Latest Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey Stories

The discovery of a previously unresolved population of galaxies in the GOODS fields and the first measurements of properties of galaxies in the almost unexplored far-infrared domain are among the first exciting scientific results achieved by Herschel's PACS and SPIRE instruments. These findings confirm the extraordinary capabilities of ESA's new infrared space observatory to investigate the formation and evolution of galaxies.These are some of the many discoveries presented this week at the...

NASA's best-recognized, longest-lived, and most prolific space observatory zooms past a threshold of 20 years of operation this month. On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age. Hubble's unprecedented capabilities made it one of the most powerful science instruments ever conceived by humans, and certainly the one most embraced by the...

Hubble shows that the beautiful spirals galaxies of the modern Universe were the ugly ducklings of six billion years ago.If confirmed, the finding highlights the importance to many galaxies of collisions and mergers in the recent past. It also provides clues for the unique status of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.Using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created a census of galaxy types and shapes from a time before Earth and the Sun existed, up to the present day....

More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this unprecedented, panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly.This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, was made from mosaics taken in September and October 2009 with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and in 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The view covers a portion of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep...

Mission's decade of success peering into the final frontierXMM-Newton, the most powerful X-ray observatory ever built and launched into space, marks its 10th anniversary on December 10th. XMM-Newton's observations have revolutionized the way we view the hottest and most extreme regions of the Universe.Scientists from the UK who have played a pivotal role in the success of the orbiting observatory, which is the size of a small bus, will be marking the occasion at a special event in Madrid...

First results from the GOODS NICMOS survey, the largest Hubble Space Telescope program ever led from outside of the United States, reveal how the most massive galaxies in the early Universe assembled to form the most massive objects in the Universe today. Dr Chris Conselice from the University of Nottingham will present the results at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science at the University of Hertfordshire on Wednesday 22nd April.The observations are part of the Great Observatories...

The U.S. space agency is planning a special exhibit to celebrate Galileo's 445th birthday and 2009's designation as the International Year of Astronomy. In conjunction with Galileo's birthday next Sunday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is releasing images from its Great Observatories -- the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to more than 100 U.S. planetariums, museums, nature centers and schools. The selected sites will unveil a large...

The deepest ultraviolet image of the Universe yetAnyone who has wondered what it might be like to dive into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colors, will enjoy the latest image released by ESO. Obtained in part with the Very Large Telescope, the image is the deepest ground-based U-band image of the Universe ever obtained. It contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations with the VIMOS instrument.This uniquely beautiful...

Our current view of the universe, to quote Albert Einstein, is "not weirder than we do imagine, but weirder than we can imagine." That said, we have no choice but to observe the universe through human eyes and brains. How can we even start to make sense of it?One answer might be to call in the artists. For thousands of years, people have used art to explore ideas that humble, confuse or even frighten us. A new exhibition opening in Pasadena continues this tradition, bringing artists...

NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes have joined forces to discover nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy."These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe" says Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.The...