Stsci - Blog Posts

Many things in space stay the same for a human lifetime, but not the Bat Shadow. Hubble pictures taken 404 days apart show it “flapping” as the shadow changes position. It’s the result of a saddle-shaped disk: https://bit.ly/3Y5qu7W

Every February 2, we wonder if Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow.

In Saturn’s case, astronomers know some of Saturn’s moons will cast shadows across the planet’s iconic rings every 15 years. This effect only occurs when the planet’s rings are perpendicular to the Sun. The next time this will happen is in May 2025.

Watch as four of Saturn’s moons orbit the planet, based on images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over a 9.5-hour span in 1995. Enceladus is first and Mimas is close behind. Both of these moons cast small shadows on Saturn, but among the two, only Enceladus’ shadow cuts across the rings. Dione follows next and casts a long shadow across the planet’s rings. About 12 seconds in, the moon Tethys moves swiftly behind the planet toward the right.

Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI.

Wonderous strange! This unusual arrangement in the sky was one of only 100 known polar-ring galaxies when it was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999. Officially known to astronomers as NGC 4650A, the polar-rings may be the result of two galaxies colliding. Gas from the smaller galaxy would have been stripped off and captured by the larger galaxy, forming a new ring of dust, gas, and stars, which orbit the inner galaxy almost at right angles to the old disk. In addition to learning about galaxy interaction, astronomers use polar-ring galaxies like this to study dark matter, which does not emit light or interact with normal matter (except through gravity), making it difficult to understand. Both the old, rotating disk and the dark matter surrounding this galaxy pull on its polar ring. The alignment of the ring along the pole of the inner disk's rotation allows scientists to probe this combination of tugs and thus the distribution of dark matter. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI. ALT TEXT: Two galaxies appear to intersect at right angles. Vertically there is a bright column of dust and stars, and horizontally there is a smaller hazy yellow band, brighter at its center, with no discernable stars. In the space around and behind the intersecting forms are smaller stars and distant galaxies colored yellow and red.

Cosmic fireworks ahead! This dramatically colorful image shows MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known. It was formed by the collision of four smaller galaxy clusters. A visible-light image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows hundreds of galaxies, both within the cluster and throughout the background, and myriad foreground stars. A pink overlay represents radio data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, which traces enormous shock waves and turbulence. The diffuse emission in blue, from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, highlights gas with temperatures of millions of degrees. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, NRAO/AUI/NSF, STScI, and R. van Weeren (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics); NASA, ESA, J. Lotz (STScI), and the Hubble Frontier Fields team. ALT TEXT: Hundreds of small galaxies of various shapes on the black background of space. They are concentrated near the center of the image. Dramatic pink ribbons form a curving L shape near the center. Below them, a linear pink feature with a blue blob in the middle extends from upper left to lower right. Diffuse blue light fills much of the field of view and is brightest just to the right of the pink ribbons.

Dusty regions like these are often the places where stars form. In fact, there are two notable stars—V633 (top left of center) and V376 Cassiopeiae (bottom left)—in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

These stars have yet to start fusing hydrogen in their cores, and continue to accumulate mass. As they do this, much of the material they ingest gets shot back out as energetic jets. For these young stars, these jets can contain as much mass as Earth has.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Gilles Chapdelaine.

ALT TEXT: A protostar in the process of forming. Above the center, at 11 o’clock, is a bright, white star. To the bottom right of this star is a large cavity, surrounded by dark brown gas and dust. This surrounding dust fills the image with the exception of another small cavity toward the bottom left. At about 4 o’clock in this cavity, there is another bright, white star. Smaller white stars are spread throughout the image.

“What in the world is that?” That’s a natural reaction when you first see this Hubble Space Telescope image of LL Pegasi. The extremely dim spiral pattern is real, and its regularity suggests a periodic origin for the nebula’s shape.

The spiral is thought to arise because LL Pegasi is a binary system, with a star that is losing material and a companion star orbiting it. The companion’s gravitational influence helps sculpt the nebula. The spacing between layers in the spiral reflects the 800-year orbital period of the binary.

Credit: ESA/NASA & R. Sahai.

