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Think of all the work that goes into getting a birds-eye view of our home planet. Now imagine how hard it would be to snap a photo that manages to capture our entire galaxy. More »
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Yesterday, NASA announced a milestone in the almost 22-year history of its Hubble Space Telescope: The 10,000th refereed scientific paper based on Hubble data has now been published, reinforcing that Hubble is one of the most successful astronomical experiments in human history. More »
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This past weekend marked the opening of the American Museum of Natural History's brilliant new exhibition, Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration. As part of our ongoing Hardcore Science Interview series, io9 spoke with the show's curator, AMNH astrophysicist Michael Shara, about the exhibit. More »
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Billions of years ago, when the universe was still in its infancy, the formation of stars is believed to have occurred at a much faster rate than it does today. Now, a recent discovery by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) suggests that the universe's earliest galaxies may have been pumping out stars even faster than we thought. More »
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Since 1994, Hubble Space Telescope has been taking pictures of newly-born stars in the Orion Nebula and the southern constellation of Vela — two regions of space located roughly 1350 light-years from Earth. More »
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This dramatic look at Arp 273 shows the very photogenic group of interacting galaxies that glow bright with intense star formation, perhaps triggered by a little carousing the two galaxies are doing with each other as they approach and interact. More »
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The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and we don't know why. Dark energy is needed to explain this, but what is this strange phenomenon? We don't know, but NASA has conclusively ruled out an alternative to dark energy. More »
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Check out this brilliant image of spiral galaxy NGC 2841, from the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. This galaxy has an unusually low rate of star creation — you can tell by the absence of the pinkish glow of emission nebulae, which would indicate new star birth. What's going on? NASA explains: More »
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The Whirlpool Galaxy looks beautiful and swirling in a visible light image (at left.) But the infrared view, at right, shows a maelstrom of chaos, revealing the dense lanes of dust around normally invisible clusters of stars. More »
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Mount Doom doesn't lay inside the heart of the black land of Mordor after all — it's in a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, judging from a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. More »
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It's Friday, which means we could all use a touch of cosmic amazement to kick-start our work-numbed souls. Cue NASA's fantastic art showing the star-making machinery at the core of the galaxy. Even more of it below. More »
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Check out this just-released picture of globular cluster NGC 1806, created to look for evidence of MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) but none were found. No doubt this will spark yet another round of complaints about the decline of manliness. More »
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When astronomers discovered a mysterious X-shaped object in space last January, they initially thought it was a comet. Further investigation by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed it to be the aftermath of two asteroids smashing into each other. More »
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It's the final hours for the Hourglass Nebula, as the central star runs out of nuclear fuel and becomes a white dwarf. And wow, don't those dying embers look like an unblinking gaze of evil? More »
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Sometimes galaxies don't just smash into each other — sometimes they just tear each other apart with their gravitational forces. Check out this new Hubble image of NGC 1911 in the Coma Cluster, being torn asunder by neighboring galaxies. More »
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The Hubble Space Telescope needs repair work just like every other large piece of equipment. But servicing an orbital telescope 350 miles above the Earth is no simple task. Here's a closeup look at how it's done. More »
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The Hubble space telescope examined a turbulent star-forming region, NGC 3603, ten years after Hubble first surveyed it. And the repeat observation showed that stars were moving in ways that startled and amazed scientists. More »
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Can a single galaxy support two mid-sized black holes? This one does. This composite image shows the starburst galaxy M82, with two intermediate-sized "survivor" black holes that have managed to avoid falling into the galactic core. More »
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The biggest galaxy in the Leo Triplet swaggers in the constellation of Leo, in this new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Notice those assymetrical arms, which come from a powerful attraction to two neighboring galaxies. More »
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We've kept you updated with all manner of space porn from the Hubble Telescope, but Coolvibe went one better and collected 100 of the best images the space telescope has sent back to Earth. Here're some of our favorites. [Coolvibe] More »
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The Hubble Space Telescope's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 took the deepest image of the universe ever in infrared light. The reddest and faintest galaxies date from just 600 million years after the Big Bang. More »
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It was the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first telescopic view of the heavens the other day, and NASA unveiled this incredible panoramic view of the center of our galaxy. It's a composite of images from all of NASA's great observatories. More »
