Space Telescope Science Institute

Webb mirror segments repositioned as alignment proceeds

24 February 2022 Astronomy Now

Engineers are making steady progress aligning the 18 segments making up the Webb space telescope’s 6.5-metre primary mirror.

NASA’s ‘Great Observatories’ team up to find magnified image of distant galaxy

17 January 2018 Astronomy Now

An intensive survey deep into the universe by NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes has yielded the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack: the farthest galaxy yet seen in an image that has been stretched and amplified by a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Hubble finds substellar objects in the Orion Nebula

16 January 2018 Astronomy Now

In an unprecedented deep survey for small, faint objects in the Orion Nebula, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered the largest known population of brown dwarfs sprinkled among newborn stars.

Hubble spots expanding light echo around supernova

10 November 2017 Astronomy Now

Light from a supernova explosion in the nearby starburst galaxy M82 is reverberating off a huge dust cloud in interstellar space.

Hubble observes exoplanet that snows sunscreen

29 October 2017 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found a blistering hot planet outside our solar system where it “snows” sunscreen.

Comet or asteroid? Hubble discovers that a unique object is a binary

22 September 2017 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope helped an international team of astronomers find that an unusual object in the asteroid belt is, in fact, two asteroids orbiting each other that have comet-like features. These include a bright halo of material, called a coma, and a long tail of dust.

NASA’s Hubble captures blistering pitch-black planet

17 September 2017 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed a planet outside our solar system that looks as black as fresh asphalt because it eats light rather than reflecting it back into space. This light-eating prowess is due to the planet’s unique capability to trap at least 94 percent of the visible starlight falling into its atmosphere.

Hubble pushed beyond limits to spot clumps of new stars in distant galaxy

10 July 2017 Astronomy Now

When it comes to the distant Universe, even the keen vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can only go so far. Teasing out finer details requires clever thinking and a little help from a cosmic alignment with a gravitational lens.

Hubble captures massive dead disc galaxy

25 June 2017 Astronomy Now

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.

Mini-flares potentially jeopardise habitability of planets circling red dwarf stars

11 June 2017 Astronomy Now

Cool dwarf stars are hot targets for exoplanet hunting right now. The discoveries of planets in the habitable zones of the TRAPPIST-1 and LHS 1140 systems, for example, suggest that Earth-sized worlds might circle billions of red dwarf stars, the most common type of star in our galaxy. But, like our own sun, many of these stars erupt with intense flares. Are red dwarfs really as friendly to life as they appear, or do these flares make the surfaces of any orbiting planets inhospitable?