hubble
-
The Best Space Images of 2023
Space is an inky black yonder… but for the countless light sources that pepper the billions of light-years that human instruments can see. Thanks to ground-based telescopes and observatories parked millions of miles from Earth, 2023 has been a terrific year for space imagery. Astronomers captured fascinating new views of globular clusters, star systems, and…
-
The Hubble Telescope Just Sized Up an Earth-Sized Exoplanet
The Hubble Space Telescope last week ogled an exoplanet passing in front of a star in a triple system, revealing the nearby world’s mass. The world is named LTT 1445Ac, and it was discovered in 2022 by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The world orbits a red dwarf star (one in a set of…
-
Webb Telescope Data Confirms ‘Hubble Tension’ Is Not Hubble Telescope’s Fault
The rate of the universe’s expansion has vexed astronomers for decades. Called the Hubble constant, the figure is quite different depending on how you get to it—fittingly, a source of constant befuddlement to astrophysicists. Now, a team of astronomers have calculated the expansion rate with greater precision using the Webb Space Telescope, a $US10 billion…
-
No, Betelgeuse Won’t Go Supernova in ‘Tens of Years’ — or Even Centuries
The expiration date of Betelgeuse, a massive dying star about 642 light-years from Earth, is a hot topic in astronomy because of the star’s superlative size and its life cycle stage.