Hubble’s takes its annual look at the solar systems four gas giants. Image: Jupiter. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team
The Hubble Space Telescope has completed what NASA calls its “annual grand tour of the Solar System,” capturing stunning views of the four gas giants – Jupiter on 4 September; Saturn on 12 September; Uranus on 25 October; and Neptune on 7 September. Even though passing spacecraft and orbiters have sent back close-up views of all four worlds and multiple moons during visits over the past half century, the cold atmospheres of the gas giants are always changing. Using Hubble to keep tabs on Earth’s outer Solar System neighbours provides valuable insights into the dynamic processes at work under the cloudtops that shape weather patterns and seasons.
Jupiter. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL teamSaturn. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL teamUranus. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL teamNeptune. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team
Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory to discover an extremely luminous, variable X-ray source located outside the centre of its parent galaxy. This peculiar object could be a wandering black hole that came from a small galaxy falling into a larger one.
In 2011, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured a view showing five of Saturn’s moons – Janus, tiny Pandora, the water world Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea, the planet’s second largest moon – in a single frame, a family portrait that is riveting in its stark beauty.
Hubble Space Telescope observations have taken advantage of gravitational lensing to reveal the largest sample of the faintest and earliest known galaxies in the universe, formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers have determined, for the first time with some confidence, that these small galaxies were vital to creating the universe that we see today.
