universe, to describe cosmic distances. The light from MACS 1149-JD has traveled 13.2 billion light-years before reaching Earth, and has a redshift of 9.6.

    To spot the galaxy, astronomers used what is called gravitational lensing. Since even modern telescopes are not sensitive enough to capture an image of an object so old, the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster situated between the Milky Way and MACS 1149-JD was used to magnify the new galaxy’s light, brightening it by around 15 times.

    Astronomers estimate that the galaxy was less than 200 million years old when it was viewed. It is small, with only around 1% of the mass of the Milky Way. This fits with currently accepted cosmological models, which show that early galaxies would have been small, then merged to form more sizable, modern galaxies.

    (Image courtesy NASA/STScl/JHU)

  • Pluto May Hold Key To Discovering Alien Worlds

    A recent space discovery has turned some heads. The once 9th planet that we all miss has a hidden moon that no one knew about until recently. Last year scientists decided to point the Hubble Space Telescope at the not forgotten furthest neighbor uncovered a new solar body that is stuck in between Pluto and it’s sister Charon. The new moon owns the title P-4 being that it is the 4th such moon orbiting Pluto.

    “I was very surprised that they found a new moon in between the other two. It basically meant that it was getting kicked around by these other moon. I thought about what the effects of being kicked around like that and wondered what we could learn about them,” astronomer Andrew Youdin, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Discovery News. “This is generally an issue with extrasolar planets,” he added. “One tries to study the stability of their orbits over time scales of billions of years.”

    What makes this discovery so special is that the whole system takes up less room than the span between Earth and our moon. Providing a delicate orbital ballet that has implications for finding planets around dual-star systems beyond the solar system. Basically by studying the way the Pluto and its moons interact with each others gravity, we can blow up the calculations to better help us find planets outside our own solar system.

    The scientists are setting up a computer simulation to help them out, but they only need to wait a little longer because next year NASA is launching the New Horizons probe to the outer corner of the solar system to study Pluto, Charon and the small moons, as well as other objects in the Kuiper Belt region. “We’ll know in a few years if we’re right or wrong,” Youdin said. “You can study the (moons’) motion through images by Hubble, but it is not as precise as what you can find by going there even on a single flyby.”

    Here is a zoomed in photo from Hubble showing Pluto and its 4 moons: