Press Releases

20 April 2011: In celebration of the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers pointed Hubble at an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273.

12 April 2011: Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe.

15 March 2011: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced an outstanding image of part of the famous Tarantula Nebula, a vast star-forming cloud of gas and dust in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In this picture, we see a close-up of the Tarantula’s central region, glowing brightly with ionised gases and young stars.

17 February 2011: The galaxy NGC 2841 - shown here in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, taken with the space observatory’s newest instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3 - currently has a relatively low star formation rate compared to other spirals. It is one of several nearby galaxies that have been specifically chosen for a new study in which a pick ’n’ mix of different stellar nursery environments and birth rates are being observed.

26 January 2011: 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).

10 January 2011: A strange, glowing green cloud of gas that has mystified astronomers since its discovery in 2007 has been studied by Hubble. The cloud of gas is lit up by the bright light of a nearby quasar, and shows signs of ongoing star formation.

5 January 2011: What happens when galaxies crash together? For years, these cosmic collisions have been blamed for triggering violent outbursts at the hearts of galaxies. Now, a remarkable piece of detective work has given a verdict: galactic mergers do not usually whet the appetite of the black holes that power these active galactic nuclei, meaning other, less dramatic phenomena are responsible.

17 December 2010: The Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility, a unique collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Southern Observatory, will close on 31 December 2010 after 26 years. ESA’s continuing partnership with NASA on the Hubble mission ensures that European astronomers will continue to have access to observing time.

14 December 2010: Hubble has spotted a festive bauble of gas in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Formed in the aftermath of a supernova explosion that took place four centuries ago, this sphere of gas has been snapped in a series of observations made between 2006 and 2010.

26 October 2010: Astronomers are used to looking millions of years into the past. Now scientists have used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to look thousands of years into the future. Looking at the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster in the Milky Way, they have calculated how the stars there will move over the next 10 000 years.

13 October 2010: An international team of astronomers has observed what happens after asteroids crash together. Using Hubble to study the aftermath of one such collision over five months, they watched a strange, comet-like debris trail slowly evolve as the collision site orbited the Sun. This research gives clues about how asteroids behave when they collide, and how the fall-out from these impacts contributes to the dust that pervades the Solar System.

22 September 2010: A spectacular new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the heart of the Lagoon Nebula. Seen as a massive cloud of glowing dust and gas, bombarded by the energetic radiation of new stars, this placid name hides a dramatic reality.

19 August 2010: An international team of astronomers using gravitational lensing observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step forward in the quest to solve the riddle of dark energy, a phenomenon which mysteriously appears to power the Universe's accelerating expansion. Their results appear in the 20 August 2010 issue of the journal Science.

12 August 2010: 12-Aug 2010 Curling around itself like a question mark, the unusual looking galaxy NGC 4696 itself begs many questions. Why is it such a strange shape? What are the odd, capillary-like filaments that stretch out of it? And what is the role of a large black hole in explaining its decidedly odd appearance?

13 July 2010: A colourful star-forming region is featured in this stunning new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 2467. Looking like a roiling cauldron of some exotic cosmic brew, huge clouds of gas and dust are sprinkled with bright blue hot young stars.

22 June 2010: A spectacular new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image — one of the largest ever released of a star-forming region — highlights N11, part of a complex network of gas clouds and star clusters within our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This region of energetic star formation is one of the most active in the nearby Universe.

16 June 2010: New and detailed observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have provided insights into two recent events on Jupiter: the mysterious flash of light seen on 3 June and the recent disappearance of the planet’s dark Southern Equatorial Belt.

31 May 2010: By exploiting the exquisite image quality of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and comparing two observations made ten years apart astronomers have, for the first time, managed to measure the tiny motions of several hundred young stars within the central cluster of the star-forming region NGC 3603. The team was surprised to find that the stars are moving in ways that are at odds with the current understanding of how such clusters evolve. The stars in the cluster have not “settled down” as expected.

11 May 2010: A heavy runaway star rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 400 000 kilometres per hour, a speed that would get you to the Moon and back in two hours. The runaway is the most extreme case of a very massive star that has been kicked out of its home by a group of even heftier siblings. Tantalising clues from three observatories, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and some old-fashioned detective work, suggest that the star may have travelled about 375 light-years from its suspected home, a giant star cluster called R136.

23 April 2010: The best recognised, longest-lived and most prolific space observatory zooms past a milestone of 20 years of operation. On 24 April 1990, the Space Shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope into a low-Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age.