Latest Edwin Hubble Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new project, named The Andromeda Project, is asking the public's help to search through Hubble Space Telescope images to identify star clusters and increase our understanding of how galaxies evolve. The new project is a collaboration between scientists at the University of Washington, the University of Utah and other partners, aiming to study thousands of high-resolution Hubble images. “It’s an amazing opportunity to discover...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new observation of Abell 520 using the Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers determine that the core of the galaxy cluster is not over-dense in dark matter after all. Astronomers earlier this year spotted an overabundance of dark matter in the heart of the galaxy cluster. This observation was puzzling because dark matter and galaxies should be anchored together. Scientists have evidence that dark matter is responsible...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New observations by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have found a planet that is secretly being consumed by its own star. The gas giant planet is about 1.4 times the size of Jupiter and is orbiting extremely close to its parent star, completing a full orbit in just over one Earth day. Due to the close distance of orbit, a gas cloud has been "boiled off," and some of it is moving out towards interstellar space to create a shroud...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) released an image this week of an interactive diagram known as the Hubble Tuning Fork. The diagram helps to describe the shape of galaxies, which can come in all different sizes. It ranges between elliptical galaxies, intermediate spirals, barred spirals and irregular shapes. The interactive map gives the examples of the different shapes of the galaxies, as well as a description in type, morphology,...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online This article is the latest installment in a new series where redOrbit’s in-house experts will answer questions submitted by you, the reader. Got a science or space question that’s stumping you? Each week we’ll select a handful of the wiliest questions you can whip up to tease the brains of our resident gurus (we call them 'geeks'). Question: We have seen numerous pictures of other galaxies and other things out...
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- By combining the power of NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature's own natural "zoom lenses" in space, astronomers have set a new record for finding the most distant galaxy seen in the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The farthest galaxy appears as a diminutive blob that is only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way galaxy. But it offers a peek back into a time...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A team of astronomers has grabbed an image of a huge elliptical galaxy with a core that is bigger than any seen before. The team used the Hubble Space Telescope to collect the image of the galaxy, which is about ten times the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. The galaxy is a member of a class of galaxies with an unusually diffuse core filled without a concentrated peak of light around a central black hole. Viewing the core would...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers have found that less than half of Generation X adults can identify our own home in the universe, the spiral galaxy in which we reside. "Knowing your cosmic address is not a necessary job skill, but it is an important part of human knowledge about our universe and—to some extent—about ourselves," said Jon D. Miller, author of "The Generation X Report" and director of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the U-M...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago,...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to make the most precise measurement yet of the rate at which our universe is expanding. This expansion rate, also known as the Hubble Constant, is critical for understanding the age and the size of the universe. In the latest research, Spitzer took advantage of long-wavelength infrared light to make its new measurement. The newly refined value for the Hubble Constant,...
Latest Edwin Hubble Reference Libraries
Cosmology -- area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. Modern Cosmological Theories Present models of the universe hold two fundamental premises: the cosmological principle and the dominant role of gravitation. Derived by Hubble, the cosmological principle holds that if a large enough sample of galaxies is considered, the universe looks the same from all positions and in all directions in space. The second point...
Reflection Nebula -- In astronomy, reflection nebulae are clouds of dust which are simply reflecting the light of a nearby star or stars. The nearby star or stars are not hot enough to cause ionization in the gas of the nebula like in emission nebulae but are bright enough to give sufficient scattering to make the dust visible. The distiction between these two types of nebulae was done by Hubble in 1922. They are usually blue because the scattering is more efficient for blue light...
Redshift -- Redshift is the phenomenon that the frequency of light when observed, under certain circumstances, can be lower than the frequency of light when it was emitted at the source. This usually occurs when the source moves away from the observer, as in the Doppler effect. More specifically, the term redshift is used for the observation that the spectrum of light emitted by distant galaxies is shifted to lower frequencies (towards the red end of the spectrum, hence the name) when...
Big Bang -- The Big Bang theory is the dominant theory in cosmology about the early development and current shape of the universe. According to this theory, the universe expanded rapidly starting 13.7 0.2 billion years ago. Extrapolating the history of the universe backwards using current physical models leads to a gravitational singularity, at which all distances become zero and temperatures and pressures become infinite. What this means is unclear and most physicists believe that this...
