When Fomalhaut b was announced in 2008, images showed it following a clear orbit around its star.
What’s the News: Even if you don’t know an exoplanet from an exoskeleton, you probably saw the gorgeous images of Fomalhaut, aka “Sauron’s Eye,” making their way around the web in 2008. A tiny, bright dot in the star’s surrounding dust cloud had moved, showing itself to be a planet—the first planet beyond our solar system to actually be seen, rather than detected with nonoptical instruments. Cue the champagne!
But new pictures show something odd: Fomalhaut b, as the planet was named, is veering off in an unexpected direction. Does this mean it’s not a planet after all, or is there another explanation? (more…)
Its’ time for another mind-blowing, record-breaking discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope. This time, it’s creeping closer than ever toward the beginning of the universe.
Astronomers have just announced they have discovered what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, smashing the previous record holder. This galaxy is at a mind-crushing distance of 13.2 billion light years from Earth, making it not just the most distant galaxy but also the most distant extant object ever detected!
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Named UDFj-39546284, the galaxy is seen as it was just 480 million years after the Universe itself formed! The previous record holder — which was announced just last October — was 13.1 billion light years away. This new galaxy beats that by 120 million light years, a substantial amount. Mind you, these galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang, which happened 13.73 billion years ago. We think the very first galaxies started forming 200 – 300 million years after the Bang; if that’s correct then we won’t see any galaxies more than about 13.5 billion light years away. Going from 13.1 to 13.2 billion light years represents a big jump closer to that ultimate limit!
The record for the most distant object in the Universe ever seen has been smashed: a galaxy has been found at the staggering distance of 13.1 billion light years!
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It’s so dim that the faintest star you can see with your unaided eye is 4 billion times brighter. Its distance is simply numbing; the Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so the light from this object began its journey on its way to Earth just 600 million years after the Universe itself formed.
Head to the full post at Bad Astronomy for all the details about how astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to find this faraway galaxy, and what the discovery tells us about the infant universe.
Out in the asteroid belt beyond Mars, two asteroids rendezvous-ed in the darkness, with explosive results. Atomic bomb level explosive.
These two asteroids, one probably 400 feet wide and the other, smaller asteroid around 10 to 15 feet across, collided sometime in early 2009. This is the first time we humans have observed an asteroid impact right after it has occurred, and the first time a resulting x-shape has been seen. Researchers aren’t sure what caused the novel shape, and they were surprised by how long the dust tail has lasted. The analysis of the finding, originally announced earlier this year, is published in Nature this week.
This is a false-color image showing the object, called P/2010 A2, in visible light. The long tail of debris is obvious; this is probably dust being blown back by the solar wind, similar to the way a comet’s tail is blown back. What apparently has happened is that two small, previously-undiscovered asteroids collided, impacting with a speed of at least 5 km/sec (and possibly faster). The energy in such a collision is like setting off a nuclear bomb, or actually many nuclear bombs! The asteroids shattered, and much of the debris expanded outward as pulverized dust.
Looking at the image, the bright spot to the left is most likely what’s left of one of the two asteroids, a chunk of rock estimated to be a mere 140 meters (450 feet) across. In the press release they’re not clear about the curved line emanating to the right of the nucleus. It may be — and I’m spitballing here — dust blown back from a stream of chunks, since the tail is broad and appears to originate from that swept curve, and not from the nucleus itself. The other filament perpendicular to the curve is from yet another piece of debris.
What you see here is the aftermath of stellar death, rediscovered after NASA temporarily lost the ability to watch it play out. Astronomers tracked supernova 1987A after its discovery that year, picking up insights into what happens after a huge star expends itself. But in 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph went kaput. The May 2009 space shuttle servicing mission repaired this eye in the sky, leading to a study in this week’s edition of the journal Science that reveals what’s behind this fluorescent view, and why that ring shines so brightly.
One of the top three priorities for the next decade of astrophysics and astronomy, we noted this week, is unraveling dark energy, the weird force that pushes the universe apart. Given that scientists know next-to-nothing about dark energy—besides the fact that it makes up most of the universe—any step could be an important one. Thanks to a study out this week in Science, astrophysicists at least can have more confidence in this phenomenon that can’t be directly seen or measured: Their estimates for dark matter’s extent appear to be on target.
The technique scientists used in this study is called gravitational lensing, and the lens in this case is a huge galactic cluster called Abell 1689.
Because of its huge mass, the cluster acts as a cosmic magnifying glass, causing light to bend around it. The way in which light is distorted by this cosmic lens depends on three factors: how far away the distant object is; the mass of Abell 1689; and the distribution of dark energy [BBC News].
