Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

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Telescope time is so expensive that astronomers usually know exactly what star or planet they are investigating.

But as an experiment NASA pointed its Hubble Telescope at a void in space which changed and provided one of the most iconic images of the cosmos.

At the time, NASA was struggling with the Hubble Telescope which was deemed a failure as it had only provided blurry images for its first five years due to a flaw in one of the mirrors the mirrors are used to take extremely long distance pictures.

However, astronauts spent three days on the satellite orbiting Earth to rectify the problem, and when they did, NASA had something to prove.

R. Williams (STScI), the HDF-S Team, and NASA/ESA

To test the new equipment, Robert Williams, former director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, decided to point the telescope at nothing.

However, what came back was a stunning image which gave the world an unprecedented view into the entire history of the universe.

In an interview with Vox, Mr Williams said: What we were doing was trying to find sort of an indiscriminate area of the sky where no observation had been made before.

AFP/Getty Images

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Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7653, which is an emission nebula located 11 000 light-years away

The image is now known as the Hubble Deep Field and is more than 12 billion lightyears deep.

A lightyear is measured by how long it takes for light to travel in a year moving at 186,000 miles per second.

So what the Hubble Deep Field image shows in the distance is how the universe looked 12 billion years ago.

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In the forefront of the image, minus a few stars which were in view, there are the galaxies which have formed over billions of years.

But in the background are irregularly shaped infant galaxies which are just beginning to take shape, so close to the dawn of time 13.8 billion years ago.

Mr Williams added: "We didnt know what was there, and that was the whole purpose of the observation, basically to get a core sample of the universe.

"You do the same thing if you're trying to understand the geology of the Earth: Pick some typical spot to drill down to try to understand exactly what the various layers of the Earth are and what they mean in terms of its geologic history."

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NASA decided to take a snap of 'nothing' and THIS is what they saw... - Express.co.uk

This artist's illustration shows the "hot Jupiter" exoplanet WASP-121b, which presents the best evidence yet of a stratosphere on an exoplanet.

A huge, superhot alien planet has a stratrosphere, like Earth does, a new study suggests.

"This result is exciting because it shows that a common trait of most of the atmospheres in our solar system a warm stratosphere also can be found in exoplanet atmospheres," study co-author Mark Marley, of NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, said in a statement.

"We can now compare processes in exoplanet atmospheres with the same processes that happen under different sets of conditions in our own solar system," Marley added. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The research team, led by Thomas Evans of the University of Exeter in England, detected spectral signatures of water molecules in the atmosphere of WASP-121b, a gas giant that lies about 880 light-years from Earth. These signatures indicate that the temperature of the upper layer of the planet's atmosphere increases with the distance from the planet's surface. In the bottom layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, the temperature decreases with altitude, study team members said.

WASP-121b lies incredibly close to its host star, completing one orbit every 1.3 days. The planet is a "hot Jupiter"; temperatures at the top of its atmosphere reach a sizzling 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 degrees Celsius), researchers said.

"The question [of] whether stratospheres do or do not form inhot Jupitershas been one of the major outstanding questions in exoplanet research since at least the early 2000s," Evans told Space.com. "Currently, our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres is pretty basic and limited. Every new piece of information that we are able to get represents a significant step forward."

The top of WASP-121b's atmosphere is heated to a blazing 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 Celsius), hot enough to boil some metals.

The discovery is also significant because it shows that atmospheres of distant exoplanets can be analyzed in detail, said Kevin Heng of the University of Bern in Switzerland, who is not a member of the study team.

"This is an important technical milestone on the road to a final goal that we all agree on, and the goal is that, in the future, we can apply the very same techniques to study atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets," Heng told Space.com. "We would like to measure transits of Earth-like planets. We would like to figure out what type of molecules are in the atmospheres, and after we do that, we would like to take the final very big step, which is to see whether these molecular signatures could indicate the presence of life."

Available technology does not yet allow such work with small, rocky exoplanets, researchers said.

