Announcements 2009

9 December 2009: The Eyes on the Skies project initiated as part of International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) celebration now entering its final weeks has won an international accolade. After originally being selected as one of eight finalists from a field of over 254 entries from 39 countries, the Eyes on the Skies movie and book went on to receive the Special Jury Award for its high production value at the MEDEA 2009 Awards held in Berlin, Germany on 4 December. The annual MEDEA awards recognize excellence in media-rich educational materials. The competition's judges said that Eyes on the Skies is "a very well designed and attractive presentation of quite a challenging subject" and is "authoritative without being confusing." In this way, the project serves as "an excellent example of integrated educational narrative and complementary use of various media," the judges also said, owing in part to its "superb script." The Eyes …

2 December 2009: An elusive, very hot star at the centre of one of the most well-known and spectacular planetary nebulae has been directly detected. Using the brand-new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in six narrow band filters, researchers from the European Southern Observatory, the University of Manchester and CSIC (Granada, Spain) have located and partially characterized the dying star. Astronomers estimate that the star, which began its life as few times more massive then the Sun, is now is a little over half the mass of the Sun. After it expelled its outer envelope some 2200 years ago, the star now has an extremely high temperature, anywhere from 200 000 K to 400 000 K — one of the hottest ever detected. It is fading very rapidly and will cool down very slowly to a small and cold white dwarf. The Bug Nebula (also known as the Butterfly Nebula), or NGC 6302, …

10 November 2009: A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy provided by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and its companion Great Observatories (the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory) is being unveiled on 10 Nov 2009. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609. Although best known for its visible-light images, Hubble also observes over a limited range of infrared light and this sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the galactic centre region. The composite image – made up of an image from each telescope – features the spectacle of stellar evolution: from vibrant regions of star birth, to young hot stars, to old cool stars, to seething remnants of stellar death called black holes. This activity occurs against a fiery backdrop in the crowded, hostile environment of the galaxy's core, the …

30 October 2009: The release of version 2 of the popular ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator image processing software has meant that it is even easier and faster to create colour images using raw observations from a range of telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESA’s XMM-Newton Telescope. Version 1 of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator was completed in July 2004 by imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and NASA. FITS stands for Flexible Image Transport System. This single file format archives nearly all images of stars, nebulae and galaxies produced by major telescopes around the world. Before July 2004 this file format was primarily accessible to scientists working with highly specialised image processing tools. More than 60,000 laypeople, educators and amateur astronomers have started using the Liberator since the release of v.1 in July 2004. The FITS Liberator …

13 October 2009: A bright and bizarre galaxy called NGC 2623 is the focus of this Hubblecast. The single galaxy is the product of the merger of two distinct galaxies. The union has spawned new star formation and activated one of the supermassive black holes found at the centres of the two original galaxies, causing it to emit light across a wide spectrum. The galaxy is part of the GOALS (The Great Observatory All-sky LIRG) Survey that combines the powers of four space telescopes to study over 200 of the most luminous infrared galaxies in the local Universe. ESA/HubbleVisual design & Editing: Martin KornmesserAnimations: Martin Kornmesser & Patrik Jonsson, Greg Novak & Joel Primack, UC Santa CruzWeb Technical Support: Lars Holm Nielsen & Raquel Yumi ShidaWritten by: Colleen SharkeyNarration: Dr. JMusic: movetwo & John Dyson from the CD DarklightStill images: XMM-Newton: ESA/Chandra: NASA/Galex: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Spitzer: NASA/JPL-Caltech Directed by: Colleen SharkeyExecutive director: Lars Lindberg …

9 September 2009: After more than three months of calibration and testing, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is reopening its rejuvenated eyes to begin probing the Universe once again. Dr. J reveals the stunning new images and the fascinating science behind them.

22 June 2009: The fifth and final mission to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope was a long time coming. After a delay in the fall of 2008, spring brought new hope and, on 11 May, the seven Space Shuttle crew members headed for the mission of a lifetime.

