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Results tagged “galaxies” from Breaking Orbit

Hubble Contest Winner Arp 274 in Full Color!

Posted on April 3, 2009 | 0 Comments

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You voted, and [unlike with Stephen Colbert] NASA listened. Now the good folks at Hubble have released this sparkling new image of the interacting galaxy group known as Arp 274:

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—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

According to NASA, the galactic trio received 67,021 votes out of the nearly 140,000 cast among the six candidate targets.

Previous shots of Arp 274, which sits about 400 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, showed the object smallish, blurred, and only in shades of gray.

The new image combines data from three kinds of light filters to show the different types of stars within the galaxies in bright color.

Older stars pictured in yellow lie in the central bulges of each galaxy. Globs of younger blue stars line two of the galaxies' spiral arms, while the light from new star formation makes nebulae in the arms glow pink.

Hubble's Next Discovery: Interacting Galaxies

Posted on March 2, 2009 | 0 Comments

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hubble-winner-274.png

You voted, and here's your new Hubble superstar: a pair of galaxies that seem to have locked arms in an interstellar dance.

Of the six choices in Hubble's contest, Arp 274 won by a landslide—67,021 votes, as compared to the next runner-up, the spiral galaxy NGC 5172, with 26,987 votes.

Now Hubble scientists are preparing to train the space telescope at their publicly elected target, with the goal of producing a spectacular new image by early April.

So stay tuned for more about this cosmic duo!

Dissecting an Anemic Galaxy

Posted on February 5, 2009 | 0 Comments

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The milky swirl seen here is NGC 4921, one of the very few spiral galaxies in the thousand-member Coma galaxy cluster about 320 million light-years away.

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—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, K. Cook (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)

The Hubble image, released today, is one of the deepest looks yet at this particular object, revealing a rich amount of new detail about a galaxy we've known of since the 1700s.

In addition to spotting some ghostly dwarf galaxies near the rim, Hubble picks up in sharp detail clusters of bluish dots that show where new stars are forming.

Astronomers consider this galaxy to be anemic, because its rate of star formation is unusually low. [A nice juxtaposition to yesterday's news about a galaxy undergoing a period of hyper-starburst.]

But perhaps the coolest part of this picture is that's actually a glass of proverbial lemonade, made when Hubble handed scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab one really big lemon.

Kem Cook and colleagues had been using the space telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys to search for what are known as Cepheid variable stars, a type of pulsating star that astronomers can use as a standard light source for telling how far away cosmic objects are from Earth.

But in early 2007 the ACS up and broke, leaving Cook's data set incomplete.

Lucky for us, 80 of his images—50 taken with a yellow filter and 30 in near-infrared—could be combined to make the above snazzy snapshot.

Biggest Star Party in the Universe

Posted on February 4, 2009 | 0 Comments

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The following is a guest post from Anne Minard, an accomplished writer and fellow space geek. Anne writes for NatGeo News a bunch and has even written a whole book [and a good one, too] on poor demoted Pluto.

Like what you read? Check out more of Anne's blogginess at 100 Days of Science.

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—Left image courtesy Sloan Digital Sky Survey; center image courtesy National Radio Astronomy Observatory; right image courtesy Plateau de Bure Interferometer

A massive galaxy at the edge of the known universe harbors the largest and most intense star factory astronomers have ever seen.

And it sounds like an incredible setting for a Wii space flight game.

Fabian Walter, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, led a research team that glimpsed the galaxy, whimsically named SDSS J1148+5251, with the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in France. Their results are out in this week's issue of Nature.

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Was Hubble a DeLorean in Another Life?

Posted on October 1, 2008 | 0 Comments

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Sometimes it must seem like the Hubble Space Telescope is a time traveler.

Within hours of Hubble making headlines because it shut itself down due to a serious mechanical failure, mission scientists released a survey of galactic diversity based on new Hubble images.

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NGC 253, Sculptor Group galaxy, 13 million light-years away
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington)

Using two of its powerful cameras, Hubble captured high-resolution views of 69 galaxies that lie 6.5 million to 13 million light-years away. This sounds pretty distant, but it's actually right in our cosmic backyard.

The project—delightfully named the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury, or ANGST, program—aims to use the new, detailed views of old stars in nearby galaxies like a fossil record.

More distant galaxies are younger galaxies to Earth-based observers, because the light had to travel for millions of years to reach us, so what we see now is how a galaxy looked in it's early days.

The young/far galaxies are loaded with active star formation and are good models in general for figuring out how galaxies grow up.

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NGC 300, Sculptor Group galaxy, 7 million light-years away

—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington)


By comparing the closer, geriatric galaxies to their younger cousins, scientists hope to trace how various types of galaxies might have evolved, as well as possibly getting a clearer picture of stellar life cycles. [Yes, I know I'm supposed to be talking about planets here, but you gotta have stars for planets to form, right?]

But, you might ask, NASA says Hubble is broken, so how is it still releasing new images?

► Read This Entire Post

About This Blog

The moon
From dwarf planets to hot Jupiters, join NatGeo News space and tech editor Victoria Jaggard in a global discussion about all things extraterrestrial.


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