Author: Andrea Gianopoulos
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NASA Celebrates Edwin Hubble’s Discovery of a New Universe
For humans, the most important star in the universe is our Sun. The second-most important star is nestled inside the Andromeda galaxy. Don’t go looking for it — the flickering star is 2.2 million light-years away, and is 1/100,000th the…
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NASA’s Hubble Celebrates Decade of Tracking Outer Planets
Encountering Neptune in 1989, NASA’s Voyager mission completed humankind’s first close-up exploration of the four giant outer planets of our solar system. Collectively, since their launch in 1977, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered that Jupiter, Saturn,…
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NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of…
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NASA’s Hubble Watches Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Behave Like a Stress Ball
Astronomers have observed Jupiter’s legendary Great Red Spot (GRS), an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth, for at least 150 years. But there are always new surprises – especially when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes a close-up look at it.…
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NASA’s Hubble, Chandra Find Supermassive Black Hole Duo
Like two Sumo wrestlers squaring off, the closest confirmed pair of supermassive black holes have been observed in tight proximity. These are located approximately 300 light-years apart and were detected using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.…
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NASA’s Hubble, MAVEN Help Solve the Mystery of Mars’ Escaping Water
Mars was once a very wet planet as is evident in its surface geological features. Scientists know that over the last 3 billion years, at least some water went deep underground, but what happened to the rest? Now, NASA’s Hubble…
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Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids
Like boulders, rocks, and pebbles scattered across a landscape, asteroids come in a wide range of sizes. Cataloging asteroids in space is tricky because they are faint and they don’t stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits…
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Hubble Tracks Jupiter’s Stormy Weather
The giant planet Jupiter, in all its banded glory, is revisited by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in these latest images, taken on January 5-6, 2024, capturing both sides of the planet. Hubble monitors Jupiter and the other outer solar system…
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NASA’s Hubble Watches ‘Spoke Season’ on Saturn
This photo of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on October 22, 2023, when the ringed planet was approximately 850 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s ultra-sharp vision reveals a phenomenon called ring spokes. Saturn’s spokes are transient features…
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Hubble Provides Unique Ultraviolet View of Jupiter
This newly released image from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows the planet Jupiter in a color composite of ultraviolet wavelengths. Released in honor of Jupiter reaching opposition, which occurs when the planet and the Sun are in opposite sides…