Source: CBS News Scientists studying early galaxies were stunned earlier this year when they discovered six massive galaxies that seem to have died during the universe’s most active period of star birth. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spied the six galaxies, which appeared to have run out of the cold hydrogen gas needed to make stars
The missing dark matter in certain galaxies can be explained by the effects of tidal disruption: the gravity forces of a neighboring massive galaxy, literally tearing the smaller galaxy apart.
The act could even reveal how to look for life on alien planets.
Multiwavelength observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and Gemini Observatory combined with close-up views from NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveal that lightning strikes and huge storm systems that create them in Jupiter’s atmosphere are formed in and around large convective cells over deep clouds of water ice and liquid; the observations also confirm that dark spots in the famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and not due to cloud color variations.
With the help of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a German-led group of astronomers have observed the intriguing characteristics of an unusual type of object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter: two asteroids orbiting each other and exhibiting comet-like features, including a bright coma and a long tail. This is the first known binary asteroid also classified as a comet. The research is presented in a paper published in the journal Nature today.
Astronomers have discovered that the well-studied exoplanet WASP-12b reflects almost no light, making it appear essentially pitch black.
By combining the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers made a surprising discovery—the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang.
Astronomers have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the center of a distant galaxy by what could be the awesome power of gravitational waves.
As British royal families fought the War of the Roses in the 1400s for control of England’s throne, a grouping of stars was waging its own contentious skirmish — a star war far away in the Orion Nebula.
For the first time, scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have witnessed a massive object with the makeup of a comet being ripped apart and scattered in the atmosphere of a white dwarf, the burned-out remains of a compact star.
