Latest Edwin Hubble Stories
A systematic search for the first bright galaxies to form in the early universe has revealed a dramatic jump in the number of such galaxies around 13 billion years ago. These observations of the earliest stages in the evolution of galaxies provide new evidence for the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation -- the idea that large galaxies built up over time as smaller galaxies collided and merged. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to...
COLUMBUS, Ohio - That intergalactic road trip to Triangulum is going to take a little longer than you had planned. An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have determined that the Triangulum Galaxy, otherwise known as M33, is actually about 15 percent farther away from our galaxy than previously measured. This finding implies that the Hubble constant, a number that astronomers rely on to calculate a host of factors -- including the size and age of the universe -- could be...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One of the main cameras on the aging Hubble Space Telescope, known for its unparalleled views of distant galaxies and infant stars, has stopped working and engineers are studying the problem, scientists said on Saturday. One of three cameras in the Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys shut down on Monday after indicating that power supply voltages had exceeded their limits, the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement. The exact cause of the problem...
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The 109-year-old Yerkes Observatory, where astronomers discovered the Milky Way galaxy's spiral shape and made other advances, will become an anchor for a spa and luxury homes, the University of Chicago, its owner, announced on Wednesday. Thirty of the 80 acres along Lake Geneva in Wisconsin that surround the ornate, stone observatory housing what was once the world's largest telescope will remain undeveloped. Private developer Mirbeau Cos. agreed to pay the...
NASA -- Giant galaxies weren't assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (M101). It is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy that has ever been released from Hubble. The galaxy's portrait is actually composed of 51 individual Hubble exposures, in addition to elements from images from ground-based photos. The final composite image measures a whopping 16,000 by 12,000 pixels.The Hubble archived observations that...
NASA - Looking like a child's pinwheel ready to be set a spinning by a gentle breeze, this dramatic spiral galaxy is one of the latest viewed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Stunning details of the face-on spiral galaxy, cataloged as NGC 1309, are captured in this color image. Recent observations of the galaxy taken in visible and infrared light come together in a colorful depiction of many of the galaxy's features. Bright blue areas of star formation pepper the spiral arms, while ruddy...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The space shuttle's return to flight could mean survival -- or at least extended life -- for the popular but aging Hubble Space Telescope.Beloved for its unparalleled views of distant galaxies, infant stars and collisions in our own solar system, Hubble needs new batteries for power and new gyroscopes to keep it steady and let it point at specific celestial features.While it might be possible, with infinite resources, to design robots to go and fix it, NASA chief...
Washington -- Astrophysicists in recent years have found evidence for a force they call dark energy in observations from the farthest reaches of the universe, billions of light years away. Now an international team of researchers has used data from powerful computer models, supported by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, to find evidence of dark energy right in our own cosmic neighborhood. The data paint a picture of the universe as a virtual sea of dark energy, with billions of...
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...