We know about exoplanet HD 209458b, nicknamed “Osiris.” We know it’s 153 light years away, that it has water in its atmosphere, and that it orbits its star in three and a half days at a distance 100 times closer than Jupiter is to the sun. But we didn’t know this for sure until now: This planet has a tail.
In a study in The Astrophysical Journal, a research team says Osiris, a gas giant, orbits so close that its star is blasting away its atmosphere. As the planet progresses on its blazing hot and hasty revolutions, a tail like that of a comet follows behind it. The Hubble Space Telescope‘s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph caught the effect as Osiris made repeated transits in front of its star.
The instrument detected the heavy elements carbon and silicon in the planet’s super-hot 2,000 degrees F (1,100 C or so) atmosphere. This detection revealed the parent star is heating the entire atmosphere, dredging up the heavier elements and allowing them to escape the planet.
Jeffrey Linsky, of the University of Colorado, who led the study, said: “We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific speeds, some coming toward Earth. The most likely interpretation is that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail” [Christian Science Monitor].
Tomorrow marks 20 years since the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. And to mark the occasion, NASA released the latest in a long line of incredibly gorgeous images of nebulae and star birth. This is the Carina nebula, which the telescope first shot in 2007. “We wanted to have an image that will be at least as spectacular as the iconic ‘pillars of creation,’ says Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, referring to a widely reproduced 1995 Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula. “This particular image can arguably be called ‘Eagle Nebula on steroids’” [Science News]. This sweeping view comes thanks to the Wide Field Camera 3, installed during a Hubble upgrade last summer.
Launch up from your couch and voyage to the final frontier this weekend with Hubble 3D, a hi-tech piece of visual wizardry from Warner Bros, IMAX, and NASA. The movie tracks the efforts of the astronauts on board mission STS-125, who blasted off aboard space shuttle Atlantis last May to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. For this mission, as DISCOVER explained in a review of the movie, Atlantis carried not only its regular payload of new gear for the telescope, but also a 600-pound IMAX camera to record the orbital repair job in breathtaking detail.
Apart from replacing worn out equipment and upgrading the world’s largest telescope so that it could continue to send home breathtaking images of the universe, the astronauts also functioned as cinematographers, using only eight minutes of film to shoot the repair work. The film also takes viewers on a tour of the telescope’s most famous observations, and explains what the ‘scope has revealed about such wonders as the stellar nurseries of the Orion nebula and our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Director Toni Meyers, whose credits include a 3-D documentary about the international space station, says: “I think there is a kind of innate curiosity in all of us and a thirst to travel to places that either we can’t go to or it’s extremely difficult to do so” [CNN].
Back in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous “deep field” image, which took more than 300 exposures over the course of 10 days to peer deep into the history of the universe and spot more than 1,500 galaxies. A decade and a half later—after failures, upgrades, and the “ultra deep field“—Hubble marches on. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, astronomers announced they’d used the telescope to look deeper into the past than ever before.
The new image captures 7,500 galaxies of all kinds and shapes. The oldest galaxies in the image glow an intense blue, indicating high concentrations of the lighter elements hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode. These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died [National Geographic News].
Astronomers want you… to help them match pictures of cosmic collisions, which are known as “galactic mergers.” Studying these mergers could explain why the universe has the mix of galaxy types – from those with wound-up spiral arms to compact balls of stars – that it does. And it turns out that the human eye is much better than a computer at matching up images of real mergers with randomly-selected images of simulated mergers [SPACE.com]. So naturally, astronomers want to enlist the eyes of Internet users to help them.
The website, Galaxy Zoo Mergers, features a new game that bears (it must be said) only a mild resemblance a Vegas slot machine, with a real galactic merger image in the middle and eight randomly selected images of simulated mergers in the slots around it. Players pick out the best matches and can even manipulate the number of stars they see or an image’s orientation to make a better match. Says researcher Chris Lintott: “By randomly cycling through the millions of simulated possibilities and selecting only the very best matches, they are helping to build up a profile of what kinds of factors are necessary to create the galaxies we see in the universe around us – and, hopefully, having fun, too” [SPACE.com].
This is the latest project from Galaxy Zoo to rely on crowdsourcing. Over the past two years, Galaxy Zoo has enlisted 250,000 Internet users to classify hundreds of thousands of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – an effort that so far has resulted in 15 scientific papers, either submitted or published [MSNBC]. This new project will focus on 3,000 merger images, including some new ones taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The researchers say their attempts to understand the dynamics of a galactic merger is like trying to understand a car crash– they hope to find out what caused it, and what the final outcome will be for the galaxies involved.
