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hubble telescope

SPACE: Check Out This Newly-Discovered “Cosmic Reef”

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Nebula - NASA

Young stars blaze to life in a nearby galaxy, repainting their cosmic neighborhood with fiery blooms of gas and radiation. This new Hubble Space Telescope image captures just another day in the life of two young nebulas (one red, one blue) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 163,000 light-years away. But for scientists and space enthusiasts on Earth, the image also marks a special anniversary. Thirty years ago today (April 24), the Hubble launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin its long mission of peering into the deepest reaches … Read more

Hubble Image Reveals New Stars That May Destroy the “Pillars of Creation”

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Pillars Of Creation - NASA

Spearing the sky like monolithic elephant trunks, the “Pillars of Creation” are a vast region of star-forming material located in the Eagle Nebula, about 6,000 light-years from Earth. These tendrils of gas and dust, made colorful by the radiation of bright young stars smoldering within, became a Milky Way landmark thanks to an iconic visible-light image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. Now, NASA scientists have shared a new view of the pillars, focusing instead on the infrared radiation normally invisible to human eyes. In the new infrared image (also taken by the Hubble Space Telescope), the colorful … Read more

How Big Is It?

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If you’ve ever dreamed of time traveling, just look out at the night sky; the glimmers you see are really snapshots of the distant past. That’s because those stars, planets and galaxies are so far away that the light from even the closest ones can take tens of thousands of years to reach Earth. The universe is undoubtedly a big place. But just how big is it? “That may be something that we actually never know,” Sarah Gallagher, an astrophysicist at Western University in Ontario, Canada, told Live Science. The size of the universe is one of the fundamental questions … Read more

SPACE: Hubble Finds Buckyballs in Space

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buckyball - pixabay

The Hubble Space Telescope recently spied new evidence of a peculiar molecule: wiggly buckyballs, which have intrigued astrophysicists since they were discovered in space nearly a decade ago. Dubbed Buckminsterfullerene, these supersize molecules are made of 60 carbon atoms linked together in pentagons and hexagons to form a hollow sphere. The shape of these structures is much like a soccer ball, or like the geodesic domes designed by 20th-century architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (the inspiration for the molecule’s name). Buckyballs were first spotted in space in the form of a gas in 2010, and then as particles in 2012. And … Read more