"We are focusing on these big gas giants that are heated to very high temperatures due to the close proximity of their stars simply because they are the easiest to study with the current technology," Evans said. "We are just trying to understand as much about their fundamental properties as possible and refine our knowledge, and, hopefully in the decades to come, we can start pushing towards smaller and cooler planets."

WASP-121b is nearly twice the size of Jupiter. The exoplanet transits, or crosses the face of, its host star from Earth's perspective. Evans and his team were able to observe those transits using an infrared spectrograph aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"By looking at the difference in the brightness of the system for when the planet was not behind the star and when it was behind the star, we were able to work out the brightness and the spectrum of the planet itself," Evans said. "We measured the spectrum of the planet using this method at a wavelength range which is very sensitive to the spectral signature of water molecules."

The team observed signatures of glowing water molecules, which indicated that WASP-121b's atmospheric temperatures increase with altitude, Evans said. If the temperature decreased with altitude, infrared radiation would at some point pass through a region of cooler water-gas, which would absorb the part of the spectrum responsible for the glowing effect, he explained.

There have been hints of stratospheres detected on other hot Jupiters, but the new results are the most convincing such evidence to date, Evans said.

"It's the first time that it has been done clearly for an exoplanet atmosphere, and that's why it's the strongest evidence to date for an exoplanet stratosphere," he said.

He added that researchers might be able to move closer to studying more Earth-like planets with the arrival of next-generation observatories such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and big ground-based observatories such as the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). JWST is scheduled to launch late next year, and GMT, E-ELT and TMT are expected to come online in the early to mid-2020s.

The new study was published online Wednesday (Aug. 2) in the journal Nature.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Hubble Telescope Detects Stratosphere on Huge Alien Planet - Space.com

For Zoltan Levay staring at the night sky and feeling the vastness of it almost gives him vertigo.

Hes enamored, fascinated and obsessed with it. Space, stars, distant planets and galaxies led Levay into a career processing images from the Hubble telescope for our world to see.

It has been rewarding to be involved in a world-class scientific project, Levay said. I have training in astronomy, and its rewarding to be here on this project and work with astronomers all over the world, some of the most prominent scientists around.

Levay is also a photographer. He started the hobby when he was in high school, and its grown into a passion. He often, as you may guess, photographs landscapes and the night sky. He also photographs nature, cityscapes and anything that visually interests him.

At the Art Association on Friday those two passions meet in Levays art exhibit, Celestial-Terrestial Convergence. The exhibit will feature Levays original photography and images hes processed from the Hubble.

Im trying to relate the landscape were familiar with to what we see in the night sky and the deep universe, Levay said. Its all part of nature. Theres a whole universe out there thats just as spectacular and all part of our grand landscape.

Levay began his career in astronomy, and is now leading the Imaging Group in the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Since 1993 the main part of that job is processing images from the Hubble space telescope. Hes also a member of the Hubble Heritage Team, a program within that institute focused on building a library of Hubble images.

Processing makes it sounds pedantic, but what Levay does is develop the photograph the way a camera would. When a telescope captures a photograph of a galaxy in deep space, the images are raw and devoid of color.

We use filters on the camera that pick particular colors, so we reconstruct color images from those individual exposures just like any camera does, Levay said.

He compared it to the way our eyes break apart the light and color of an image and then reconstruct it in our brain so we can see it.

We use the same principles a photographer would use to make a picture thats powerful and dramatic and interesting, yet conveys the reality of what the scene represents.

Levay said his favorite image from the Hubble has the uninspiring title NGC 1300.

I like that image because it has this very dramatic form to it, Levay said. It has irregularities on top of that so its very interesting and it shows us a great depth in the universe. It shows stars that are relatively nearby, but this galaxy is millions of light years away, so you see the whole sweep of the universe in this one image.

Its those kinds of realizations, that youre staring at the universe, that give Levay a drop-in-the-stomach, vertigo feeling.

Sometimes well produce a photograph and realize this is the first time anyone has ever seen this, he said.

