Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

NASAs Hubble telescope has revealed a real space battle.

Researchers found that around 1400, in theOrion Nebula, a group of stars was engaged in an even more impressive battle.

The gravitational tussle ended with the system breaking apart and at least three stars being ejected in different directions.

The stars went unnoticed for hundreds of years, NASA revealed.

However, over the past few decades, two of them were spotted in infrared and radio observations, which were able to penetrate the thick dust in the Orion Nebula.

The observations showed that the two stars were traveling at high speeds in opposite directions from each other.

The stars origin, however, was a mystery.

Astronomers traced both stars back 540 years to the same location and suggested they were part of a now-defunct multiple-star system.

But the duos combined energy, which is propelling them outward, didnt add up.

The researchers reasoned there must be at least one other culprit that robbed energy from the stellar toss-up.

Now NASAs Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers find the final piece of the puzzle by spotting a third runaway star.

The astronomers followed the path of the newly found star back to the same location where the two previously known stars were located 540 years ago.

The trio reside in a small region of young stars called the Kleinmann-Low Nebula, near the center of the vast Orion Nebula complex, located 1,300 light-years away.

All three stars are moving extremely fast on their way out of the Kleinmann-Low Nebula, up to almost 30 times the speed of most of the nebulas stellar inhabitants.

Based on computer simulations, astronomers predicted that these gravitational tugs-of-war should occur in young clusters, where newborn stars are crowded together.

But we havent observed many examples, especially in very young clusters, Luhman said.

The Orion Nebula could be surrounded by additional fledging stars that were ejected from it in the past and are now streaming away into space.

What often happens when a multiple system falls apart is that two of the member stars move close enough to each other that they merge or form a very tight binary.

In either case, the event releases enough gravitational energy to propel all of the stars in the system outward.

The energetic episode also produces a massive outflow of material, which is seen in the NICMOS images as fingers of matter streaming away from the location of the embedded source I star.

The teams results will appear in the March 20, 2017 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Luhman stumbled across the third speedy star, called source x, while he was hunting for free-floating planets in the Orion Nebula as a member of an international team led by Massimo Robberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

The team used the near-infrared vision of Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3 to conduct the survey.

During the analysis, Luhman was comparing the new infrared images taken in 2015 with infrared observations taken in 1998 by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

He noticed that source x had changed its position considerably, relative to nearby stars over the 17 years between Hubble images, indicating the star was moving fast, about 130,000 miles per hour.

The astronomer then looked at the stars previous locations, projecting its path back in time.

He realized that in the 1470s source x had been near the same initial location in the Kleinmann-Low Nebula as two other runaway stars, Becklin-Neugebauer (BN) and source I.

BN was discovered in infrared images in 1967, but its rapid motion wasnt detected until 1995, when radio observations measured the stars speed at 60,000 miles per hour.

Source I is traveling roughly 22,000 miles per hour.

The star had only been detected in radio observations; because it is so heavily enshrouded in dust, its visible and infrared light is largely blocked.

The three stars were most likely kicked out of their home when they engaged in a game of gravitational billiards, Luhman said.

What often happens when a multiple system falls apart is that two of the member stars move close enough to each other that they merge or form a very tight binary.

In either case, the event releases enough gravitational energy to propel all of the stars in the system outward.

The energetic episode also produces a massive outflow of material, which is seen in the NICMOS images as fingers of matter streaming away from the location of the embedded source I star.

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NASA's Hubble telescope reveals a real space battle - The Marshalltown

Hubble collected this stunning image of galaxy UGC 12591, located in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster. This hybrid galaxy is a combination of a lenticular and a spiral galaxy and is one of the largest known structures in the Universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an amazing view of a strange hybrid galaxy 400 million light-years away.