It was a tough repair job that one astronaut called brain surgery in space, but it sure was worth it. NASA has just released the first images taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope following the five-day servicing mission carried out by the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis in May, and it's clear that the mission went off without a hitch. Both the two new cameras and the repaired equipment are producing stunningly clear pictures of galaxies, nebulas, and stars. The breathtaking images that follow will both delight the public and allow astronomers to probe the universe's deepest mysteries.
This celestial "butterfly" is actually the pattern made by a dying star, which ejected vast clouds of gas that were then set glowing by ultraviolet radiation. The two "wings" of the nebula stretch across two light-years of space.
This morning, 350 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, a tender goodbye took place. Astronauts aboard the Atlantisspace shuttle released the Hubble Space Telescope to conclude the telescope’s fifth and final repair mission. The better-than-new observatory is expected to send back breathtaking images and mind-rattling information about the universe for another five to seven years. As the NASA officials in charge of the telescope put it: “Hubble is now ready to resume its role as humankind’s most powerful eyes on the universe” [AP].
During this mission, Atlantis astronauts spent more than 36 hours over five marathon spacewalks to make upgrades and outfit Hubble with new instruments. These included a panchromatic wide-field camera that should be able to see objects formed just 500 million years after the universe’s birth in the big bang explosion some 13.7 billion years ago [Reuters]. But there were occasional glitches: When a bolt wouldn’t come free on the Sunday spacewalk, astronaut Mike Massimino had to resort to brute force, jerking the railing that it held in place until the bolt snapped. There was also an ill-timed incident this morning involving an antenna.
Yesterday, about 350 miles above western Australia, two massively expensive pieces of space hardware rendezvoused in a delicate orbital dance. The space shuttleAtlantis arrived at the Hubble Space Telescope for the telescope’s fifth and final upgrade, and met the telescope in orbit as it circled the Earth at 17,200 miles per hour. With mission commander Scott Altman at the controls, Atlantis eased up within 30 feet of NASA’s flagship observatory, bringing the ship close enough for a capture attempt. Mission specialist Megan McArthur limbered up the shuttle’s robot arm and used snares at its end to latch on to a pin-like grapple fixture on the side of the gleaming telescope. “Houston, Atlantis. Hubble has arrived onboard Atlantis,” said Altman [Florida Today blog].
The astronauts audibly gasped as they drew up to the 12-ton telescope. “Just looking out the window here, and it’s an unbelievably beautiful sight,” said John M. Grunsfeld, a veteran astronaut. “Amazingly, the exterior of Hubble, an old man of 19 years in space, still looks in fantastic shape.” Dr. Grunsfeld, who is on his third Hubble repair trip, was one of the last humans to see the telescope in March 2002 and arguably knows it better than anyone on or above Earth [The New York Times].
At 2:01 this afternoon in Florida, the space shuttle Atlantis is expected to roar off its launch pad and set off toward the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, for the fifth and final repair mission in the telescope’s history. The countdown timeline is on target, and “Atlantis is ready to fly,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s test director…. The 11-day mission will include five spacewalks to refurbish Hubble with state-of-the-art science instruments. After the upgrades, the telescope’s capabilities will be expanded, and its lifetime extended through at least 2014 [CNN].
The current mission carries a higher degree of danger than the space shuttle‘s habitual jaunts to the International Space Station. Hubble orbits about 350 miles above Earth, in an area with a higher density of debris. Earlier this year two satellites collided over Siberia, which has increased the risk even more, as junk from that collision drifts lower [ABC News]. While NASA will track orbiting space junk as it always does, the agency has also taken the precaution of getting the space shuttle Endeavor ready for launch on another pad in case a rescue operation is necessary.
NASA will cover the launch live on NASA TV, and DISCOVER’s own Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, will be posting updates on his breaking news Twitter account.
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
From 
The one ring is back, and it’s beautiful.
One of the top three priorities for the next decade of astrophysics and astronomy, 
We know about exoplanet HD 209458b, nicknamed “Osiris.” We know it’s 153 light years away, that it has 
Back in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous 
Astronomers want you… to help them match pictures of cosmic collisions, which are known as “galactic mergers.”
This morning, 350 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, a tender goodbye took place. Astronauts aboard the Atlantis 
Yesterday, about 350 miles above western Australia, two massively expensive pieces of space hardware rendezvoused in a delicate orbital dance. The 
At 2:01 this afternoon in Florida, the space shuttle Atlantis is expected to roar off its launch pad and set off toward the orbiting 
