Hubble Space Telescope on EARTH Magazine

It's an asteroid, no wait, a comet, no wait…

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 18:11:05 -0500

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spied a unique object in the debris-filled asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter: a pair of asteroids — orbiting tightly around each other — that also show comet-like characteristics, including a bright halo of ice and dust known as a coma and a long tail of dust. The odd object, called 2006 VW139/288P, is the first known binary asteroid that is also classified as a main-belt comet.

Jupiter's shrinking Great Red Spot

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 10:10:58 -0500

New images of Jupiter show some key changes in the gas giant's atmosphere and storm systems. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC), M. Wong (UC Berkeley), and G. Orton (JPL-Caltech).

Like a kid sitting for her annual school portrait, Jupiter lines up with the Hubble Space Telescope for a series of photographs once a year. The images capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric patterns, and are used to create yearly maps of the gas giant to study how it changes over time.

Down to Earth With: Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:41:58 -0500

Adam Riess is sharing the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for his team's discovery that the universe is expanding rapidly. Gail Burton, MacArthur Foundation

Astronomer Adam Riess and his team made a huge splash in 1998 when they announced they had discovered something called dark energy, the major component of our universe. They had been studying supernovae — exploding stars — to learn more about how fast our universe is expanding. By measuring the brightness and color of the light from a supernova, astronomers can tell how far the light has traveled and how its speed has changed over its journey. Riess’ calculations led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to the repulsive force of dark energy. His discovery was called 1998’s “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science magazine.