The galaxy, called UGC 12591, is odd because it's a cross betweena typical lenticular and spiral galaxy. It is located in the westernmost reaches of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster - a vast chain of galaxy clusters that extends across hundreds of millions of light-years. The galaxy is also a fast spinner, rotating at a mind-boggling 1.1 million mph (1.8 million km/h), according to a NASA description. [8 Galaxies With Really Weird Names]

"The galaxy itself is also extraordinary: it is incredibly massive," NASA officials wrote in an image description. The galaxy and its halo together contain several hundred billion times the mass of the sun; four timesmass of the Milky Way."

Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers are beginning to understand the mass of UGC 12951, NASA officials added. Scientists are using data from Hubble to establish whether the monster galaxy formed and stretched over time, or if it was formed from two large galaxies colliding at some point in the distant past, they added.

The Pisces-Perseus Supercluster of galaxy clusters, which UGC 12951 calls home, is one of the largest known structures in the universe, NASA officials added.

You can follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook & Google+. Original story on Space.com.

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Hubble Telescope Snaps Photo of Massive (and Weird) Hybrid Galaxy - Space.com

The Indian Express

Hubble Space Telescope spots galaxy four times the mass of the Milky way The Indian Express The Hubble space telescope has captured a new image showcasing an incredibly massive galaxy located under 400 million light-years away from the Earth. The galaxy UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral, according to NASA. NASA's Hubble telescope captures image of UGC 12591 galaxyBGR India NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Image Showcases ...SpaceCoastDaily.com Hubble showcases a remarkable galactic hybridPhys.Org all 17 news articles »

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Hubble Space Telescope spots galaxy four times the mass of the Milky way - The Indian Express

By Joshua SokolMar. 8, 2017 , 8:00 AM

It was the early 1990s, and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, had emptied out for the Christmas holiday. Wendy Freedman was toiling alone in the library on an immense and thorny problem: the expansion rate of the universe.

Carnegie was hallowed ground for this sort of work. It was here, in 1929, that Edwin Hubble first clocked faraway galaxies flying away from the Milky Way, bobbing in the outward current of expanding space. The speed of that flow came to be called the Hubble constant.

Freedman's quiet work was soon interrupted when fellow Carnegie astronomer Allan Sandage stormed in. Sandage, Hubble's designated scientific heir, had spent decades refining the Hubble constant, and had consistently defended a slow rate of expansion. Freedman was the latest challenger to publish a faster rate, and Sandage had seen the heretical study.

"He was so angry," recalls Freedman, now at the University of Chicago in Illinois, "that you sort of become aware that you're the only two people in the building. I took a step back, and that was when I realized, oh boy, this was not the friendliest of fields."

A 1923 image of the Andromeda galaxy. A cepheid, or variable star (marked VAR!), helped Edwin Hubble determine the vast distance to Andromeda.

The Carnegie Observatories

The acrimony has diminished, but not by much. Sandage died in 2010, and by then most astronomers had converged on a Hubble constant in a narrow range. But in a twist Sandage himself might savor, new techniques suggest that the Hubble constant is 8% lower than a leading number. For nearly a century, astronomers have calculated it by meticulously measuring distances in the nearby universe and moving ever farther out. But lately, astrophysicists have measured the constant from the outside in, based on maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the dappled afterglow of the big bang that is a backdrop to the rest of the visible universe. By making assumptions about how the push and pull of energy and matter in the universe have changed the rate of cosmic expansion since the microwave background was formed, the astrophysicists can take their map and adjust the Hubble constant to the present-day, local universe. The numbers should match. But they don't.

It could be that one approach has it wrong. The two sides are searching for flaws in their own methods and each other's alike, and senior figures like Freedman are racing to publish their own measures. "We don't know which way this is going to land," Freedman says.

But if the disagreement holds, it will be a crack in the firmament of modern cosmology. It could mean that current theories are missing some ingredient that intervened between the present and the ancient past, throwing off the chain of inferences from the CMB to the current Hubble constant. If so, history will be repeating itself. In the 1990s, Adam Riess, now an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, led one of the groups that discovered dark energy, a repulsive force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. It is one of the factors that the CMB calculations must take into account.