ALT TEXT: At center left, a faint spiral structure with wide bands has a dark, dusty center. To its right, a bright white star displays four prominent diffraction spikes. A handful of smaller, more distant background galaxies are also scatted throughout the image.

The brown dwarf W1935 is a bit of a mystery. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope picked up glowing methane—a sign that the object’s upper atmosphere is being heated. But the brown dwarf has no host star, so where could the heat be coming from?

In our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn show methane emission due to the presence of auroras—what we call the Northern Lights on Earth. W1935 might also have auroras, which could be powered by energetic particles from a nearby, active moon, like Jupiter’s Io: https://webbtelescope.pub/4aKMkBF

This animation portrays the creation of the cat’s tail in the southwest portion of Beta Pic’s secondary debris disk, estimated to span 10 billion miles. Read today's #AAS243 release to learn more: http://webbtelescope.pub/3RXt9Nx

Webb + Hubble > peanut butter + chocolate? We think so!

In this image of galaxy cluster MACS0416, the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have united to create one of the most colorful views of the universe ever taken. Their combination of visible and infrared light yields vivid colors that give clues to the distances of galaxies (blue = close, red = far).

Looking at the combined data, scientists have spotted a sprinkling of sources that vary over time, including highly magnified supernovas and even individual stars billions of light-years away.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U. Missouri).

ALT TEXT: A field of galaxies on the black background of space. In the middle, stretching from left to right, is a collection of dozens of yellowish spiral and elliptical galaxies that form a foreground galaxy cluster. They form a rough, flat line along the center. Among them are distorted linear features, which mostly appear to follow invisible concentric circles curving around the center of the image. The linear features are created when the light of a background galaxy is bent and magnified through gravitational lensing. At center left, a particularly prominent example stretches vertically about three times the length of a nearby galaxy. A variety of brightly colored, red and blue galaxies of various shapes are scattered across the image, making it feel densely populated. Near the center are two tiny galaxies compared to the galaxy cluster: a very red edge-on spiral and a very blue face-on spiral, which provide a striking color contrast.

If galaxies could talk, we’d want to ask for this galaxy’s skincare routine!

Meet I Zwicky 18, a galaxy lying 60 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.

The bluish-white knots in the center are regions where stars are forming at a rapid rate. These large hubs of stellar creation and the lack of heavy elements in the surrounding gas caused astronomers to think that this dwarf irregular galaxy was very young, since it resembles galaxies in the early universe.

However, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that I Zwicky 18 is more mature than it first appears. Hubble found faint, older stars within the galaxy, indicating that I Zwicky 18 has been forming stars for more than a billion years.

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (Space Telescope Science Institute and European Space Agency).

ALT TEXT: A bright white and blue oval-shaped area takes up most of the view and is largely centered. Cloud-like wisps of blue material surround the bright-white center, forming a fluffy wreath-like shape. The fluffy material begins as light blue near the center and gradually darkens moving outward. Stars, seen as many bright white and yellow small points of light, are densely grouped in the white and light blue region, forming two roughly circular clumps, one in the upper left and one in the lower right. The corners of the image are dark and mostly empty, with a few larger, fuzzy yellow points of light scattered infrequently throughout.

What is casting dark shadows across 36,000 light-years of space in this Hubble Space Telescope image?

The mysterious dark rays appearing to emanate from galaxy IC 5063 have intrigued astronomers, and there are a few different ideas about what is causing them. They could be like the shadows of clouds when light from the setting Sun pierces through them.

Astronomers have traced the rays back to the galaxy’s core, the location of an active supermassive black hole. One idea suggests that the shadows are being cast into space by an inner tube-shaped ring, or torus, of dusty material surrounding the black hole.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and W.P. Maksym (CfA).

ALT TEXT: Rust-colored view of space, with a bright, narrow purple region at the center, a galaxy. Background stars and galaxies are scattered sparsely—this is a dusty rather than starry scene. To the upper left of the bright central region are dark dust lanes. Opposite these to the lower right, one dark area extends from the central bright region and splits into two dark rays. Similar dark rays can be seen to the top left, behind the dust lanes. The edges of the entire image are dark, fading from the colored center.