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A Horse of a Different Color

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The Horsehead Nebula is a dark cloud of dense gas and dust located just below the belt of Orion on the sky. A visible light view shows a strong silhouette resembling the horse’s head used for a knight in chess. Infrared light, however, reveals a more complex scene, as shown in Hubble’s 2013 image. The warm parts of the clouds glow in infrared light, plus longer infrared wavelengths can penetrate deeper into the clouds. A dark and relatively featureless scene is revealed as a glowing gaseous landscape.... Read More | Share it now!

Cosmic eXploration: Hubble eXtreme Deep Field

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In 2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) provided a ground-breaking view of distant galaxies. In 2009, those data were augmented with new infrared observations to create the HUDF-IR. In 2012, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF) combined those images along with a complete census of archival datasets to see yet farther into the universe. The HXDF contains roughly 5500 galaxies stretching over 13 billion light-years of space, and represents astronomy’s deepest view into the cosmos.... Read More | Share it now!

Kepler Visualization Demo and JWST & Hubble @SXSW Recap

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Join us tonight for a Hubble Hangout live from South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where we’ve been talking with the crowds and taking in some of the NASA events and exhibits. Our topics tonight will include exoplanets and the search for life. Natalie Batalha from the Kepler mission will demonstrate a new app for visualizing Kepler data and we’ll discuss the JWST Panel “First Signs: Finding Life on Other Planets.” ... Read More | Share it now!

Truth and Beauty in Astronomy Visualization

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Please tune in (or join us in person, if you’re in the Austin, Texas area!) for a lecture by Hubble astrophysicist Dr. Frank Summers at the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin this Thursday at 7 p.m. CST. This talk will be live-streamed here on our YouTube Channel, but if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hi!... Read More | Share it now!

Across the Universe: Hubble Ultra Deep Field

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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) peers deeper into the universe than any previous visible-light image. Multiple observations of the same small patch of sky were combined for an equivalent exposure time of more than 11 days. Revealed within the image are thousands of galaxies located many billions of light-years away. Many of these galaxies are too small and too faint to be otherwise seen. Most importantly, because the light from distant galaxies requires billions of years to cross the intervening space, astronomers get to see them as they were billions of years ago. Much of the history of galaxy development can be found within the HUDF image.... Read More | Share it now!

Star Clusters in Collision

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The dense star cluster called R136 is located within the Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus), a giant star-forming region in a nearby dwarf galaxy. Astronomers suspect that the multiple clumps of stars within R136 are actually a pair of interacting star clusters. Supporting evidence for this idea comes from the large number of “runaway stars” — stars moving with unusually high velocity — that have been found within the nebula. A single, large star cluster would not produce as many runaway stars as two smaller interacting star clusters. In addition, some of these runaway stars are older than the estimated age of R136.... Read More | Share it now!