Now, Riess's team is leading the quest to pin down the Hubble constant in nearby space and beyond. His goal is not just to refine the number, but to see whether it is changing over time in ways that even dark energyas currently conceivedcan't explain. So far, he has few hints about what the missing factor might be. "I'm really wondering what is going on," he says.

In1927, Hubble was moving beyond the Milky Way with what was then the world's biggest telescope, the 100-inch (2.5-m) Hooker telescope that loomed over Pasadena on top of Mount Wilson. He photographed the faint spiral smudges we know as galaxies and measured the reddening of their light as their motions Doppler-shifted it to longer wavelengths, like the keening of a receding ambulance. By comparing the galaxies' redshifts to their brightness, Hubble stumbled on something revolutionary: The dimmer and presumably farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was receding. That meant the universe was expanding. It also meant the universe had a finite age, beginning in a big bang.

Debate over the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe, has exploded again. Astronomers had mostly settled on a number using a classical techniquethe "distance ladder," or astronomical observations from the local universe on out. But these values conflict with cosmological estimates made from maps of the early universe and adjusted to the present day. The dispute suggests a missing ingredient may be fueling the growth of the universe.

J. You

To pin down the expansion ratehis eponymous constantHubble needed actual distances to the galaxies, not just relative ones based on their apparent brightness. So he began the laborious process of building up a distance ladderfrom the Milky Way to neighboring galaxies to the far reaches of expanding space. Each rung in the ladder has to be calibrated by "standard candles": objects that shift, pulse, flash, or rotate in a way that reliably encodes how far away they are.

The first rung seemed reasonably sturdy: variable stars called cepheids, which ramp up and down in brightness over the course of days or weeks. The length of that cycle indicates the star's intrinsic brightness. By comparing the observed brightness of a cepheid to the brightness inferred from its oscillations, Hubble could gauge its distance. The Mount Wilson telescope was only good enough to see a few cepheids in the nearest galaxies. For more distant galaxies, he assumed that the brightest star in each had the same intrinsic brightness. Even farther out, he assumed that entire galaxies were standard candles, with uniform luminosities.

C. Bickel

They weren't good assumptions. Hubble's first published constant was 500 kilometers per second per megaparsecmeaning that for every 3.25 million light-years he looked out into space, the expanding universe was ferrying away galaxies 500 kilometers per second faster. The number was way offan order of magnitude too fast. It also implied a universe just 2 billion years old, a baby compared with current estimates. But it was a start.

By 1949, construction had finished on the 200-inch (5.1-m) telescope at Palomar in southern Californiajust in time for Hubble to suffer a heart attack. Hubble passed the mantle to Sandage, an ace observer who spent the subsequent decades exposing photographic plates during all-night sessions suspended in the telescope's vast apparatus, shivering and in desperate need of a bathroom break.

With Palomar's higher resolution and light-gathering power, Sandage could pluck cepheids from more distant galaxies. He also realized that Hubble's bright stars were in fact entire star clusters. They were intrinsically brighter and thus farther away than Hubble thought, which, in addition to other corrections, implied a much lower Hubble constant. By the 1980s, Sandage had settled on a value of about 50, which he zealously defended. Perhaps his most famous foil, French astronomer Grard de Vaucouleurs, promoted a competing value of 100. One of the key parameters of cosmology was contested to an embarrassing factor of two.

In the late 1990s, Freedman, having survived Sandage's verbal abuse, was determined to solve the puzzle with a powerful new tool designed with just this job in mind: the Hubble Space Telescope. Its sharp view from above the atmosphere allowed Freedman's team to pick out individual cepheids up to 10 times farther away than Sandage had with Palomar. Sometimes those galaxies happened to host both cepheids and an even brighter beacona type Ia supernova. These exploding white dwarf stars are visible across space and flare to a consistent, maximum brightness. Once calibrated with the cepheids, the supernovae could be used on their own to probe the most distant reaches of space. In 2001, Freedman's team narrowed the Hubble constant to 72 plus or minus eight, a definitive effort that ended Sandage and De Vaucouleurs's feud. "I was done," she says. "I never thought I'd work on the Hubble constant again."

