Hubble Space Telescope

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New Telescope Will Be 10 Times Sharper Than Hubble

$700M Giant Magellan Telescope will be ready in 2022

(Newser) - Scientists are currently hard at work on a new telescope that promises to have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope—but we're going to have to wait awhile. So far, only one of an eventual seven massive mirrors has been completely cast and polished for the...

Hunch Leads Astronomer to New Neptune Moon

Planet's 14th moon is just 12 miles across

(Newser) - An astronomer poring over old images from the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a previously unknown 14th moon of Neptune. SETI Institute researcher Mark Showalter—who has five other moon discoveries to his name—followed a hunch while studying ring segments around the planet and tracked a white dot to...

Astronomers Find Blue Planet

But you wouldn't want to live there

(Newser) - A space traveler might be forgiven for mistaking Earth for another planet known as HD189733b from a distance—they're both a pleasant shade of blue. As Space.com explains, astronomers have for the first time determined the color of a far-flung world, this one 63 light-years away. (They did...

Astronomers Spot Oldest Galaxy Yet

It's 13.3 billion years old, nearly as old as the universe

(Newser) - Our universe is a mind-boggling 13.7 billion years old, and now astronomers say they have found a galaxy that has been around since the universe was a spry 420 million years old, reports LiveScience . Called MACS0647-JD, the 13.3-billion-year-old galaxy is tiny, cosmically speaking, just 600 light years wide...

Hubble 'Travels' Back 13.2B Years

'Time-tunnel' composite bares space 'just' after Big Bang

(Newser) - An out-of-this-world composite photo of Hubble Space Telescope shots peers back to a time a "mere" 450 million years after the Big Bang. Dubbed the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photograph—made up of 2,000 snaps taken by the Hubble over 10 years—reveals nearly 5,500...

Oldest Spiral Galaxy Shocks Astronomers

'Grand-design' spiral formed only 3B years after Big Bang

(Newser) - An ancient galaxy has flabbergasted astronomers. The perfectly formed spiral galaxy was born eons ago, a mere 3 billion years after the Big Bang. But this galaxy type was considered impossible so early on, when the cosmos was too chaotic to mold a "grand-design" spiral. How did it appear?...

Moon No. 5 Found for Pluto
 Moon No. 5 Found for Pluto 

Moon No. 5 Found for Pluto

Just 6 miles across, P5 is Pluto's smallest moon yet

(Newser) - It's not a chapter in the Twilight series, but it is a new moon: astronomers have discovered a tiny fifth satellite revolving around distant Pluto, reports Space.com . One year after P4 was announced, now the Hubble Telescope has spied a fifth moon. Pluto's biggest moon, Charon, is...

Bye-Bye, Milky Way —in Just 4B Years

Andromeda galaxy will smash into it

(Newser) - Our Milky Way is on a crash course with the (relatively) nearby Andromeda galaxy, and the two are scheduled to smash into each other—in just 4 billion years, reports the Christian Science Monitor . Actually, the two galaxies will collide three times over the following 2 billion years, eventually forming...

New &#39;Water World&#39; Confirmed
 New 'Water World' Confirmed 

New 'Water World' Confirmed

GJ 1214b water world may yield 'hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water'

(Newser) - A hot and steamy water world 40 light years away has been identified as the first known member of a whole new class of planets. Researchers using the Hubble space telescope have confirmed that planet GJ 1214b, first spotted in 2009 , contains a much higher proportion of water than any...

Dark Matter Map Unveils Cosmic Mystery

Data from Hubble telescope reaches back billions of years

(Newser) - Invisible matter may be holding us all together after all. Researchers have unveiled the biggest-ever map of dark matter in the universe, which shows large clumps and wispy filaments of the stuff nestling galaxies like jewels, the BBC and Space.com report. "We've seen the first glimpse of...

Vast New Black Holes Shatter Record

They're 10 times the size of our solar system

(Newser) - Ready to have your mind boggled by the awe-inspiring scale of cosmological phenomena? Well boggle away: Astronomers have discovered two black holes bigger than any glimpsed before, with one weighing in as much as 21 billion suns, the New York Times reports. The other clocks in at a mere 9....

NASA Studying Strange, Star-Creating Blob

Hanny's Voorwerp creating 'lonely' stars 'in the middle of nowhere'

(Newser) - The Hubble Telescope has turned its gaze to a mysterious glowing green blob that’s creating stars where stars shouldn’t normally form. Dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp, after the Dutch elementary school teacher who first discovered it in 2007, the blob is a swirling mass of hydrogen gas, caused by...

NASA Finds Bizarre X-Shaped Comet

Debris from extremely recent collision

(Newser) - The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of a bizarre X-shaped object with a comet-like streak of dust behind it, NASA announced yesterday. Scientists believe the images represent an extremely recent asteroid collision, with a small rock, perhaps 10-15 feet wide, colliding with a larger, roughly 400-foot-wide one. When...

Universe's Fate: Cold, Dead Wasteland

Amount of dark energy suggests it will expand forever

(Newser) - Scientists say they've learned "exactly what the fate of the universe will be," and it doesn't sound pleasant. A team led by a NASA astronomer predicts the universe will continue to expand forever and eventually will become a cold, dead wasteland, the BBC reports. How did they arrive...

Astronomers Discover Impossibly Huge Star

It's at least 265 times more massive than the sun

(Newser) - Astronomers have discovered a star so big and bright that it stretches the boundaries of what scientists believed was possible. The star, known so far only as R136a1, has an observed mass 265 times greater than our sun, and modeling suggests it was once 320 times bigger. “If it...

Hubble Telescope Spots a Star Eating a Planet

(Newser) - A new instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope has captured evidence of a Sun-like star "eating" a nearby planet. The planet, called Wasp-12b, may only have another 10 million years left before it is devoured, the BBC reports . So close to its star that it completes an orbit in...

Pluto Turning Redder
 Pluto Turning Redder 

Pluto Turning Redder

Hubble photos reveal major changes on ex-planet's surface

(Newser) - Astronomers haven't been ignoring Pluto since its demotion to "dwarf planet" in 2006, particularly now that it's putting on a color show for scientists. Newly processed images from the Hubble Space Telescope have given scientists their best view yet of Pluto, which is 20% redder than it used to...

Hubble Spots Mysterious 'Flying X'

The lead investigators thinks it's the result of an asteroid collision

(Newser) - An object captured on film by the Hubble telescope has astronomers scratching their heads. The body, named P/2010 A2 after it was discovered in early January, shares comet-like traits, but the head is x-shaped and seems to be disconnected from its tail, reports the New York Daily News .

New Hubble Images Dazzle
 New Hubble Images Dazzle 
Slideshow

New Hubble Images Dazzle

Refurbished telescope can see further, with more color

(Newser) - NASA released the first shots from the recently upgraded Hubble Space Telescope today, and the results are spectacular. Thanks to the new imagers installed in May, Hubble can now see farther, with greater clarity and a wider color spectrum, reports NPR. Officially, NASA calls it a new beginning for the...

Hubble Snaps Photos of Jupiter Impact

(Newser) - NASA pulled the recently upgraded Hubble space telescope out of testing yesterday to take a photo of the Earth-sized impact scar on Jupiter, CNN reports. “Because we believe this magnitude of impact is rare, we are very fortunate to see it with Hubble,” a NASA scientist says. “...

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