Latest Hubble Deep Field Stories

[ Watch the Video ] Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed both a cluster of rare ultra-blue stars and a "double nucleus" of old, reddish stars orbiting a 100-million-solar-mass black hole at the nearby Andromeda spiral galaxy, NASA officials announced on Wednesday. The discoveries, detailed by the U.S. space agency in separate press releases, were also presented Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Austin, Texas. A paper detailing the Hubble...

In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy. "We've had to go to extremes to get...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] Using its near-infrared vision to peer 9 billion years back in time, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an extraordinary population of young dwarf galaxies brimming with star formation. While dwarf galaxies are the most common type of galaxy in the universe, the rapid star-birth observed in these newly found examples may force astronomers to reassess their understanding of the ways in which galaxies form. The galaxies are a hundred times less massive,...

NASA said on Thursday that astronomers have found evidence for two extrasolar planets using Hubble Space Telescope data from 1998. Using old Hubble images gives astronomers an invaluable time machine for comparing earlier planet orbital motion data to more recent observations, according to the space agency. Star HR8799 has four giant planets orbiting around it, three of which were discovered in 2007 and 2008 in near-infrared ground-based images taken by astronomers at W.M. Keck...

Ten-billion-year-old exploding stars were a source of Earth's iron, TAU researchers say Supernovas — stars in the process of exploding — open a window onto the history of the elements of Earth's periodic table as well as the history of the universe. All of those heavier than oxygen were formed in nuclear reactions that occurred during these explosions. The most ancient explosions, far enough away that their light is reaching us only now, can be difficult to spot. A project...

  With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and colleagues have discovered supermassive black holes growing in shockingly small galaxies, the university announced on Thursday. The findings, according to a UCSC press release, suggests that central black holes, which can be found in all massive galaxies, had formed at an earlier stage of galaxy evolution, since they are rarely observed in smaller "dwarf" galaxies. The...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a close-up view of the galaxy Centaurus A. Hubble's out-of-this-world location and world-class Wide Field Camera 3 instrument reveal a dramatic picture of a dynamic galaxy in flux.Centaurus A, also known as NGC 5128, is well known for its dramatic dusty lanes of dark material. Hubble's observations, using its most advanced instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, are the most detailed ever made of this galaxy. They have been combined here in a...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 26, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The tiny, dim object is a compact...

Astronomers who survey galaxies in the distant universe are getting some unexpected help from gravity, according to a new study.In a presentation at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week and a related paper in the current issue of the journal Nature, researchers say that as many as 20 percent of the most distant galaxies currently detected appear brighter than they actually are, because of an effect called "strong gravitational lensing."The discovery could change...

A European team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far. By carefully analyzing the very faint glow of the galaxy they have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. The results were presented at an online press...