The same feeling comes to him when hes deep in a national park photographing the landscape.

I was Canyonlands National Park a few months ago and these landscapes seem infinite when youre there, Levay said. Youre standing on the edge of an overlook and looking down and looking out at this dramatic landscape going on forever. You have this feeling of infinity, but you realize its a teeny tiny part of existence.

Levay hopes that the pairing of his landscapes with the images of faraway worlds will bridge the distance between the two and show people how connected the ground we stand on and space are.

I hope that people get the feeling of power and scale of whats out there in the universe and the drama of these powerful landscapes here on Earth or in space, Levay said.

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Celestial Creations - Jackson Hole News&Guide

Scoping out the scene

NASA

By Leah Crane

Its a moonshot. A signal has been spotted that might be the first moon detected outside our solar system, and researchers are gearing up to use the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm it.

David Kipping at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues have been using the Kepler Space Telescope to search for moons around other worlds for years, but they havent found any yet. Weve had candidates in the past and investigated them, and most of them have evaporated, says Kipping.

The Kepler Space Telescope finds planets by watching them pass in front of their stars, causing a dip in the stars light. The new potential moon was found in the same way as a moon orbits its planet, it leads to an extra fall in the starlight coming from behind.

Kipping and his colleagues observed these characteristic dips over three orbits of the planet around its sun-sized star, which is called Kepler-1625. Their observations suggested that a moon was there with a statistical confidence of just above 4 sigma. That means if the moon is not real, theres only around a 1 in 16,000 chance of seeing the exact same signal through a fluke in the data.

It is consistent with the signal that we might expect from a moon, but it might be consistent with other things as well, says Kipping. The system is almost 4000 light years away and relatively faint, so more observations are needed to verify that the Kepler signal was really a moon and not just a statistical blip.

Hubble is much more powerful than Kepler, so the group has proposed to point the telescope at Kepler-1625 in October, when the planet is expected to transit its star again, to get a clear observation.

We anticipate that the proposed measurements would be sufficient to confirm the first unambiguous detection of a moon beyond our Solar System, the team writes in its request for time on the Hubble telescope.

The team says the moon, if it exists, is probably the size of Neptune, and orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet. Given what we know about how planets are born, it seems unlikely this arrangement could have formed to begin with, but the large moon could have been captured by the planet at a later time.

If there really is something there, its such a faint star that itd have to be a planet-sized moon for them to have seen it transit, says David Waltham at Royal Holloway, University of London. It would be spectacularly different than anything we see in the solar system.

Because there are so many diverse moons in our solar system, most astronomers assume that there are lots of moons around more distant planets as well. I think were pretty sure that theyre going to be there, says Waltham. It would be pretty odd that there are hundreds of moons in the solar system but none anywhere else.

If Kipping and his team are able to verify this detection, as well as being the first exomoon weve ever seen, it would be a much larger moon than weve ever seen before. This indicates that there may be even more types of moon than the many weve already observed.

It would be analogous to the first exoplanet detections, which defied our prejudices from the solar system as well, says Duncan Forgan at the University of St Andrews in the UK.

Well have to wait a few months to find out for sure whether its out there.

It may prove to be nothing, or it may prove to be a really fabulous discovery, says Waltham. We wont know until the Hubble data comes back.

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1707.08563

Read more: Find exomoons by watching how they warp their planets light

More on these topics:

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First exomoon might have been spotted 4000 light years away - New Scientist

NORTHAMPTON When Smith College astronomy professor James Lowenthal got images back from the Hubble Space Telescope this year, his initial response was simple: Wow!

What he was looking at were the brightest infrared galaxies in the universe close-up views of rare, ultrabright collections of stars from the early universe that are furiously producing even more stars. Those views, Lowenthal said speaking at his office on Tuesday, may someday help answer a fundamental question about the history of the cosmos: how did galaxies form and evolve?

The images Lowenthal was observing made use of a well-known effect called gravitational lensing. Essentially, the light from those 22 distant galaxies passes through the gravitational field of a closer massive object, which acts as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for researchers on Earth.