Edwin Hubble poses inside the 200-inch Palomar telescope a few years before his death in 1953.

Ned/Steer/Huchra/Riess; NASA/ESA

But then came the physicist, who had an independent way of calculating the Hubble constant with the most distant, redshifted thing of all: the microwave background. In 2003, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) published its first map showing the speckles of temperature variations on the CMB. The maps provided not a standard candle, but a standard yardstick: a pattern of hotter and colder spots in the primordial soup created by sound waves rippling through the newborn universe.

With a few assumptions about the ingredients in that soupfamiliar particles like atoms and photons, some extra invisible stuff called dark matter, and dark energythe WMAP team could calculate the physical size of those primordial sound waves. That could be compared to the apparent size of the sound waves as recorded in the CMB speckles. The comparison gave the distance to the microwave background, and a value for the expansion rate of the universe at that primordial moment. By making assumptions about how regular particles, dark energy, and dark matter have altered the expansion since then, the WMAP team could tune the constant to its current rate of swelling. Initially, they came up with a value of 72, right in line with what Freedman had found.

But since then, the astronomical measurements of the Hubble constant have inched higher, even as error bars have narrowed. In recent publications, Riess has leapfrogged ahead of competitors like Freedman by using the infrared camera installed in 2009 on the Hubble Telescope, which can both pinpoint the distances to Milky Way cepheids and pick out their faraway, reddish cousins from the bluer stars that tend to surround cepheids. The most recent result from Riess's team is 73.24.

Meanwhile, Planck, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that has imaged the CMB at higher resolution and greater temperature sensitivity, has settled on 67.8. In statistical terms, the two values are separated by a gulf of 3.4 sigma not quite the 5 sigma that in particle physics signals a significant result, but getting there. "That, I think, is hard to explain as a statistical fluke," says Chuck Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who led the WMAP team.

Each side is pointing its finger at the other. George Efstathiou, a leading cosmologist for the Planck team at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, says the Planck data are "absolutely rock solid." Fresh off analyzing the first Planck results in 2013, Efstathiou cast his eyes elsewhere. He downloaded Riess's data and published his own analysis with a lower and less-precise Hubble constant. He found the astronomers' outwardly groping ladder "messy," he says.

Allan Sandage, Edwin Hubble's designated scientific heir, consistently defended a lower value for the Hubble constant.

The Carnegie Observatories

In response, the astronomers argue that they are making an actual measurement in the present-day universe, whereas the CMB technique relies on many cosmological assumptions. If the two don't agree, they ask, why not change the cosmology? Instead, "The George Efstathious of the world moved in and said, I'm going to reanalyze all of your data," says the University of Chicago's Barry Madore, who has been Freedman's collaborator and husband since the 1980s. "So what do you do? You have to find a tiebreaker."

Wendy Freedman thought her 2001 study pinned down the Hubble constant, but debate has resumed.

Yuri Beletsky, Carnegie Institution for Science

In the astronomers' corner is a technique called gravitational lensing. Around massive galaxy clusters, gravity itself warps space, forming a giant lens that can bend light from a more distant light source, like a quasar. If the alignment of the lens and quasar is just right, the light can follow several paths to Earth, creating multiple images around the lensing cluster. In even luckier circumstances, the quasar flickers in brightness. That causes each cloned image to flicker, too, but at different times, because the light rays for each image take different paths through the bent space. The delays between the flickers indicate differences in the path lengths; by combining those with the size of the cluster, astronomers can use trigonometry to calculate the absolute distance to the lensing galaxy cluster. Only three gravitational lenses have been rigorously measured this way, with six more under study now. But in late January, astrophysicist Sherry Suyu of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and her collaborators published their current best guess at the Hubble constant. "Our measurement is in agreement with the distance ladder approach," Suyu says.

