NASA-International Space Station

Imagine discovering a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have found the astronomical corresponding of prehistoric life in our intergalactic backyard: a group of small, early galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to come together. These "late bloomers" are on their way to building a large elliptical galaxy.

Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are usually seen billions of light-years away and therefore occurred billions of years ago. But these galaxies, members of Hickson Compact Group 31, are comparatively nearby, only 166 million light-years away.

New images of this foursome by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offer a window into the determining years of the universe, when the buildup of large galaxies from smaller construction blocks was common. The analysis was bolstered by infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and Swift satellite. Those data helped the astronomers measure the total amount of star formation in the system.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that propose a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

The object, “P/2010 A2”, was circling about 144 million kilometres from Earth in the major asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was covered last week by the Hubble Space Telescope. “The truth is we’re still struggling to understand what this means,” said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. – (Reuters).

The star, called T Pyxidis, is set to self-destruct in an explosion called a supernova with the force of 20 billion megatons of TNT.

Although the star is thought to be around 3,260 light-years away, a fairly short distance in galactic terms – the bang from the thermonuclear explosion could strip away the Earth's ozone layer, the scientists said.

Astronomers from Villanova University, Philadelphia, in the US, said the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite has revealed them that T Pyxidis is really two stars, one called a white dwarf that is sucking in gas and progressively growing. When it reaches a decisive mass it will blow itself to pieces.

It will become as intense as all the other stars in the galaxy put together, they said. The Hubble space telescope has photographed the star preparing for its big bang with a series of minor blasts or "burps", called novas.

These explosions came frequently about every 20 years from 1890 – but stopped after 1967. So the next blast is nearly 20 years late, said scientists Edward M Sion, Patrick Godon and Timothy McClain at the American Astronomical Society in Washington

Robin Scagell, vice-president of the UK's Society for Popular Astronomy, said: "The star may definitely became a supernova soon – but soon could still be a long way off so don't have nightmares."

More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this extraordinary, panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly.

This picture, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, was made from mosaics taken in September and October 2009 with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and in 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The view covers a section of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), a deep-sky study by numerous observatories to trace the evolution of galaxies.

The final picture combines a broad range of colors, from the ultraviolet, through visible light, and into the near-infrared. Such a complete multi-color view of the universe has never before been assembled at such a level of clarity, accuracy, and depth.

Hubble's sharp declaration and new color versatility, produced by combining data from the two cameras, is allowing astronomers to sort out the different stages of galaxy formation. The image reveals galaxy shapes that show increasingly chaotic at each earlier epoch, as galaxies grew through accretion, collisions, and mergers. The galaxies range from the mature spirals and ellipticals in the foreground, to smaller, fainter, irregularly shaped galaxies, most of which are farther away, and therefore existed farther back in time. These smaller galaxies are considered the building blocks of the bigger galaxies we see today.

Astronomers are using this multi-color panorama to trace many details of galaxy evolution over cosmic time, with the star-formation rate in galaxies, the rate of mergers among galaxies, and the abundance of weak active galactic nuclei.

The picture shows a rich tapestry of 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe's history. The closest galaxies seen in the foreground emitted their experiential light about a billion years ago. The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang. This mosaic spans a slice of space that is equal to about a third of the diameter of the full Moon (10 arc minutes).

The new Hubble vision highlights a wide variety of stages in the galaxy assembly process. Ultraviolet light taken by WFC3 shows the blue glow of hot, young stars in galaxies teeming with star birth. The orange light reveals the final swelling of massive galaxies about 8 to 10 billion years ago. The near-infrared light displays the red glow of very distant galaxies -- in a little cases as far as 12 billion to 13 billion light-years away-whose light has been stretched, like a toy Slinky, from ultraviolet light to longer -- wavelength infrared light due to the expansion of the universe.

In this determined use of Hubble's observing time, astronomers used 100 Hubble orbits to make the ACS optical observations of this slice of the GOODS field and 104 orbits to make the WFC3 ultraviolet and near-infrared exposures. WFC3 peered deeper into the universe in this study than equal near-infrared observations from ground-based telescopes. This set of exceptional new Hubble observations reveals galaxies to about 27th magnitude in brightness.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a scheme of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the organization of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington.

The Hubble Space Telescope has peered farther back in space and time than ever before to see baby galaxies that may have been created as little as 500 million years after the big bang.

Astronomers estimate that three recently identified galaxies, which are small and compact and glow a striking blue, are about 13.2 billion light years away. This means that their starlight was emitted about 13.2 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 4 per cent of its present age.

“With the rejuvenated Hubble and its latest instruments, we are now entering uncharted territory that is ripe for new discoveries,” said Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the survey team. He told the American Astronomical Society conference, in Washington, that the efficient Hubble observatory provided an opportunity to “push back the frontiers”.

