Hubble tagged posts

Hubble uncovers Black hole that Shouldn’t Exist

NGC 3147 (left) and artist impression of black hole
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appears next to an artist’s illustration of the supermassive black hole residing at the galaxy’s core. The Hubble image shows off the galaxy’s sweeping spiral arms, full of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette. However, at the brilliant core of NGC 3147 lurks a monster black hole, weighing about 250 million times the mass of our Sun. Hubble observations of the black hole demonstrate two of Einstein’s theories of relativity. The reddish-yellow features swirling around the center are the glow of light from gas trapped by the hefty black hole’s powerful gravity. The black hole is embedded deep within its gravitational field, shown by the green grid that illustrates warped space...
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Hubble astronomers assemble Wide View of the Evolving Universe

apparent size comparison of Legacy Field mosaic with full Moon
This graphic compares the dimensions of the Hubble Legacy Field on the sky with the angular size of the Moon. The Hubble Legacy Field is one of the widest views ever taken of the universe with Hubble. The new portrait, a mosaic of nearly 7,500 exposures, covers almost the width of the full Moon. The Moon and the Legacy Field each subtend about an angle of one-half a degree on the sky (or half the width of your forefinger held at arm’s length).
Credits: Hubble Legacy Field Image: NASA, ESA, and G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz); Moon Image: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center and Arizona State University


Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations ...

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Hubble celebrates its 29th Birthday with unrivaled view of the Southern Crab Nebula

This is the Southern Crab Nebula — Hubble’s 29th anniversary image.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI

This incredible image of the hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula was taken to mark the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 29th anniversary in space. The nebula, created by a binary star system, is one of the many objects that Hubble has demystified throughout its productive life. This new image adds to our understanding of the nebula and demonstrates the telescope’s continued capabilities.

On 24 April 1990, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was launched on the space shuttle Discovery. It has since revolutionised how astronomers and the general public see the Universe. The images it provides are spectacular from both a scientific and a purely aesthetic point of view.

Each year the telesco...

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Face Recognition for Galaxies: Artificial Intelligence brings new tools to astronomy

A 'deep learning' algorithm trained on images from cosmological simulations is surprisingly successful at classifying real galaxies in Hubble images. Top row: High-resolution images from a computer simulation of a young galaxy going through three phases of evolution (before, during, and after the "blue nugget" phase). Middle row: The same images from the computer simulation of a young galaxy in three phases of evolution as it would appear if observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Bottom row: Hubble Space Telescope images of distant young galaxies classified by a deep learning algorithm trained to recognize the three phases of galaxy evolution. The width of each image is approximately 100,000 light years. Credit: Image credits for top two rows: Greg Snyder, Space Telescope Science Institute, and Marc Huertas-Company, Paris Observatory. For bottom row: The HST images are from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS).

A ‘deep learning’ algorithm trained on images from cosmological simulations is surprisingly successful at classifying real galaxies in Hubble images. Top row: High-resolution images from a computer simulation of a young galaxy going through three phases of evolution (before, during, and after the “blue nugget” phase). Middle row: The same images from the computer simulation of a young galaxy in three phases of evolution as it would appear if observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Bottom row: Hubble Space Telescope images of distant young galaxies classified by a deep learning algorithm trained to recognize the three phases of galaxy evolution. The width of each image is approximately 100,000 light years...

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