What's New in the Universe of the Hubble Space Telescope as of January 11, 2001

What's New

What's New in the Universe of the Hubble Space Telescope as of January 11, 2001

The wait is over… Hubble has a brand new Web site! Visit hubble.site for the latest in Hubble news, pictures, information, and resources.

Job Availability in the Office Of Public Outreach: Details on the employment process can be found in the Human Resources Department.

Hubble's Ultraviolet Views of Nearby Galaxies Yield Clues to Early Universe
Astronomers are using these three Hubble telescope images of nearby galaxies to help tackle the question of why their distant relatives have such odd shapes, appearing markedly different from the typical "ellipticals" and "spirals" seen in the nearby universe.

'Death Spiral' Around a Black Hole Yields Tantalizing Evidence of an Event Horizon
The Hubble telescope may have, for the first time, provided direct evidence for the existence of black holes by observing how matter disappears when it falls beyond the "event horizon," the boundary between a black hole and the outside universe.

Intergalactic 'Pipeline' Funnels Matter Between Colliding Galaxies
This visible-light picture, taken by the Hubble telescope, reveals an intergalactic "pipeline" of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago.

"X" Marks the Spot: Hubble Sees the Glow of Star Formation in a Neighbor Galaxy
The saying "X" marks the spot holds true in this Hubble telescope image. In this case, X marks the location of Hubble-X, a glowing gas cloud in one of the most active star-forming regions in galaxy NGC 6822. The galaxy lies 1.6 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors. This hotbed of star birth is similar to the fertile regions in the Orion Nebula in our Milky Way Galaxy, but on a vastly greater scale. The intense star birth in Hubble-X occurred about 4 million years ago, a small fraction of the approximate 10-billion-year age of the universe.

Satellite Footprints Seen in Jupiter Aurora
In this Hubble telescope picture, a curtain of glowing gas is wrapped around Jupiter's north pole like a lasso. This curtain of light, called an aurora, is produced when high-energy electrons race along the planet's magnetic field and into the upper atmosphere where they excite atmospheric gases, causing them to glow. The aurora resembles the same phenomenon that crowns Earth's polar regions. But this Hubble image, taken in ultraviolet light, also shows the glowing "footprints" of three of Jupiter's largest moons: Io, Ganymede, and Europa.

Ghostly Reflections in the Pleiades
This ghostly apparition is actually an interstellar cloud caught in the process of destruction by strong radiation from a nearby hot star. This haunting picture, snapped by the Hubble telescope, shows a cloud illuminated by light from the bright star Merope. Located in the Pleiades star cluster, the cloud is called IC 349 or Barnard's Merope Nebula.

Hubble Captures an Extraordinary and Powerful Active Galaxy
The Hubble telescope has taken a snapshot of a nearby active galaxy known as Circinus. This active galaxy belongs to a class of mostly spiral galaxies called Seyferts, which have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes.