Press Releases

23 April 2024: In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of the legendary NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 24 April, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located 3400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The photogenic nebula is a favourite target of amateur astronomers.

9 November 2023: The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have united to study an expansive galaxy cluster known as MACS0416. The resulting panchromatic image combines visible and infrared light to assemble one of the most comprehensive views of the Universe ever obtained. Located about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, MACS0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster.

5 October 2023: A very rare, strange burst of extraordinarily bright light in the universe just got even stranger – thanks to the eagle-eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The phenomenon, called a Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT), flashed onto the scene where it wasn’t expected to be found, far away from any host galaxy. Only Hubble could pinpoint its location. The Hubble results suggest astronomers know even less about these objects than previously thought by ruling out some possible theories.

7 September 2023: The glittering globular cluster Terzan 12 — a vast, tightly bound collection of stars — fills the frame of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The location of this globular cluster, deep in the Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, means that it is shrouded in gas and dust which absorb and alter the starlight emanating from Terzan 12.

2 February 2023: Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf star – the surviving core of a burned-out sunlike star.