Hubble Space Telescope Unveils 9 New Monster Stars

cerberus · Mar 18, 2016

http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/hubble-space-telescope-unveils-9-new-monster-stars-1288518

'monster stars' 'with masses over 100 times the mass of the sun' 'about 170,000 light-years away' 'the young cluster hosts many extremely massive' 'these nine stars outshine the Sun by a factor of 30 million' Blimey, if they keep this up they're gonna run out of superlatives soon. Who can believe this (*)(*)(*)(*)?

"It would appear that such stars can originate from the star formation process," Caballero-Nieves added, (my insertion) "and if only we had some more research funding we could find out for certain." Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty!

waltky · Aug 15, 2016

Hubble gets new lease on life...

Hubble Space Telescope Gets a New 5-Year Contract
August 11, 2016 — The Hubble Space Telescope has been dazzling earthlings with views of deep space for over 26 years. That’s old for a satellite but NASA has a team of approximately 80 engineers working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to extend the life of Hubble’s mechanical parts.

Anticipating Anomalies

Hubble is taking pictures and transmitting them down to Earth 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as it races around our planet at more than 27,000 kilometers per hour. This means that most of the instructions sent to the orbiting observatory must be automated and uploaded ahead of time. So, the engineers at Goddard spend much of their time coming up with innovative ways to keep the decades-old mechanisms on Hubble moving. This usually involves minimizing the motions of the most-used gears and predicting the future. “Part of our jobs here at Goddard is to try to anticipate problems ... and try to find ways to work around them or respond to them so we get back to science” as quickly as possible, Olivia Lupie, mission operations manager for Hubble, tells VOA. Months and months pass between issues. But rest assured, the engineers are prepared to respond to get the telescope back on its science schedule -- even on weekends.

These towers of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula are known as the Pillars of Creation because within them, hundreds of new stars are being created.

Hubble Tetris

Astronomers from around the world request images from Hubble. Each week, Merle Reinhart, an engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, is tasked with organizing hundreds those requests. “It’s kind of a big jigsaw puzzle. The hard part is trying to figure out the most efficient way to put all those together so that we’re making maximum use of the time on Hubble,” Reinhart explains. “We really don’t want the spacecraft sitting there doing nothing.” The images are usually available within 24-48 hours. It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for the researchers to look at the data and tell the world about their exciting results. Data from Hubble has allowed astronomers to make cosmic breakthroughs:

* pin down the age of the universe by measuring the brightness of stars in distant galaxies
* watch comets plunge into Jupiter’s clouds, providing new insights into the physics of the stormy planet
* take the very first images of planet-forming disks around newborn stars, something astronomers knew had to be there but never dreamed they’d see with their own eyes.

Four of these five galaxies in Stephan's Quintet are so close together they are bound together by gravity and will eventually merge into a single galaxy. The galaxy at top left is in the foreground, far from the other members.

Cosmic team-up

NASA began constructing Hubble in 1979 for what was planned as a 15-year mission. But several visits by shuttle astronauts to fix problems and install updates prolonged its life beyond that, and Hubble is still working so well that NASA just extended its operation for another five years. That means its mission will overlap with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in October, 2018. That will give astronomers what Malcolm Niedner, JWST project manager, calls "a very full toolkit." "Hubble is primarily an optical and ultra-violet telescope," he explained. "James Webb is an infrared telescope. Having them both together, very potent, very powerful." The James Webb Space Telescope is still being assembled and tested here on Earth but astronomers can hardly wait to see what this dynamic duo can produce.

Hubble's image of the dark clouds of the Carina Nebula

http://www.voanews.com/a/hubble-mission-extended/3460617.html
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2nd Planet May Have Been Habitable Once: Scientists
August 12, 2016 - “Hellish” is a word commonly used to describe the atmosphere on Venus, but a new study suggests the second planet from the sun may have been habitable once.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, climate scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) say the planet may have had a shallow ocean and “habitable surface temperatures” for around 2 billion years of its history. “Many of the same tools we use to model climate change on Earth can be adapted to study climates on other planets, both past and present,” said Michael Way, a researcher at GISS and the paper’s lead author. “These results show ancient Venus may have been a very different place than it is today.” Today, Venus is a suffocating place with an atmosphere 90 times denser than Earth’s, almost no water vapor and temperatures that can reach as high as 462 degrees Celsius. Venus likely formed from the same materials as Earth, but went in a very different direction at some point in its history.