That foregrounded, natural lens allows astronomers to see otherwise impossible-to-see pictures of the distant universe. Light traveling from those galaxies takes billions of years to reach Earth, so researchers are quite literally looking into the past at galaxies from as long as 12 billion years ago about 90 percent of the way back to the Big Bang, according to Lowenthal.

Lowenthal presented those images at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, last month.

The reaction has been in our scientific community, This is so, so cool, Lowenthal said of the response from his colleagues.

But before Lowenthal could take that peek into the past with his fellow researchers including Min Yun, Kevin Harrington, Patrick Kamieneski and Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts Amherst they had to write a scientifically rigorous proposal laying out their case for getting highly sought-after time on the Hubble telescope.

We convinced them it would be really cool, Lowenthal said of the proposal. And wow! It was really cool.

Lowenthal said Yun and others cleverly discovered the galaxies by using publicly available data from several telescopes, and used the Large Millimeter Telescope a joint project between UMass and Mexicos National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics to confirm their distances from Earth.

It was thanks to that work narrowing down a list of distant galaxies that the team knew where to look when they got time on the Hubble telescope.

The distant galaxies in the Hubble images are producing 5,000 to 10,000 times more stars than the Milky Way, but are using the same amount of gas contained in the Milky Way. That fact leaves astronomers to puzzle over what exactly is fueling that star birth.

Possible explanations for the rapid creation of stars could be the collision of massive galaxies, a flood of gas or something entirely different. At issue is the very nature of galaxy formation and evolution.

Those are lingering questions that Lowenthal hopes to answer, but first the images from the Hubble telescope must be decoded.

While gravitational lensing makes those distant galaxies more visible in high detail, it also bends their light, leaving warped images with streaks, circles and arcs that can leave researchers unclear about what exactly theyre looking at. The task now is to unscramble those pictures.

To explain the warping of the images, Lowenthal used the analogy of looking at candlelight through a wine glass. The light will appear in different spots, or even stretch across the bottom of the glass in a circle, depending on how the glass is held.

Because the images theyve received are warped, researchers must now work backwards to reconstruct what those galaxies actually looked like before passing through the lens. Knowing the distance of those galaxies, Lowenthal and others must figure out other variables like the gravitational pull of the lens to model what the original image looked like, or to even figure out what the background and foreground are.

From Hubble, we got only monochromatic, black and white images. Its only one wavelength, Lowenthal said, noting that hes hoping to get images from Hubble in the future that will show colors like red and blue. If we did have that information, it would tremendously, instantly help us separate foreground from background, because the foreground and background are almost always different colors.

Lowenthal and his colleagues failed to get approval to use the Hubble telescope during the latest cycle of proposals, but he said he hopes theyll soon have access again, and they hope to gain further insight into the nature of those early galaxies.

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A 'wow' moment for the astronomy community - The Recorder

The illustrious Hubble Space Telescope will eventually re-enter Earths atmosphere and be destroyed or so I understand. Could it be returned to Earth safely and put in a museum? If so, what would be the cheapest way to do it?

(Continued)

Our apologies to Sam Palasciano whose earlier submission to this question on 3 June contained an error introduced by us Ed

Hubbles primary mirror weighs roughly 1800 pounds or 800 kilograms, not 450 as the article stated. This could be significant if someone wanted to seriously pursue this question.

However, I would much rather someone came up with a way of extending the life of the Hubble telescope in orbit. The replacement Webb Telescope, as I understand it, operates at different wavelengths. Hubble was designed to have a more useful operating window, including both ultraviolet and infrared, an advantage that will be lost when it is closed down.

Sam Palasciano, Oceanside, California, US

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Salvaging Hubble - New Scientist

NORTHAMPTON When Smith College astronomy professor James Lowenthal got images back from the Hubble Space Telescope this year, his initial response was simple: Wow!

