Hubble's continuing 'Deepest' and 'Most Distant' discoveries

[mickw]

Astronomers have glimpsed what may be the farthest galaxy we've ever seen, providing a picture of a baby galaxy born soon after the beginning of the universe.

Images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed the galaxy at almost 13 billion light-years away, making it the strongest candidate for the most distant galaxy ever seen, said European Southern Observatory astronomer Piero Rosati, who helped make the discovery.

More: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080212/sc_space/farthestgalaxyfoundperhaps

They are probably not using the Lidlscope 

[mickw]

An unusual large galaxy with a shape bordering between spiral and elliptical has been spotted by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

NGC 7049 sits in the southern constellation Indus, and is the brightest of a cluster of galaxies, a so-called Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG). Typical BCGs are some of the oldest and most massive galaxies, which provide excellent opportunities for astronomers to study the elusive globular clusters lurking within.

The halo, a ghostly region of diffuse light surrounding the galaxy, is composed of myriads of individual stars and provides a luminous background to the swirling ring of dust lanes surrounding NGC 7049's core.

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090407-hubble-galaxy.html

[mickw]

A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow.

For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87's brilliant core.

Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior.

More:  http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090414-jet-flare.html

[Rick]

Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has captured its deepest view of the Universe, producing images of galaxies that have never been seen before.

The images were captured by Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

This highly sensitive camera has captured starlight from very distant galaxies - light that has been "stretched" by the expanding Universe.

Scientists who have analysed these images say the galaxies could be the most distant yet seen.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8401374.stm

[mickw]

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest look into the universe yet, revealing some of the most distant, earliest galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

The images peer back about as far as Hubble can look, to about 600 million to 800 million years after the theoretical Big Bang, team scientists said. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old.

"Essentially we are looking back 13 billion years" and looking at very faint objects, said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We're pushing Hubble to the limits to find these objects."

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/100105-hubble-earliest-galaxies.html

[mickw]

Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, but until recently astronomers have been at a loss to explain why.

Now scientists have used dark matter theory to predict the menagerie of galaxies found in the universe. Their new model reproduces 13 billion years' worth of cosmic evolution, resulting in a surprisingly accurate tally of the different kinds of galaxies we see.

"We were completely astonished that our model predicted both the abundance and diversity of galaxy types so precisely," said researcher Nick Devereux of Embry-Riddle University in Arizona.

American astronomer Edwin Hubble first developed a classification system in the 1930s, known as the Hubble Sequence, which divides galaxies into two main types: spirals, and ellipticals.

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/galaxy-shape-hubble-100111.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+spaceheadlines+(SPACE.com+Headline+Feed)

[mickw]

Galaxies are big cannibals that constantly gobble up smaller galaxies nearby.

Scientists have just discovered new signs of this cosmic carnage in nearby galaxies, including our closest neighbor, Andromeda.

When wimpy galaxies pass near behemoths like the Milky Way, the unfortunate weaklings are slowly swallowed up, their stars integrated into the parent. But they leave behind evidence of their demise in the form of so-called tidal streams, which are trails of stars that were ripped off the small galaxies by gravitational forces.

The tidal streams trace the path the mini galaxies followed as they orbited around their parent before they were swallowed up. Scientists can use these orbits to measure how much the larger galaxies weigh and how their mass is spread out, and can even learn more about how the galaxies were formed and evolved.

More:   http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/galaxy-cannibals-100111.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+spaceheadlines+(SPACE.com+Headline+Feed)

[mickw]

Pushing the Hubble Space Telescope to the limit of its technical ability, an international collaboration of astronomers have found what is likely to be the most distant and ancient galaxy ever seen, whose light has taken 13.2 billion years to reach us (a redshift of around 10).
The dim object, called UDFj-39546284, is likely to be a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang, only four percent of the Universe's current age. It is tiny. Over one hundred such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
This galaxy would be more distant than the population of redshift 8 galaxies recently discovered in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, including the current most distant spectroscopically confirmed record holder at a redshift of 8.6 (eso1041), and the redshift 8.2 gamma-ray burst from 2009 (eso0917). A redshift of z = 8.6 means that the object is seen as it was around 600 million years after the Big Bang.