Further clues to the early Universe have been provided by another image, which combines pictures from Hubble’s new camera with a survey from 2004. It gives a panoramic vision of the sky with about 7,500 galaxies at diverse stages of evolution.

The earliest galaxies detected by Dr Illingworth’s team were pinpointed in August last year, following the fitting of the telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The instrument was pointed at a section of sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was first surveyed in visible light in 2004 to provide one of the telescope’s most iconic images — dark sky teeming with more than 10,000 galaxies. The WFC3 instrument has now recurring the exercise for infrared light. The first analysis of the new 2009 Hubble Ultra Deep Field found substance that was formed about 600 million years after the big bang. Dr Illingworth’s team has now found proof that three galaxies in the image date to about 500 million years after the dawn of the Universe.

Marcella Carollo, another member of the research group, said: “They are the very building blocks from which the immense galaxies of today, like our own Milky Way, ultimately formed.”

Like a whirl of shiny flakes dazzling in a snow globe, Hubble caught this glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest and best-known globular clusters in the northern sky. This glittering metropolis of stars is simply found in the winter sky in the constellation Hercules and can even be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

M13 is home to over 100,000 stars and located at a distance of 25,000 light-years. These stars are packed so intimately together in a ball, approximately 150 light-years across, that they will spend their entire lives whirling around in the cluster. Near the core of this cluster, the density of stars is about a hundred times greater than the density in the neighborhood of our sun. These stars are so packed that they can, at times, slam into each other and even form a new star, called a "blue straggler."

The brightest reddish stars in the cluster are ancient red giants. These aging stars have stretched to many times their original diameters and cooled. The blue-white stars are the hottest in the cluster. Globular clusters can be found spread largely in a vast halo around our galaxy. M13 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters immediate our Milky Way galaxy.

Globular clusters have some of the oldest stars in the universe. They probably formed before the disk of our Milky Way, so they are older than nearly all other stars in our galaxy. Studying globular clusters therefore tells us regarding the history of our galaxy. This image is a composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most meticulous view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood.

The gigantic, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.

Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Numerous of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.

The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible, and red light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. The nebula is close enough to Earth that Hubble can determine individual stars, giving astronomers significant information about the stars' birth and evolution.

The brilliant stars are carving deep cavities in the adjacent material by unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light, and hurricane-force stellar winds (streams of charged particles), which are etching away the persistent hydrogen gas cloud in which the stars were born. The image reveals a fantasy landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys, as well as a dark region in the center that roughly looks like the outline of a holiday tree. Besides sculpting the gaseous terrain, the brilliant stars can also help create a consecutive generation of offspring. When the winds hit dense walls of gas, they create shocks, which may be generating a new wave of star birth.

The movement of the LMC around the Milky Way may have triggered the enormous cluster's formation in several ways. The gravitational tug of the Milky Way and the companion Small Magellanic Cloud may have compressed gas in the LMC. Also, the pressure resulting from the LMC plowing through the Milky Way's halo may have condensed gas in the satellite. The cluster is a rare, nearby example of the many super star clusters that formed in the distant, early universe, when star birth and galaxy contacts were more frequent. Previous Hubble observations have shown astronomers that super star clusters in faraway galaxies are omnipresent.

The LMC is situated 170,000 light-years away and is a member of the Local Group of Galaxies, which also includes the Milky Way.The Hubble observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009. The blue color is light from the hottest, most gigantic stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest object ever seen in visible light in the Kuiper Belt, a enormous ring of icy debris that is surrounding the outer rim of the solar system just beyond Neptune, NASA said.

The object found by Hubble is only 3,200 feet across and a massive 4.2 billion miles away. The smallest Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) seen before in reflected light is roughly 30 miles across, or 50 times larger.

This is the first observational proof for a population of comet-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt that are being ground down through collisions. The Kuiper Belt is therefore collisionally developing, meaning that the region's icy content has been modified over the past 4.5 billion years.

The object detected by Hubble is so faded, at 35th magnitude; it is 100 times dimmer than what the Hubble can see directly, according to NASA.

A ruddy nebula reflects the light from an enormous, nearby star in this latest image released by the Hubble Space Telescope’s operators.

The Iris Nebula is a bit mystifying. It’s not sizzling enough to emit its own light, like some nebulae do. Instead, the Iris reflects light from the star, HD 200775, which is 10 times as immense as the sun, most nebulae of this type are blue-tinged, but as you can see, it’s apparently reddish. Why?

By studying the dust’s concerto, astronomers have revealed that the filaments above and to the left of the image’s center are red because of an anonymous chemical, likely hydrocarbon based. They’re now working to figure out what the accurate compound is.

The study of objects like the Iris, which is situated about 1,400 light-years away in the Cephelus constellation, have come a long way since Sir William Herschel first discovered it in 1794. Not only can the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys provide marvelous detail, but Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer can be used to examine the chemical makeup of celestial bodies.

Zoomed out beyond, the composite image below shows precisely why the Iris Nebula is so named.