What he was looking at were the brightest infrared galaxies in the universe close-up views of rare, ultrabright collections of stars from the early universe that are furiously producing even more stars. Those views, Lowenthal told the Gazette at his office on Tuesday, may someday help answer a fundamental question about the history of the cosmos: how did galaxies form and evolve?

The images Lowenthal was observing made use of a well-known effect called gravitational lensing. Essentially, the light from those 22 distant galaxies passes through the gravitational field of a closer massive object, which acts as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for researchers on Earth.

That foregrounded, natural lens allows astronomers to see otherwise impossible-to-see pictures of the distant universe. Light traveling from those galaxies takes billions of years to reach Earth, so researchers are quite literally looking into the past at galaxies from as long as 12 billion years ago about 90 percent of the way back to the Big Bang, according to Lowenthal.

Lowenthal presented those images at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, last month.

The reaction has been in our scientific community, This is so, so cool, Lowenthal said of the response from his colleagues.

But before Lowenthal could take that peek into the past with his fellow researchers including Min Yun, Kevin Harrington, Patrick Kamieneski and Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts Amherst they had to write a scientifically rigorous proposal laying out their case for getting highly sought- after time on the Hubble telescope.

We convinced them it would be really cool, Lowenthal said of the proposal. And wow! It was really cool.

Lowenthal said Yun and others cleverly discovered the galaxies by using publicly available data from several telescopes, and used the Large Millimeter Telescope a joint project between UMass and Mexicos National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics to confirm their distances from Earth.

It was thanks to that work narrowing down a list of distant galaxies that the team knew where to look when they got time on the Hubble telescope.

The distant galaxies in the Hubble images are producing 5,000 to 10,000 times more stars than the Milky Way, but are using the same amount of gas contained in the Milky Way. That fact leaves astronomers to puzzle over what exactly is fueling that star birth.

Possible explanations for the rapid creation of stars could be the collision of massive galaxies, a flood of gas or something entirely different. At issue is the very nature of galaxy formation and evolution.

Those are lingering questions that Lowenthal hopes to answer, but first the images from the Hubble telescope must be decoded.

While gravitational lensing makes those distant galaxies more visible in high detail, it also bends their light, leaving warped images with streaks, circles and arcs that can leave researchers unclear about what exactly theyre looking at. The task now is to unscramble those pictures.

To explain the warping of the images, Lowenthal used the analogy of looking at candlelight through a wine glass. The light will appear in different spots, or even stretch across the bottom of the glass in a circle, depending on how the glass is held.

Because the images theyve received are warped, researchers must now work backwards to reconstruct what those galaxies actually looked like before passing through the lens. Knowing the distance of those galaxies, Lowenthal and others must figure out other variables like the gravitational pull of the lens to model what the original image looked like, or to even figure out what the background and foreground are.

From Hubble, we got only monochromatic, black and white images. Its only one wavelength, Lowenthal said, noting that hes hoping to get images from Hubble in the future that will show colors like red and blue. If we did have that information, it would tremendously, instantly help us separate foreground from background, because the foreground and background are almost always different colors.

Lowenthal and his colleagues failed to get approval to use the Hubble telescope during the latest cycle of proposals, but he said he hopes theyll soon have access again, and they hope to gain further insight into the nature of those early galaxies.

While he waits for more data, however, the images Lowenthal already has have nevertheless changed his perception of the cosmos in at least some way. As a scientist who normally studies distant galaxies without much emphasis on gravitational lensing, the new images have made him rethink the galaxies he has been looking at for so many years.

I have not been thinking, Most of those galaxies are probably gravitationally lensed, at least a little bit, Lowenthal said. And now Im thinking, Everything is lensed!

Its definitely startling to have a big shift like that, he said, though the smile on his face and wonder in his eyes seemed to indicate he was far more excited and curious for the work ahead than startled.

