Please tune in (or join us in person, if you’re in the Austin, Texas area!) for a lecture by Hubble astrophysicist Dr. Frank Summers at the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin this Thursday at 7 p.m. CST. This talk will be live-streamed here on our YouTube Channel, but if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hi!... Read More

The dense star cluster called R136 is located within the Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus), a giant star-forming region in a nearby dwarf galaxy. Astronomers suspect that the multiple clumps of stars within R136 are actually a pair of interacting star clusters. Supporting evidence for this idea comes from the large number of “runaway stars” — stars moving with unusually high velocity — that have been found within the nebula. A single, large star cluster would not produce as many runaway stars as two smaller interacting star clusters. In addition, some of these runaway stars are older than the estimated age of R136.... Read More

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) peers deeper into the universe than any previous visible-light image. Multiple observations of the same small patch of sky were combined for an equivalent exposure time of more than 11 days. Revealed within the image are thousands of galaxies located many billions of light-years away. Many of these galaxies are too small and too faint to be otherwise seen. Most importantly, because the light from distant galaxies requires billions of years to cross the intervening space, astronomers get to see them as they were billions of years ago. Much of the history of galaxy development can be found within the HUDF image.... Read More

The active galaxy Hercules A was given that name because it is the brightest radio source in the constellation of Hercules. Astronomers found that the double-peaked radio emission corresponded to a giant elliptical galaxy cataloged as 3C 348. Unusually, this behemoth galaxy is not found within a large cluster of hundreds of galaxies, but rather within a comparatively small group of dozens of galaxies. The ‘active’ part of the galaxy is the supermassive black hole in its core, which spews out strong jets of energetic particles that produce enormous lobes of radio emission. Some astronomers suspect that Hercules A may be the result of two galaxies merging together.... Read More