Tag: Astrophysics Division

  • NASA’s Hubble Unexpectedly Catches Comet Breaking Up

    NASA’s Hubble Unexpectedly Catches Comet Breaking Up

    In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings published Wednesday in the journal Icarus. The…

  • NASA’s Hubble Identifies One of Darkest Known Galaxies

    NASA’s Hubble Identifies One of Darkest Known Galaxies

    In the vast tapestry of the universe, most galaxies shine brightly across cosmic time and space. Yet a rare class of galaxies remains nearly invisible — low-surface-brightness galaxies dominated by dark matter and containing only a sparse scattering of faint…

  • Hubble Sees Galaxy with Dark Rings in New Light

    Hubble Sees Galaxy with Dark Rings in New Light

    This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. A lenticular, meaning “lens-shaped,” galaxy is a type whose classification…

  • AI Unlocks Hundreds of Cosmic Anomalies in Hubble Archive

    AI Unlocks Hundreds of Cosmic Anomalies in Hubble Archive

    A team of astronomers has employed a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence-assisted technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena within archived data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just…

  • Hubble Snaps Stellar Baby Pictures

    Hubble Snaps Stellar Baby Pictures

    Newly developing stars shrouded in thick dust get their first baby pictures in these images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble took these infant star snapshots in an effort to learn how massive stars form. Protostars are shrouded in thick…

  • Hubble Observes Ghostly Cloud Alive with Star Formation

    Hubble Observes Ghostly Cloud Alive with Star Formation

    While this eerie NASA Hubble Space Telescope image may look ghostly, it’s actually full of new life. Lupus 3 is a star-forming cloud about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. White wisps of gas swirl throughout the region, and…

  • Hubble’s Album of Planet-Forming Disks

    Hubble’s Album of Planet-Forming Disks

    This collection of new images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showcases protoplanetary disks, the swirling masses of gas and dust that surround forming stars, in both visible and infrared wavelengths. Through observations of young stellar objects like these, Hubble…

  • Hubble Observes Stars Flaring to Life in Orion

    Hubble Observes Stars Flaring to Life in Orion

    Just-forming stars, called protostars, dazzle a cloudy landscape in the Orion Molecular Cloud complex (OMC). These three new images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were taken as part of an effort to learn more about the envelopes of gas and…

  • Hubble Nets Menagerie of Young Stellar Objects

    Hubble Nets Menagerie of Young Stellar Objects

    A disparate collection of young stellar objects bejewels a cosmic panorama in the star-forming region NGC 1333 in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To the left, an actively forming star called a protostar casts its glow on…

  • Hubble Spies Stellar Blast Setting Clouds Ablaze

    Hubble Spies Stellar Blast Setting Clouds Ablaze

    This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a jet of gas from a forming star shooting across the dark expanse. The bright pink and green patches running diagonally through the image are HH 80/81, a pair of Herbig-Haro (HH)…