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Smith astronomer presents rare images of stars at national conference - GazetteNET

GIF

Its easy to feel small and insignificant in the grandiose scope of the universe, because we are. At the same time, as Carl Sagan once reminded us, were made of the same star stuff as the cosmos. All too often, we forget how random, ridiculous, and resplendent it is to part of the stellar sorority of the universe. Thats why art, specifically movies like Eliza McNitts Fistful of Stars, is importantit reacquaints us with humanitys small and stupid and somehow very special place in the cosmos.

Fistful of Stars is a five minute-long virtual reality experience that takes the viewer on a tour through the vast star-forming region known as the Orion Nebula. Its hauntingly beautiful images, accompanied by The Hubble Cantatawhich includes a 30 piece ensemble, a 100 person choir, and two singers from the Metropolitan Operagives the film a 2001 feel without the murderous robots.

Its a combination of science and magical realism, director Eliza McNitt told Gizmodo. We wanted to give users the feeling as if they were a star floating on stellar winds through the Orion Nebula. That could take billions of years but we wanted to give you the experience of that spectacular journey through five minutes.

Humans have never ventured into the Orion Nebula, because its roughly 1,500 lightyears away. Peering into its cloudy heart, Hubble has found some of the most beautiful chaos of star birth ever captured. As its name suggests, Fistful of Stars masterfully captures the beauty within our otherwise bellicose universe. I still cant decide whether the whole thing is a cause or cure for an existential crisis.

The Orion Nebula is a place thousands of lightyears away where no human has ever been, McNitt said. Fistful of stars offers humans an experience...where you get to become the eyes of the human telescope.

Though the film originally premiered back in March at SXSW, its finally available on Vices Samsung VR channel. If you dont have VR gear, you can check still check it out without a headset right here, in 360 video.

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This Real World 'Space Opera' Lets You Become the Hubble Telescope - Gizmodo

The Hindu

Phobos imaged by Hubble Space telescope The Hindu NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back images of the tiny Martian moon Phobos in its orbital trek around the red planet. Over the course of 22 minutes, Hubble took 13 separate images, allowing astronomers to create a time-lapse video showing ... This is just really cool a time-lapse animation from the Hubble telescope showing a tiny moon zinging around MarsDiscover Magazine (blog) NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures tiny Martian moon PhobosBusiness Standard Tiny Martian moon Phobos captured by NASA's Hubble telescopeIndia Today CNET -India.com -NASA -Solar System Exploration - NASA all 81 news articles »

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Phobos imaged by Hubble Space telescope - The Hindu

NASAs Hubble Telescope has captured a unique time-lapse movie of Martian moon Phobos as it orbited around the planet. In the sequence, Phobos emerges from behind the Mars and passes in front of the planet. The moon looks so small that it could easily be mistaken with a star.

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Phobos is the larger of Mars' two moons. It is closer to its host planet than any other moon in the solar system and it takes it just 7 hours and 39 minutes to complete an orbit.

Mars gravitational pull is drawing Phobos closer and closer. Every 100 years, the moon is approaching Mars by about 2 meters or 6.5 feet. As the moon is getting dangerously close to its planet, it could be shredded into pieces and likely form rings Saturn-like around Mars. Scientists predict that this could happen between 30 and 50 million years.

Thought Phobos is the largest moon of Mars, it is still one of smallest natural satellites in our solar system. The moon is 27 by 22 by 18 km in diameter and could easily fit inside Washington, D.C. Beltway.

The origin of Phobos is not yet fully determined. But researchers suspect that it could be caused by collision between Mars and another body.

Phobos may be a pile of rubble that is held together by a thin crust. It may have formed as dust and rocks encircling Mars were drawn together by gravity. Or, it may have experienced a more violent birth, where a large body smashing into Mars flung pieces skyward, and those pieces were brought together by gravity. Perhaps an existing moon was destroyed, reduced to the rubble that would become Phobos. NASA statement said.

The images of Phobos orbiting the Red Planet were taken on May 12, 2016 days before Mars came closest to the Earth in 11 years.

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Hubble Telescope Captures Mars Moon Phobos Orbiting Around The Planet - I4U News