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This area near the core of the Pinwheel Galaxy turns out to be bursting with newborn stars, some only a few million years old. And there are about 60 supernova remnants, showing the full stellar life-cycle. [Hubble via Wired] More »
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A butterfly-shaped nebula, NGC 6302, surrounds a dying star. It's just one of four brain-shattering images from the new wide-field camera aboard the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble's back in business, baby! Click through for the rest. More »
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Award-winning space photographer Thierry Legault traveled to Florida to take this picture of the Space Shuttle Atlantis passing in front of the sun. And click through to see Atlantis and Hubble meeting in the sunshine. More »
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Later today, Space Shuttle Atlantis will be lifting off from Florida for the last ever servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Today's mission also marks the 30th mission for the Orbiter, which first launched in October of 1985 with STS-51-J. More »
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It might take two space shuttles to complete NASA's next mission: making final repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, and ensuring our supply of space porn. More »
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Another galaxy smashed through the heart of the Cartwheel Galaxy 100 million years ago, and today the Cartwheel remains one of the most powerful UV-emitting galaxies near us, as that blue outer ring shows. More »
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The opportunity to capture a quadruple transit, when Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from Earth, only happens every 14 to 15 years. [Hubblesite] More »
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Every one of Saturn's rings has had a known moon — except the mysterious "G" ring. Now NASA's Cassini Space Probe has found the planet's 61st satellite. Meanwhile, you've voted for your next space-porn fix. More »
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How do we love spiral galaxy Messier 101? Let us count the ways. We love the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared image, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory's blue X-ray light, and the Hubble's yellow visible light. More »
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When you imagine the center of our galaxy, you think of a howling void (with that famous super-massive black hole at its center.) But this picture, the sharpest yet, shows a center teeming with stars. More »
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The Hubble Space Telescope went back online, and it was just in time to warn us about the deadliest threat we've faced so far — the giant Eye In Space. Here it is, staring out at us from a mere 400 million light years away. More »
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NASA's on-site repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope may have fallen through until next year, but luckily NASA engineers have figured out a way to fix the Hubble remotely. Which means we could soon be getting more stunning images like this one, of Comet Holmes. More details, and a few of our favorite recent Hubble images, below the fold. More »
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The galaxy NGC 1275 has long commanded attention because it emits such strong radio waves and X-rays. And new images of the galaxy, at the heart of the Perseus cluster, paint a super-violent picture of events at its heart, thanks to the black hole at its exact center. This image combines optical imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green and blue) with X-ray data (soft violet) and radio waves (red). Click through to see X-ray and radio images separately. More »
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Here's a detail of a new image the Hubble Space Telescope released to celebrate its 100,000th orbit of Earth. It shows the "firestorm" of star creation in the nebula near star cluster NGC 2074. The three-dimensional image shows off "dramadramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head 'pillars of creation,' and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation," says NASA. The high-energy radiation from all those hot young stars is slowly eating away at the wall of the nebula. Click through to see the whole thing. More »
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A smaller galaxy blasts through a larger one, like a mega-bullet, sowing disruption in its wake, in this image of Arp 148. The Hubble Space Telescope released 62 images of galaxies smashing into each other, to celebrate its 18th anniversary in space. Galactic collisions were more common in the early universe than they are today, and they're not jjust wanton destruction: they also turn on quasars and jumpstart the birth of stars. A hurtling galaxy would also make an awesome weapon, if you could figure out how to propel it. Click through for a gallery of our favorite galaxy-crashes from Hubble. More »
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Actual space technology has been making cars haul ass way faster for years now, including a solar car that broke speed records using parts taken directly from the Hubble Space Telescope. But that's nothing compared to what's on the way, including muscle cars that use heat-resistant pistons. Click through for details. More »
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Is this art? This picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula, and other images from the Hubble Space Telescope, are hanging at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The exhibition of science photos has made people question whether a photo taken by a machine can be art. But the more you examine that question, the more you realize how artificial these photos really are. More »
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Gas clouds suffer total gravitational collapse and form embryonic stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, our companion galaxy. Some of the stars are only about half the size of our own sun, so it was only pretty recently that the Hubble Space Telescope was able to pick them out of the nebula NGC 346. These baby stars haven't yet ingnited their hydrogen fuel to sustain nuclear fusion. Image by AP/NASA. More »
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