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Tag: Hubble telescope

  • Hubble Is Back! NASA Fixes Telescope’s Computer

    Hubble Is Back! NASA Fixes Telescope’s Computer

    NASA has successfully fixed the Hubble Telescope’s payload computer, after it malfunctioned and stopped working over a month ago.

    After a month of trying to get Hubble up-and-running again, NASA was able to narrow the problem down to the Power Control Unit (PCU), responsible for maintaining the proper electrical voltage. Engineers began the process of switching to the backup PCU yesterday, and the operation was successful.

    The switch included bringing online the backup Power Control Unit (PCU) and the backup Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF) on the other side of the Science Instrument and Command & Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit. The PCU distributes power to the SI C&DH components, and the CU/SDF sends and formats commands and data. In addition, other pieces of hardware onboard Hubble were switched to their alternate interfaces to connect to this backup side of the SI C&DH. Once these steps were completed, the backup payload computer on this same unit was turned on and loaded with flight software and brought up to normal operations mode. 

    NASA says it will still take a day or more to bring the scientific equipment out of safe mode, and engineers are continuing to monitor the hardware to make sure everything continues operating properly. If everything goes well, it appears Hubble will be back in action, delivering more breathtaking photos of the cosmos.

  • NASA May Have Found the Problem With Hubble

    NASA May Have Found the Problem With Hubble

    NASA believes it has discovered the issue with Hubble, after the telescope has been in safe mode for over a month.

    The Hubble Telescope’s payload computer started malfunctioning in June. Despite various attempts to get it working properly, NASA has not had any success. NASA has gained enough understanding from the failed attempts to now have a clearer picture of what’s happening.

    NASA believes the problem is in the Power Control Unit (PCU). 

    It ensures a steady voltage supply to the payload computer’s hardware. The PCU contains a power regulator that provides a constant five volts of electricity to the payload computer and its memory. A secondary protection circuit senses the voltage levels leaving the power regulator. If the voltage falls below or exceeds allowable levels, this secondary circuit tells the payload computer that it should cease operations. The team’s analysis suggests that either the voltage level from the regulator is outside of acceptable levels (thereby tripping the secondary protection circuit), or the secondary protection circuit has degraded over time and is stuck in this inhibit state.

    Like much of the systems on Hubble, there is a backup PCU. NASA is now trying to switch to the backup, a process that was also done in 2008 and will take several days to complete.

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • 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)

  • 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:

  • NASA Discovers Dark Matter Phenomenon

    NASA Discovers Dark Matter Phenomenon

    NASA discovers new dark matter phenomenon in an area they call Abell 520. Abell 520 is a merger of galaxies which were thought to have collided a long time ago and are now attached to a clump of dark matter (an invisible substance). The matter makes it difficult to study because, it has a bending and distorting effect which obscures the true source of light and other significant markers from the area.

    However a new technique called gravitational lensing can allow scientists to infer the presence of dark matter in a cluster like Abell 520. By employing this technique researchers have been able to theorize that the dark matter has condensed into a dark core and traveled far away from the galaxies which they originally believed were closely banned together.

    Astronomer James Jee of the University of California comments on the newly discovered phenomenon:

    “This result is a puzzle,”

    “Dark matter is not behaving as predicted, and it’s not obviously clear what is going on. It is difficult to explain this Hubble observation with the current theories of galaxy formation and dark matter.”

    The original detection of Abell 520 was written-off by researchers as the data was confusing and contradictory to what they knew about dark matter at the time. Only recently could Hubble analysis confirm the separation of the galaxies and the dark matter. Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was utilized to help verify their suspicions.

    Jee comments on the result:

    “We know of maybe six examples of high-speed galaxy cluster collisions where the dark matter has been mapped,”

    “But the Bullet Cluster and Abell 520 are the two that show the clearest evidence of recent mergers, and they are inconsistent with each other. No single theory explains the different behavior of dark matter in those two collisions. We need more examples.”

    So it is unclear what NASA discovered with this dark matter Phenomenon, but it does have implications for future understanding of how the matter obscures what is really out there in space. Researchers may be able to use this knowledge to create new technology that allows them to separate the distortions from what is really occupying the space they hope to examine.

    We will keep you posted on what happens with this dark matter discovery going forward.