Hubble tagged posts

Hubble Sees Aftermath of Galaxy’s Scrape with Milky Way

A whitish, whirlpool-like galaxy at middle of top edge, and a tadpole-shaped structure sweeps from left to right across lower half. A label pointing to outer, left of galaxy reads “Earth.” Faint, purple haze labeled “Milky Way Halo” surrounds galaxy and stretches to graphic’s edges.  The tadpole-shaped object is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, with its own halo and streaming tail. Semi-circular, progressively darker layers of purple labeled “LMC Halo” surround the LMC, which appears roughly circular, with a central, light-yellow bar. Cloud-like features sprinkled with white specks surround this bar. Trailing the LMC is a large, tail-like  feature labeled “Stream.” At the bottom left corner of graphic are several small, bright points of light labeled “Quasars.” Three light blue lines point from the label “Earth” through the LMC’s halo, and to three corresponding quasars. At the bottom, right corner is the label “Artist’s Concept.”
This artist’s concept shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much more massive Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has blown away most of the spherical halo of gas that surrounds the LMC, as illustrated by the trailing gas stream reminiscent of a comet’s tail. Still, a compact halo remains, and scientists do not expect this residual halo to be lost. The team surveyed the halo by using the background light of 28 quasars, an exceptionally bright type of active galactic nucleus that shines across the universe like a lighthouse beacon. Their light allows scientists to “see” the intervening halo gas indirectly through the absorption of the background light...
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Hubble Captures Intricacies of R Aquarii, a Symbiotic Binary Star roughly 700 Light-Years from Earth

Hubble's view on symbiotic binary star R Aquarii

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided a dramatic and colorful close-up look at one of the most rambunctious stars in our galaxy, weaving a huge spiral pattern among the stars. Hubble’s images capture its details and its evolution is featured by a unique timelapse video.

Residing only roughly 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, R Aquarii is a symbiotic binary star: a type of binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and a red giant that is surrounded by a large, dynamic nebula. As the closest symbiotic star to Earth, R Aquarii was studied by none other than Edwin Hubble in an effort to understand the mechanism that powers the system.

R Aquarii undergoes violent eruptions that blast out huge filaments of glowing gas...

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NASA’s Hubble watches Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Behave Like a Stress Ball

Astronomers have observed Jupiter’s legendary Great Red Spot (GRS), an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth, for at least 150 years. But there are always new surprises — especially when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes a close-up look at it.

Hubble’s new observations of the famous red storm, collected 90 days between December 2023 to March 2024, reveal that the GRS is not as stable as it might look. The recent data show the GRS jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The combined Hubble images allowed astronomers to assemble a time-lapse movie of the squiggly behavior of the GRS.

“While we knew its motion varies slightly in its longitude, we didn’t expect to see the size oscillate...

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Hubble Views the Dawn of a Sun-like Star

Large image at upper right: Three bright stars with diffraction spikes shine near the center-right of the image, illuminating nearby clouds that glow in pale blue. The clouds darken at the edges of the image, and are dotted with smaller stars, some also with diffraction spikes. Small inset image in the lower-left corner: A colorful nebula or gas cloud. A white square outlines the area of the nebula that Hubble image captures.

Looking like a glittering cosmic geode, a trio of dazzling stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The triple-star system is made up of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3. HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t begun nuclear fusion yet but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun. T Tauri stars tend to be younger than 10 million years old ― in comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old ― and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of dust and gas from which they formed.

As with all variable stars, HP Tau’s brightness changes over time.

T Tauri stars are known to have both periodic and random fluctuation...

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