Image (Credit): Hubble’s view of spiral galaxy IC 4709. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Koss, A, Barth)
This week’s image comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows an almost too perfect spiral galaxy that might have come from AI software, but it is a real image from NASA and ESA. You are looking at spiral galaxy IC 4709, which is about 240 million light-years away.
Its view here is studded with stars, many of which appear particularly large and bright thanks to their nearby locations in our own galaxy, and which feature the characteristic diffraction patterns caused by Hubble’s optics. Much further away — around 240 million light-years distant in fact, in the southern constellation Telescopium — is the spiral galaxy IC 4709. Its swirling disc filled with stars and dust bands is beautifully captured, as is the faint halo surrounding it. The compact region at its core might be the most remarkable sight, however: this is an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
Image (Credit): The complex cluster of emission nebulae is known as N11. (NASA, ESA, J. M. Apellaniz from the Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC/INTA Inst. Nac. de Tec. Aero., and Gladys Kober from NASA/Catholic University of America)
This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a cluster of stars that are about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our Milky Way.
A bubbling region of stars both old and new lies some 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. This complex cluster of emission nebulae is known as N11, and was discovered by American astronomer and NASA astronaut Karl Gordon Henize in 1956. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope brings a new image of the cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
About 1,000 light-years across, N11’s sprawling filaments weave stellar matter in and out of each other like sparkling candy floss. These cotton-spun clouds of gas are ionized by a burgeoning host of young and massive stars, giving the complex a cherry-pink appearance. Throughout N11, colossal cavities burst from the fog. These bubbles formed as a result of the vigorous emergence and death of stars contained in the nebulae. Their stellar winds and supernovae carved the surrounding area into shells of gas and dust.
Image (Credit): RCW 7, a nebula located just over 5,300 light-years from Earth. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Tan (Chalmers University & University of Virginia), R. Fedriani (Institute for Astrophysics of Andalusia))
This week’s image is from the NASA/European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble space telescope. It shows the nebula called RCW 7, which is located about 5,300 light-years away.
Clouds of gas and dust with many stars. The clouds form a flat blue background towards the bottom, and become more thick and smoky towards the top. They are lit on one side by stars in the nebula. A thick arc of gas and dust reaches around from the top, where it is brightly lit by many stars in and around it, to the bottom where it is dark and obscuring. Other large stars lie between the clouds and the viewer.
Image (Credit): The deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope on April 25, 1990 from the space shuttle Discovery. (NASA/Smithsonian Institution/Lockheed Corporation)
The Hubble Space Telescope is suffering the kinds of aches and pains that can come with being old, and NASA officials say they’re shifting into a new way of pointing the telescope in order to work around a piece of hardware that’s become intolerably glitchy. Officials also announced that, for now, they’ve decided not to pursue a plan put forward by a wealthy private astronaut who wanted to go to Hubble in a SpaceX capsule, in a mission aimed at extending the telescope’s lifespan by boosting it up into a higher orbit and perhaps even adding new technology to enhance its operations.
NASA announced Friday it selected three industry proposals to help develop technologies for future large space telescopes and plan for the agency’s Habitable Worlds Observatory mission concept, which could be the first space telescope designed to search for life outside our solar system. The mission would directly image Earth-like planets around stars like our Sun and study their atmospheres for the chemical signatures of life, as well as enable other investigations about our solar system and universe. NASA is currently in the early planning stages for this mission concept, with community-wide working groups exploring its fundamental science goals and how best to pursue them. The agency is also in the process of establishing a Habitable Worlds Observatory Technology Maturation project office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
When NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew past the tiny main belt asteroid Dinkinesh last November, the Southwest Research Institute-led mission discovered a trough and ridge structure on the main asteroid as well as the first-ever-encountered contact binary satellite. The flyby data of this half-mile-wide object revealed a dramatic history of sudden breakups and transformation. Scientists think a big chunk of Dinkinesh suddenly shifted, excavating the trough and flinging debris into its vicinity. Some materials fell back to the asteroid body, forming the ridge, while others coalesced to form a contact binary satellite known as Selam. The complex shapes show that Dinkinesh and Selam have significant internal strength and a complex, dynamic history.
Image (Credit): The Hubble Space Telescope returning to orbit after its second servicing mission in February 1997. (NASA)
“Perhaps the opportunity with Polaris won’t be there, but NASA can work with Congress and the Administration to request funds for a Hubble reboost or enhancement mission, using a commercial partner where NASA is in the drivers [sic] seat, and the maturity of the space systems is higher and lower risk.”
-Statement by John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who operated on Hubble multiple times, in an NPR story regarding an offer by businessman Jared Isaacman to privately fund a mission to move the Hubble Space Telescope to a higher orbit and conduct necessary repairs to extend the telescope’s life. His offer has been met with some skepticism due to the difficulty of such a mission.
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