The cosmologists, meanwhile, have their own sister technique: baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). As the universe aged, the same sound wave patterns imprinted on the CMBthe primordial yardstickseeded the nuggets of matter that grew into galaxy clusters. The patterning of galaxies on the sky should preserve the original dimensions of the sound waves, and as before, comparing the apparent scale of the pattern to its calculated actual size leads to a distance. Like the CMB technique, the BAO method makes cosmological assumptions. But over the past few years, it has been yielding Hubble constant values in line with Planck's. The ongoing fourth iteration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a vast galaxy mapping effort, should help refine these measurements.

That's not to say that the bickering distance ladder and CMB teams are simply waiting for other methods to settle the dispute. To firm up the foundation of the distance ladder, the distances to cepheids in the Milky Way, ESA's Gaia mission is trying to find precise distances to about a billion different nearby stars, cepheids included. Gaia, in orbit around the sun beyond Earth, uses the surest of all measures: parallax, or the apparent shift of the stars against the background sky, as the spacecraft swings to opposite sides of its orbit. When Gaia's full data set is released in 2022, it should provide another leap forward in certainty for the astronomers. (Already, Riess has found that his higher Hubble constant persists when he uses the preliminary Gaia results.)

The cosmologists expect to firm up their measurements, too, using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile and the South Pole Telescope, which can check Planck's high-resolution results. "It's not going to remain ambiguous," says Lyman Page, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. And if the divergent results prove rock solid, it will be up to the theorists to try to close the gap. "The gold is where the model breaks down," Page says. "Confirming the model isblah."

The South Pole Telescope will help astrophysicists map the tiny temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background, refining one Hubble measurement.

Keith Vanderlinde

One fixis to add an extra particle to the standard model of the universe. The CMB offers an estimate of the overall energy budget of the universe soon after the big bang, when it was divided into matter and high-energy radiation. Because of Albert Einstein's famous equivalence E=mc2, energy acted like matter, slowing the expansion of space with its gravity. But matter is a more effective brake. As time passed, radiationphotons of light and other lightweight particles like neutrinoscooled and lost energy, diluting its gravitational influence.

There are currently three known kinds of neutrinos. If there were a fourth, as some theorists have speculated, it would have claimed a little more of the universe's initial energy budget for the radiation side, which would dissipate faster. That, in turn, would mean an early universe that expanded faster than the one predicted by standard cosmology's list of ingredients. Fast-forwarding that adjustment into the present brings the two measurements in line. Yet neutrino detectors haven't turned up any evidence for a fourth kind, and other Planck measurements put a tight cap on the total amount of surplus radiation.

Another possible fix is so-called phantom dark energy. Current cosmological models assume a constant strength for dark energy. If dark energy becomes slightly stronger over time, though, it would explain why the cosmos is expanding faster today than one might guess from looking at the early universe. But critics like Hiranya Peiris, a Planck astrophysicist based at University College London, says variable dark energy seems "ad hoc and contrived." And her work suggests that new neutrino physics doesn't work either. Right now, she says, flaws in the different techniques are more likely than new physics.

For Freedman, now a dean of the field, the only solution to the squabble is to fight fire with firewith new observations of the universe. She and Madore are now preparing a separate measurement calibrated not just with cepheids, but other types of variable stars and bright red giantsusing an automated telescope only 30 centimeters across to study the nearest examples, and the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to monitor them in remote galaxies. If she could handle the dark and stormy Sandage, she's ready to stand with Riess and answer the brash challenge from the Planck team. "The message was You guys are wrong. Well, maybe," she says, chuckling. "We'll see."

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A recharged debate over the speed of the expansion of the universe could lead to new physics - Science Magazine

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The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday night and because of our depth perception it will look like the decades-old telescope is slamming into the Red Planet.

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USA Today Network Bernie Badger Published 11:40 a.m. ET March 3, 2017 | Updated 3:17 p.m. ET March 3, 2017

NASA released the largest photo ever of the Andromeda Galaxy. The panoramic image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is 1.5 billion pixels. 1-20-15

In this image released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Hubble Space Telescope is backdropped against black space.(Photo: Getty Images/file)

The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday night and because of our depth perception it will look like the decades-old telescope is slamming into the Red Planet.

