Hubble
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Hubble shows the universe is expanding faster than we thought
New measurements from the Hubble telescope suggest the universe is expanding between five and nine percent faster than scientists initially thought. NASA and the ESA measured the distance to stars in 19 galaxies outside of our own and compared the data to the cosmic microwave measurements taken by the Planck and WMAP probes -- and they didn't tally quite like they should. This potentially puts a question mark above at least a part of science's most enduring tenet -- Einstein's theory of relativity.
Software predicts the lifespans of machines by 'cloning' them
In some cases, machine breakdowns are more than just inconveniences -- in the military, they can spell disaster on the battlefield. Software is quickly eliminating those rude surprises, however. NASA spinoff Sentient Science has been offering DigitalClone, a software tool that predicts failures by 'cloning' parts. It uses an understanding of the physics of a given part, such as friction and wear, to determine when that gear is likely to break. The clone is uncannily accurate (Sentient Science has sensors to confirm its data), making it easy to extend the lifespan of a device by replacing parts before there's a crisis.
Hubble discovers that dwarf planet Makemake has a moon
The Hubble telescope has spotted a shadowy moon with a charcoal black surface orbiting the dwarf planet Makemake. Astronomers first observed Makemake in 2005, but since it's the second brightest icy dwarf planet after Pluto, it took some time to see a satellite that's 1,300 times fainter than the celestial body it's orbiting. Also, it's positively tiny with a diameter measuring 100 miles across, making it but a fraction of our own moon that has a diameter measuring 2,159.2 miles. The Hubble team used the telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the same technique that found Pluto's satellite's in 2005, 2011 and 2012 to discover Makemake's companion that has been christened "MK 2." NASA says its presence can tell us more about the dwarf planet, including its density.
The Hubble has seen farther back in time than ever before
NASA announced on Thursday that an international team of astronomers have used the Hubble space telescope to spot the most distant galaxy discovered to date -- not to mention one of the oldest in the visible Universe. The galaxy, dubbed GN-z11, has a measured redshift of 11.1, meaning it formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.
ICYMI: NASA's new telescope, amazing robot hand and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777419{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777419, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777419{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-777419").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: NASA just started developing the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, slotted to hit space by the mid-2020s. This will good 'ole Hubble still chugged away, analyzing the atmosphere of an exoplanet 40 light years away. University of Washington developed a robotic hand capable of carefully holding small, delicate objects by first 3D printing a hand based on a human skeleton, then adding tendons and muscles just where a person's would be. For those of you with any difficulty typing, this DIY creation pairs speech recognition with mechanical buttons for some riveting viewing. If you didn't read it, make sure to dive into the Apple vs. FBI debate here. As always, please share any interesting science or tech videos, anytime! Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag to @mskerryd.
NASA finds 'super-Earth' with an atmosphere it can analyse
Astronomers at NASA, working with the ESA and the University College London, announced Tuesday that they have discovered a "super-Earth" exoplanet with an atmosphere, that, for the first time, they can analyse. The Hubble telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) first spotted the planet, dubbed 55 Cancri e, which is only about 40 light years away. Super-earths are simply rocky planets that are bigger than the Earth -- in this case, eight times bigger. They're widely believed to be the most common type of rocky planet in the galaxy.
Hubble shows some of the galaxy's biggest, brightest stars
The Hubble Space Telescope still isn't done providing insights and pretty pictures -- far from it. Researchers have published a composite Hubble image showing the massive, extra-bright stars of the Trumpler 14 cluster, which sits 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula. It's dazzling, of course (NASA likens the stars to diamonds), but it's also a reminder that some celestial bodies lead short, intense lives. Many of the stars you see here are young (under 500,000 years old) blue-white variants burning so fiercely that they'll explode as supernovae within a few million years, rather than die relatively quietly over billions of years.
Hubble spots faint galaxy with 'natural magnifying glass'
NASA's Hubble and Spitzer have been ridiculously successful at spotting distant objects, but some galaxies are too faint to spot directly. Thanks to gravitational lensing, the space telescopes have found the dimmest object ever from the early universe -- a galaxy that existed 13.4 billion years ago, or a mere 400 million years after the big bang. Dubbed "Tayna," or new-born, the object belongs to a new class of faint, newly formed galaxies that have evaded detection until now. It's roughly the size of the Magellanic Cloud near our own Milky Way galaxy, but makes new stars at around ten times the rate.
The majority of Earth-like planets haven't been born yet
Humanity's inability to find Earth-like planets may not be the result of limited technology or a lack of ambition -- we might simply be too early, and in the wrong place. Astronomers poring over Hubble and Kepler data now believe that only 8 percent of the universe's potentially habitable planets exist. Based on the amount of hydrogen and helium gas left over from the Big Bang, there's still plenty of opportunity for those planets to form. These planets are most likely to appear in either dwarf galaxies or giant galaxy clusters, where the stars haven't used up all the surrounding gas.
Hubble's 4K images prove Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking
NASA's Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, which aims to observe the outer planets every year using Hubble, has released its first (UltraHD) maps and images. The subject? Jupiter. While you're most likely familiar with the gas giant's distinct looks, these new high-res images show just how much it has changed since the last time it was captured on cam. According to the space agency, the ancient storm has become more circular and more orange than red. There's also a wispy filament right in the heart of the spot, dancing and undulating as the storm continues to rotate.