The notion of a liquid ocean once flowing on the planet’s surface is not new. In the 1980s, the Pioneer space probe discovered hints that water once existed; but, that water was burned off by the amount of sunlight Venus gets. Venus spins very slowly, and one day there is the same as 117 days here on Earth. Even the water vapor was likely broken apart by ultraviolet radiation, which caused the hydrogen to escape the atmosphere, say scientists. “With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to a so-called runaway greenhouse effect that created present conditions,” NASA wrote in a press release.

This June 2004 photo shows the transit of Venus, which occurs when Venus passes between the Earth and the sun.

Venus’ slow rotation compared to Earth was thought to be a result of the thick atmosphere; but, researchers say that even a planet with a relatively thin atmosphere like Earth’s could also spin slowly. That means an ancient, habitable Venus could have also spun slowly. Topography also plays a crucial role in Venus’ atmosphere. The researchers think that even with an ocean, Venus has more dry land than Earth, particularly in the tropical regions. This, researchers say, would limit evaporation and slow down the greenhouse effect caused by water vapor.[ “This type of surface appears ideal for making a planet habitable; there seems to have been enough water to support abundant life, with sufficient land to reduce the planet’s sensitivity to changes from incoming sunlight,” NASA said.

For the climate modeling used in this study, researchers took all of this into consideration when making a model for a hypothetical early Venus. They also took into account data from the Magellan spacecraft mission in the 1990's as well as factoring in that the ancient sun was up to 30 percent dimmer than it is today. “In the GISS model’s simulation, Venus’ slow spin exposes its dayside to the sun for almost two months at a time,” co-author and fellow GISS scientist Anthony Del Genio said. “This warms the surface and produces rain that creates a thick layer of clouds, which acts like an umbrella to shield the surface from much of the solar heating. The result is mean climate temperatures that are actually a few degrees cooler than Earth’s today.”

http://www.voanews.com/a/mht-venus-may-have-been-habitable-nasa/3461966.html
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waltky · Sep 23, 2017

Hubble spots binary asteroid tumbling through our solar system...

Hubble spots something very, very strange hurtling through our solar system
September 22, 2017 - NASA’s Hubble telescope has spotted something hurtling through our solar system that honestly feels more at home in a science fiction novel than reality.

The Hubble space telescope has unravelled the mystery of a strange asteroid which had also been classified as a comet – and which had puzzled astronomers. Hubble was used to image the asteroid, designated 2006 VW139, in September 2016 – and the image revealed that it’s not one, but two asteroids. ‘We detected strong indications for the sublimation of water ice due to the increased solar heating, similar to how the tail of a comet is created,’ said m leader Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany.

This time-lapse video made with Hubble Space Telescope photos shows two asteroids that orbit each other and have comet-like features. The asteroid pair, called 2006 VW139/288P, is unlike anything ever observed in the asteroid belt.

The features of the binary asteroid – such as its comet-like activity, and the fact that the two parts are the same size – make it unique. Understanding its origin and evolution may provide new insights into the early days of the solar system.

NASA’s Hubble telescope has spotted something hurtling through our solar system that honestly feels more at home in a science fiction novel than reality.

Main-belt comets may help to answer how water came to a bone-dry Earth billions of years ago. Argawal said, ‘We need more theoretical and observational work, as well as more objects similar to this object, to find an answer to this question.’

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hubble-spots-something-strange-hurtling-solar-system-100031657.html
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Hubble Space Telescope Unveils 9 New Monster Stars

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Hubble Space Telescope Unveils 9 New Monster Stars

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