The Hubble's expected pathputs it right in front of Mars at 7:58:42 p.m.People think that they can see in 3-D, but this isnt true. Our retinas are fundamentally two-dimensional. We see light in different positions but not truly at different depths.

So, thanks to our lack of true depth perception, we'll see the illusion of a Mars-Hubble collision, even though Mars is about 140 million miles from Earth.

Scientists find incredible fountains shooting from Jupiter's moon

If you are looking through the observatory telescope, you may or may not see the Hubble Space Telescope zoom through the field of view. I cannot predict it with that much accuracy. A low power eyepiece will offer the best chance. But for anyone looking without optical aid, you should see the Hubble Space Telescope glide right over Mars. No explosions will ensue but perhaps a feeling that the Red Planet has just dodged a bullet.

The Hubble, according to NASA, was launched in 1990 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then it's been orbiting Earth, snapping photos and collecting data that has been used in more than 14,000 scientific papers. It's roughly the size of a school bus and moves orbits at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour. So far, it's traveled more than 3 billion miles.

Far out: Most distant galaxy cluster discovered

The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday evening.(Photo: USA TODAY)

Mr. Badger is Project Coordinator at the Eastern Florida State College Planetarium in Cocoa. Send questions, suggestions, or comments tobadgerb@easternflorida.edu

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2lHDTOl

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The Hubble telescope won't crash into Mars, but it may look that way - USA TODAY

The Hubble space telescope has captured an image to showcase an incredible massive galaxy, UGC 12591, that lies just under 400 million light-years away from the Earth. The galaxy and its halo together contain several hundred billion times the mass of the Sun four times the mass of the Milky Way, NASA said in a statement on Friday. It also whirls round extremely quickly, rotating at speeds of up to 1.8 million kilometers per hour, it added.

UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral. It lies in the westernmost region of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster, a long chain of galaxy clusters that stretches out for hundreds of light-years ? one of the largest known structures in the cosmos. Observations with Hubble are helping astronomers to understand the mass of UGC 12591, and to determine whether the galaxy simply formed and grew slowly over time, or whether it might have grown unusually massive by colliding and merging with another large galaxy at some point in its past, NASA said. The Hubble Space Telescope is collaboration between NASA and European Space Agency (ESA).

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NASA's Hubble telescope captures image of UGC 12591 galaxy - BGR India

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USA Today Network Bernie Badger Published 11:40 a.m. ET March 3, 2017 | Updated 24 hours ago

NASA released the largest photo ever of the Andromeda Galaxy. The panoramic image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is 1.5 billion pixels. 1-20-15

In this image released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Hubble Space Telescope is backdropped against black space.(Photo: Getty Images/file)

The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday night and because of our depth perception it will look like the decades-old telescope is slamming into the Red Planet.

The Hubble's expected pathputs it right in front of Mars at 7:58:42 p.m.People think that they can see in 3-D, but this isnt true. Our retinas are fundamentally two-dimensional. We see light in different positions but not truly at different depths.

So, thanks to our lack of true depth perception, we'll see the illusion of a Mars-Hubble collision, even though Mars is about 140 million miles from Earth.

Scientists find incredible fountains shooting from Jupiter's moon

If you are looking through the observatory telescope, you may or may not see the Hubble Space Telescope zoom through the field of view. I cannot predict it with that much accuracy. A low power eyepiece will offer the best chance. But for anyone looking without optical aid, you should see the Hubble Space Telescope glide right over Mars. No explosions will ensue but perhaps a feeling that the Red Planet has just dodged a bullet.

The Hubble, according to NASA, was launched in 1990 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then it's been orbiting Earth, snapping photos and collecting data that has been used in more than 14,000 scientific papers. It's roughly the size of a school bus and moves orbits at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour. So far, it's traveled more than 3 billion miles.