The Hubble Telescope's breathtaking views of space
We already showed the Hubble Telescope some love back in the spring when it turned 25. However, since it's Space Week, we thought we'd revisit some of its amazing space imagery once more. Since it launched aboard the Space Shuttle discovery in 1995, Hubble has captured breathtaking views of planets, galaxies and more for us to enjoy. That being said, let's get started with the telescope's most recent work: a photo of spiral galaxy NGC 613.
Hubble captures a fantastical view of the Veil Nebula
See that diaphanous cylinder of gas above? That's the Veil Nebula -- the supernova remnant of a star that exploded 5,000 to 8,000 years ago -- as captured by the Hubble telescope. This shot of the gossamery structure looks a lot more detailed compared to previous attempts, thanks to Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, which used six fields of view for magnification. That's the same camera that was attached to the space telescope during its last servicing mission in 2009, and the same one used to take a clearer, haunting photo of the Pillars of Creation earlier this year.
The Big Picture: A nebula with the grace of a butterfly
Nebulae tend to be stunning by their very nature, but the Twin Jet Nebula might just take the cake. The Hubble Space Telescope team has captured an updated image of the dying binary star system (the last shot was from 1997), and its namesake twin jets of ejecting gas are unfurling like the iridescent wings of a butterfly. The seemingly magical effect stems from the stars' unusual interaction with each other -- while only one star is ejecting its outer layers, the other (an already-shrunken white dwarf) is pulling those layers in opposite directions. You won't have to worry about this light show disappearing any time soon, by the way. The nebula only got started around 1,200 years ago, so it's going to be visible for many, many years to come. [Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA]
Earth's orbiting observatories and their literally awesome images
While the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, cruises into interstellar space (the farthest man-made object from Earth) and missions like New Horizons capture snaps from the outskirts of the solar system, we've been keeping the heavy hitters close to home. Massive space telescopes that scan the cosmos with augmented eyes have been orbiting the Earth for years to get a clear view of the universe without atmospheric distortion. The Hubble Space Telescope's 1990 launch set a new precedent for these space-based observatories in terms of scale and abilities. These new instruments have helped scientists gather an incredible amount of data and mind-bending photos from deep space. With Pluto hogging the spotlight lately, we decided to take a look back at some of these powerful orbiting eyes and their visual achievements. [Image credit: JPL]
The Big Picture: Nitrogen-rich star left a beautiful corpse
A small minority of enormous stars explode in a fiery supernova after they run out of fuel and collapse. Regular stars die less spectacularly, but the remnants can still be gorgeous. Case in point is NGC 6153, a nebula about 4,000 light-years from Earth. The ethereal blueish, ellipse-shaped cloud (imaged by Hubble, above) was ejected by a sun-sized star after it burned up its fuel. However, the nebula contains an unusually large amount of elements like neon and argon, and five times the nitrogen of our sun. Why? Likely because its star formed in a corner of the Milky Way with a completely different composition than our own neck of the woods.
The Big Picture: Hubble peeks at the Milky Way's densest star cluster
Some parts of space are a little more crowded than others. The Arches Cluster, located 25,000 light-years from Earth, is currently the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way. For comparison, if you measured the distance between our sun and its nearest star, and used that as a radius for a section of the Arches Cluster, you would find more than 100,000 stars twinkling back at you. These balls of gas burn brightly -- NASA says 150 are among the brightest it's ever recorded -- which limits their natural lifespan to a few million years. Once their nuclear fuel has been depleted, they explode in breathtaking supernovas which create abnormally high volumes of heavy elements in the gas between the remaining stars. The image above was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in infrared; due to enormous dust clouds, the cluster is otherwise obscured and difficult to observe.
Scientists spot runaway galaxies
It's well established that runaway stars and planets are a cosmic reality, but runaway galaxies? Yes, amazingly enough, those exist. Scientists have discovered at least 11 galaxies moving so quickly (up to 6 million miles per hour) that they're escaping the gravitational tug of their host clusters. Most likely, these wayward celestial bodies are the result of three-way interactions -- a small elliptical galaxy tied to a larger counterpart will fly off into space when another big galaxy gets close enough. It could take a long time before astronomers have a better sense of how common stray galaxies might be, but it's already apparent that the universe is messy at its grandest scale. [Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team]
Hubble turns 25: The past, present and future
Today, 25 years ago, Hubble finally left Earth aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery after decades of planning and development. Its journey was fraught with problems and delays, but it ultimately rose above it all to bring us groundbreaking scientific discoveries and historic photos of planets, galaxies, nebulae, space dust and more. Hubble didn't only outlive its original 10-year lifespan -- it became the Michael Jordan, the Madonna of telescopes. If you're a movie fan, you've likely seen it on screen at least once. If you're a metalhead, you might have seen at least one of the photos it captured on an album cover. Even people with zero interest in space know its name.
Here's how the largest galaxies die
Like it or not, all galaxies will eventually die. But have you wondered just how they meet their grisly ends? Researchers now have a good idea. They've studied 22 very large elliptical galaxies about 10 billion years old, and have discovered that these celestial bodies die from the inside out. The older they get, the more red giants (that is, dead stars) exist at their centers -- stars keep forming at the periphery up until the galaxy's last moments.
Dark matter is (probably) more complex than you think
Scientists typically believe that dark matter, for all of its mystery, behaves in a simple way: if one clump encounters another, the two interact solely through gravity. However, researchers using both Hubble and the Very Large Telescope have published findings which suggest that there's more involved. They've noticed dark matter (the blue lines in this picture) lagging behind a galaxy due to friction, hinting that there are factors beyond gravity at work. It's not certain whether the source of this friction is a familiar phenomenon or something entirely undiscovered, but it's definitely not the usual culprit.
