Latest Hubble Deep Field Stories

A newly developed image analysis technique has significantly improved the sensitivity limits reached by the IBIS imager on board INTEGRAL, resulting in the deepest survey ever compiled of the entire sky in the energy range between 17 and 60 keV. Pushing the instrument towards its very limits, the novel method discloses a vast number of previously undetected faint sources, galactic and extragalactic alike.For more than seven years, the INTEGRAL observatory has been surveying the entire X-ray...

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...

This week, Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special feature devoted to the new results obtained with the infrared satellite AKARI, a JAXA project with the participation of ESA. It includes 17 articles dealing with various subjects. Some papers are based on the AKARI all-sky survey, which has just been released. Others are dedicated to pointed observations of many astronomical targets from solar system bodies to distant galaxies.Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special...

WASHINGTON, April 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As the Hubble Space Telescope achieves the major milestone of two decades on orbit, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, in Baltimore are celebrating Hubble's journey of exploration with a stunning new picture and several online educational activities. There are also opportunities for people to explore galaxies as armchair scientists and send personal greetings to Hubble for posterity. (Logo:...

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 22 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), built and integrated at the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) Space Systems facility in Sunnyvale, was launched 20 years ago aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, on April 24, 1990, ushering in a new golden age of astronomy. HST was released by the crew into Earth orbit the next day and the universe hasn't looked the same since. "HST has had a fundamental impact on astronomical research and how we view our universe. It is...

Astronomers investigating why the cosmic background radiation is much brighter at radio wavelengths than expected have identified a potential culprit: fast spinning black holes early in the galaxy formation process. The results will be presented by Professor Andy Lawrence at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow on Wednesday April 14th.Last July, US astronomers announced surprising results from a high-altitude balloon experiment called ARCADE-2, which had made careful measurements of...

Astronomers have long known that in many surveys of the very distant Universe, a large fraction of the total intrinsic light was not being observed. Now, thanks to an extremely deep survey using two of the four giant 8.2-meter telescopes that make up ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and a unique custom-built filter, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. The survey also helped uncover some of the...

Narrated by award-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a film documenting the STS-125 shuttle mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope arrives in theaters on Friday, March 19. The film is a joint venture between NASA, the IMAX Corporation and Warner Bros. Pictures.The IMAX 3-D cameras launched aboard space shuttle Atlantis on May 11, 2009, during the STS-125 mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronauts used the cameras to document the mission's five spacewalks to repair and...

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....

Astronomers, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, have broken the distance limit for galaxies by uncovering a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. They are from 13 billion years ago, just 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.These newly found objects are crucial to understanding the evolutionary link between the birth of the first stars, the formation of the first galaxies, and the sequence of evolutionary events that resulted in...