Far out: Most distant galaxy cluster discovered

The Hubble Space Telescope will pass in front of Mars on Friday evening.(Photo: USA TODAY)

Mr. Badger is Project Coordinator at the Eastern Florida State College Planetarium in Cocoa. Send questions, suggestions, or comments tobadgerb@easternflorida.edu

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2lHDTOl

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The Hubble telescope won't crash into Mars, but it may look that way - Poughkeepsie Journal

The Hubble space telescope has captured a new image showcasing an incredibly massive galaxy located under 400 million light-years away from the Earth.

The galaxy UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a spiral, according to NASA.

It lies in the westernmost region of the PiscesPerseus Supercluster, a long chain of galaxy clusters that stretches out for hundreds of light-years - one of the largest known structures in the cosmos.

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UGC 12591 itself is also extraordinary: it is incredibly massive, NASA said.

The galaxy and its halo together contain several hundred billion times the mass of the Sun; four times the mass of the Milky Way.

It also whirls round extremely quickly, rotating at speeds of up to 1.8 million kilometres per hour.

Observations with Hubble are helping astronomers to understand the mass of UGC 12591, and to determine whether the galaxy simply formed and grew slowly over time, or whether it might have grown unusually massive by colliding and merging with another large galaxy at some point in its past.

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Hubble Telescope Captures Massive Galaxy 400 Million Light-Years Away - Outlook India

The Hubble telescope has taken an amazing picture of a hybrid galaxy, which is part spiral, like our own, and part lenticular, so lacks many new stars.

The galaxys tremendous size also makes it stand out, with a mass four times that of our own Milky Way.

Its called UGC 12591 and lies 400 million light-years away in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster, which is a chain of galaxy clusters hundreds of light-years long.

The galaxy is part of a chain of them hundreds of light-years long (ESA/Hubble & NASA)

It also spins much faster than the Milky Way a neck-breaking 1.8 million km/h compared with our own leisurely 828,000 km/h.

Scientists think its massive size could be because it either collided with another galaxy or just keeps growing, but more pictures from Hubble should help them work it out.

The telescope was launched into space in 1990 and has been taking fantastic pictures unobstructed by the Earths light pollution, atmosphere or weather ever since.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a stunning hybrid ... - BreakingNews.ie

NASAs Hubble telescope captured a picture of a massive galaxy known as UGC 12591 400 million light years away from Earth, Sci-News reported Monday. The distant galaxy cluster is enormous, spanning hundreds of millions of light years.

UGC 12591, also known as LEDA 71391, is situated in the westernmost part of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster. Its the fastest rotating galaxy known to man, according to a Harvard study, spinning at up to 1.2 million mph.The galaxy is also immense, weighing in at four times the mass of the Milky Way and several hundred billion times the mass of our sun.

Hubbles photo is aiding astronomers in their quest to determine exactly how the galaxy came to be and whether it grew over time or collided with another galaxy.

Hubble has been regularly capturing images from deep space since it was launched in 1990. More than 1.3 million observations have been made from the telescope, which orbits above the atmosphere at 17,000 mph for an untarnished view of the universe. The telescope helped scientists discern the age of the universe, an estimated 14 billion years old, through its observations.

In September 2016, NASA released photos from Hubble of Jupiters moon Europa, kick-starting a search for possible life on the lunar planet. The images revealed the possibility of a subsurface ocean on Europa that could be capable of hosting life.

In another exciting discovery, NASA released photos in January of two combination spiral galaxies located over one billion light years away. The Hubble images captured the two galaxies, known as IRAS 14348-1447, merging together and destroying one other, emitting incredibly bright infrared energy.

Earlier in February, the Hubble telescope captured an image of a spiral galaxy named NGC 7640, a far smaller galaxy situated just 19 million light years from Earth inside of the Andromeda constellation.

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Space Travel News: Pictures From NASA's Hubble Telescope Show Galaxy 400 Million Light Years Away - International Business Times