11 May 2009: In a bright, loud and visibly perfect launch, space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 2:01 p.m. EDT (20:01 CEST). The seven astronauts of STS-125 are headed for their rendezvous with Hubble Space Telescope. Over an 11-day mission, veteran astronauts Scott Altman, Gregory C. Johnson, John Grunsfeld and Mike Massimino and rookies Andrew Feustel, Michael Good and Megan McArthur will install two new instruments, repair two inactive ones and perform the component replacements that will keep the telescope functioning into at least 2014. Atlantis also will carry a replacement Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit for Hubble. Astronauts will install the unit on the telescope, removing the one that stopped working on Sept. 27, 2008, delaying the servicing mission until the replacement was ready.

11 May 2009: The Hubble community bids farewell to the soon-to-be decommissioned Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In tribute to Hubble's longest running optical camera, a planetary nebula has been imaged as WFPC2's final "pretty picture". This planetary nebula is known as Kohoutek 4-55 (or K 4-55). It is one of a series of planetary nebulae that were named after their discoverer, Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek. A planetary nebula is formed from material in the outer layers of a red giant star that were expelled into interstellar space when the star was in the late stages of its life. Ultraviolet radiation emitted from the remaining hot core of the star ionises the ejected gas shells, causing them to glow. In the specific case of K 4-55, a bright inner ring is surrounded an asymmetric, fainter layer. The entire system is then surrounded by a faint red halo …

9 April 2009: For nineteen years, NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made some of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of astronomy but it has also helped scientists learn more about our own Solar System. From its vantage point 600 km above the Earth, Hubble has studied every planet in our Solar System except Mercury where light from the Sun would damage its instruments. Hubble has captured the impact of a comet on Jupiter, immense storms on Neptune and even tiny dwarf planets at the edge of our Solar System. The veteran telescope keeps a watchful eye on our solar backyard.

3 April 2009: In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photographed the winning target in the Space Telescope Science Institute's "You Decide" competition. The image of the winner, a group of interacting galaxies called Arp 274, was revealed during ESO's "Around the World in 80 Telescopes" webcast. The striking object received 67,021 votes out of the nearly 140,000 votes cast for the six candidate targets. On 1-2 April Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 captured Arp 274 (also known as NGC 5679). Arp 274 is a system of three galaxies that appear to be partially overlapping in the image, although they may be at somewhat different distances. The spiral shapes of two of these galaxies appear mostly intact. The third galaxy (far left) is more compact, but shows evidence of star formation. Two of the three galaxies are forming new stars at a high rate. This …

10 March 2009: NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope partnered with ESO's VLT to obtain exceptional 3D views of distant galaxies by probing the motions of gas in tiny objects, seen when the Universe was half its current age. By looking at this unique "history book" of our Universe, at an epoch when the Sun and the Earth did not yet exist, scientists hope to solve the puzzle of how galaxies formed in the remote past. For decades, distant galaxies that emitted their light six billion years ago were no more than small specks of light on the sky. With the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s, astronomers were able to scrutinise the structure of distant galaxies in some detail for the first time. Under the superb skies of Paranal, the VLT's FLAMES/GIRAFFE spectrograph (eso0219) — which obtains simultaneous spectra from small areas of extended objects — can now also resolve …

4 March 2009: "Eyes on the Skies" and "Hidden Universe", two books produced in a unique collaboration between the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the European Southern Observatory, the European Space Agency and the international publisher Wiley-VCH, have just been announced as 2008 bestsellers. The publisher's second ranking bestseller is "Eyes on the Skies", which tells the fascinating story of the telescope through words and a wealth of stunning photographs and illustrations (plus a 60-minute documentary DVD). In 8th place, "Hidden Universe" achieves the tricky task of communicating unseen phenomena comprehensively and without jargon, beginning with a look at the way we observe the Universe using our eyes and telescopes and then travelling across the five wavelength bands. Both books are released at the occasion of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

16 January 2009: The unique planetary nebula NGC 2818 is nested inside the open star cluster NGC 2818A. Both the cluster and the nebula reside over 10 000 light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis (the Compass). NGC 2818 is one of very few planetary nebulae in our galaxy located within an open cluster. Open clusters, in general, are loosely bound and they disperse over hundreds of millions of years. Stars that form planetary nebulae typically live for billions of years. Hence, it is rare that an open cluster survives long enough for one of its members to form a planetary nebula. This open cluster is particularly ancient, estimated to be nearly one billion years old. The spectacular structure of NGC 2818 (also known as PLN 261+8.1) contains the outer layers of a sun-like star that were sent off into interstellar space during the star' s final stages of life. These glowing gaseous …