Latest Hubble Stories

WASHINGTON, May 25, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a Science Update Thursday, May 31, at 1:30 p.m. EDT to discuss new Hubble Space Telescope observations that allow astronomers to predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our entire galaxy, sun, and solar system. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The news conference will be held in NASA Headquarters' James E. Webb Auditorium at 300 E St. SW in Washington and be shown...

NASA officials have announced plans to use the moon like a mirror in order to allow them to see the forthcoming transit of Venus across the face of the sun on June 5 and 6, the U.S. space agency announced in a Friday press release. The seemingly unorthodox technique is necessary because the Hubble Space Telescope, which will be used to observe the transit, cannot look at the sun directly. To work around that issue, astronomers will be pointing the telescope at our planet's satellite, using...

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have located the most distant grouping of still-developing galaxies ever witnessed in the early universe, NASA announced on Tuesday. According to the U.S. space agency, Hubble found a cluster of five tiny galaxies located 13.1 billion light years away during a random sky survey conducted in near-infrared light. The galaxies in the developing cluster, or protocluster, are said to be among the brightest at that epoch and were...

The new and highly sensitive Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a strong ultraviolet-wavelength absorber on Pluto's surface, providing new evidence that points to the possibility of complex hydrocarbon and/or nitrile molecules lying on the surface, according to a paper recently published in the Astronomical Journal by researchers from Southwest Research Institute and Nebraska Wesleyan University. Such chemical species can be produced by the...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has passed another milestone in its almost 21 years of observations: the publication of the 10,000th refereed scientific paper based on Hubble data. Alvaro Gimenez, Director of Science and Robotic Exploration for the European Space Agency said: “Reaching the milestone of the 10,000th scientific paper reminds us that Hubble is one of the most successful scientific endeavors in history. European scientists have played a big part in this, and have been...

The greatest astronomical discovery of the 20th century may have been credited to the wrong person. But it turns out to have been nobody's fault except for that of the actual original discoverer himself. Writing in the November 10th issue of the journal Nature, astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute has put to bed a growing conspiracy theory about who was fairly credited for discovering the expanding universe. For nearly a century, American astronomer Edwin...

  A public art installation featuring Hubble observations of distant galaxies, quasars and stars is going to the USA. From the Distant Past features a laser projecting spectra from distant celestial objects onto the facades of buildings. While the green lines might appear abstract at first, they represent light, split into its constituent colors, that has travelled across space for billions of years from some of the most distant galaxies ever observed. The idea for the installation was...

NASA said on Tuesday that its Hubble Space Telescope has crossed another milestone in its 21-years of space exploration. The space agency said its famous telescope logged its one-millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away. Alvaro Gimenez, head of science and robotic exploration for the European Space Agency said in a statement: "With a million observations and many thousands of scientific papers to its name, Hubble is one of the...

Frank Reddy, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.Late last year, astronomers noticed an asteroid named Scheila had unexpectedly brightened, and it was sporting short-lived plumes. Data from NASA's Swift satellite and Hubble Space Telescope showed these changes likely occurred after Scheila was struck by a much smaller asteroid. "Collisions between asteroids create rock fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons," said Dennis...

WASHINGTON, April 26, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following is the daily "Profile America" feature from the U.S. Census Bureau: (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090226/CENSUSLOGO) TUESDAY, APRIL 26: HUBBLE TELESCOPE Profile America -- Tuesday, April 26th. One of the greatest scientific achievements in history began this week 21 years ago -- when the crew of the space shuttle Discovery put the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. The telescope was named for the great American...