December 27, 2019 – When astronomers look around the solar system, they find that planets can be made out of almost anything. Terrestrial planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus have dense iron cores and rocky mantles. The massive outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn are mostly gaseous and liquid. Astronomers can’t peel back their cloud […]
Space Telescope Science Institute
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Hubble Showcases New Portrait of Jupiter
Aug. 9, 2019 – The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals the intricate, detailed beauty of Jupiter’s clouds in this new image taken on 27 June 2019[1]. It features the planet’s trademark Great Red Spot and a more intense colour palette in the clouds swirling in the planet’s turbulent atmosphere than seen in previous years. Among […]
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What Makes a Good Planet Turn Bad?
July 9, 2019 – What can turn a seemingly perfect ocean-rich planet into an uninhabitable desert wasteland? Two future space explorers (played by Cas Anvar and Cara Gee of “The Expanse”) aim to find out in “The Habitable Zone: Scorched Earth Enigma,” a science-grounded sci-fi video from the NASA’s Universe of Learning project. While the story […]
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What does the Milky Way weigh? Hubble and Gaia investigate
March 7, 2019 – We can’t put the whole Milky Way on a scale, but astronomers have been able to come up with one of the most accurate measurements yet of our galaxy’s mass, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The Milky Way weighs in at about 1.5 trillion […]
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Saturn and Mars Team Up to Make Their Closest Approaches to Earth in 2018
July 26, 2018 – NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has photographed Saturn and Mars near their closest approaches to Earth in June and July 2018. It’s now summertime in Saturn’s northern hemisphere and springtime in Mars’ southern hemisphere. The Hubble images show that Earth isn’t the only planet where intense spring and summer storms wreak havoc. […]
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Hubble’s Celestial Snow Globe (video)
December 12, 2017 – It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling snowstorm in a snow globe. The stars are residents of the globular star cluster Messier 79, or M79, located 41,000 light-years from Earth, in the […]
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Hubble astronomers develop a new use for a century-old relativity experiment to measure a white dwarf’s mass
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the binary star system Stein 2051 on October 1, 2013, consisting of the brighter, redder “A” component at lower right and the fainter, bluer “B” component near the center, a white dwarf star. Because these stars are relatively close to Earth, only 18 light-years away, they appear to move […]
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Observatories Combine to Crack Open the Crab Nebula
May 11, 2017 – Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to the powerful X-ray glow as seen by the orbiting Chandra X- ray […]
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A Lot of Galaxies Need Guarding in This NASA Hubble View
May 4, 2017 – Much like the eclectic group of space rebels in the upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has some amazing superpowers, specifically when it comes to observing innumerable galaxies flung across time and space. A stunning example is a galaxy cluster called Abell 370 that contains […]