More:   Hubble

[mickw]

Hubble astronomers have observed deeper into space than ever before.
In doing so, they have identified six new galaxies of stars that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang itself.
The study also updates a distance estimate for a seventh galaxy, placing it further back in time than any object previously identified.
Called UDFj-39546284, this is seen when the cosmos was less than 3% of its current age.
The new Hubble telescope investigation was led by Richard Ellis from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and colleagues at Edinburgh University, including Jim Dunlop and Ross McLure.
Its significance is that it gives us the clearest insight into how some of the earliest years of cosmic history unfolded.

More:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20695327
and More:   http://www.space.com/18879-hubble-most-distant-galaxy.html

[MarkS]

Hubble discovers the most distant galaxy yet:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24637890

But what is the excuse for the most bizarre artist's impression?  It looks like a spider's nest.

[Tony G]

Mark,

That is actually the 'spider's nest nebula' which just happens to be directly on front of the most distance discovered galaxy. 

Tony G

[Rick]

Hubble Shows Farthest Lensing Galaxy Yields Clues to Early Universe

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly discovered the most distant cosmic magnifying glass, produced by a monster elliptical galaxy. Seen here as it looked 9.6 billion years ago, this monster elliptical galaxy breaks the previous record holder by 200 million years. These "lensing" galaxies are so massive that their gravity bends, magnifies, and distorts light from objects behind them, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

The object behind the cosmic lens is a tiny spiral galaxy undergoing a rapid burst of star formation. Its light has taken 10.7 billion years to arrive here. Seeing this chance alignment at such a great distance from Earth is a rare find.

Locating more of these distant lensing galaxies will offer insight into how young galaxies in the early universe built themselves up into the massive dark-matter-dominated galaxies of today. Dark matter cannot be seen, but it accounts for the bulk of the universe's matter.

More: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/33/full/

[Rick]

NASA Telescopes Uncover Early Construction of Giant Galaxy

Astronomers have for the first time caught a glimpse of the earliest stages of massive galaxy construction. The building site, dubbed "Sparky," is a dense galactic core blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars that are forming at a ferocious rate.

The discovery was made possible through combined observations from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.

A fully developed elliptical galaxy is a gas-deficient gathering of ancient stars theorized to develop from the inside out, with a compact core marking its beginnings. Because the galactic core is so far away, the light of the forming galaxy that is observable from Earth was actually created 11 billion years ago, just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

More: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/august/nasa-telescopes-uncover-early-construction-of-giant-galaxy/

[Rick]

Hubble Helps Find Smallest Known Galaxy Containing a Supermassive Black Hole

Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and ground observation have found an unlikely object in an improbable place -- a monster black hole lurking inside one of the tiniest galaxies ever known.

The black hole is five times the mass of the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. It is inside one of the densest galaxies known to date -- the M60-UCD1 dwarf galaxy that crams 140 million stars within a diameter of about 300 light-years, which is only 1/500th of our galaxy's diameter.

If you lived inside this dwarf galaxy, the night sky would dazzle with at least 1 million stars visible to the naked eye. Our nighttime sky as seen from Earth's surface shows 4,000 stars.

More from the Hubble site

[Rick]

NASA's Hubble Finds Extremely Distant Galaxy through Cosmic Magnifying Glass

Peering through a giant cosmic magnifying glass, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a tiny, faint galaxy -- one of the farthest galaxies ever seen. The diminutive object is estimated to be more than 13 billion light-years away.

This galaxy offers a peek back to the very early formative years of the universe and may just be the tip of the iceberg.

"This galaxy is an example of what is suspected to be an abundant, underlying population of extremely small, faint objects that existed about 500 million years after the big bang, the beginning of the universe," explained study leader Adi Zitrin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. "The discovery is telling us galaxies as faint as this one exist, and we should continue looking for them and even fainter objects, so that we can understand how galaxies and the universe have evolved over time."

The galaxy was detected by the Frontier Fields program, an ambitious three-year effort that teams Hubble with NASA's other great observatories -- the Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to probe the early universe by studying large galaxy clusters. These clusters are so massive their gravity deflects light passing through them, magnifying, brightening, and distorting background objects in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. These powerful lenses allow astronomers to find many dim, distant structures that otherwise might be too faint to see.

More on the Hubble site.