Press Releases

19 April 2022: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge.

13 April 2022: An international team of astronomers using archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and other space- and ground-based observatories have discovered a unique object in the distant, early Universe that is a crucial link between star-forming galaxies and the emergence of the earliest supermassive black holes. This object is the first of its kind to be discovered so early in the Universe’s history, and had been lurking unnoticed in one of the best-studied areas of the night sky.

30 March 2022: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) — the most distant individual star ever seen. This sets up a major target for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in its first year

7 March 2022: Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. On 7 March 2002 astronauts installed the ACS during Hubble Servicing Mission 3B, also known as STS-109. With its wide field of view, sharp image quality, and high sensitivity, the ACS delivers many of Hubble’s most impressive images of deep space.

22 February 2022: A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies, known as Arp 143, has fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-formation frenzy as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

18 November 2021: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made its stunning yearly observations of the Solar System’s giant planets, to reveal atmospheric changes.

28 October 2021: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope celebrates Halloween this year with a striking observation of the carbon star CW Leonis, which resembles a baleful orange eye glaring from behind a shroud of smoke.

14 October 2021: Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope recently revealed water vapour in the atmosphere of Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons. A new analysis of archival images and spectra has now revealed that water vapour is also present in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The analysis found that a water vapour atmosphere is present only on one hemisphere of the moon. This result advances our understanding of the atmospheric structure of icy moons, and helps lay the groundwork for upcoming science missions which will explore Jupiter’s icy moons.

27 September 2021: In Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm that has been roiling for centuries, its “outer lane” is moving faster than its “inner lane” — and continues to pick up speed. By analysing long-term data from this high-speed ring, researchers have found that the wind speed has increased by up to 8 percent between 2009 and 2020. These findings could only be made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has amassed more than 10 years of regular observations, acting like a storm watcher for the planets in our Solar System.

23 September 2021: In December 2020 the ESA/Hubble team published a stunning view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered. This observation has since been used to develop a lensing model to study the physical properties of the lensed galaxy. Scientists have successfully measured the distance to the object and determined the magnification factor to be 20, which effectively makes Hubble’s observing capability equivalent to that of a 48-metre telescope.

6 September 2021: Could dying stars hold the secret to looking younger? New evidence from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope suggests that white dwarfs could continue to burn hydrogen in the final stages of their lives, causing them to appear more youthful than they actually are. This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of star clusters.

26 July 2021: Astronomers have used archival datasets from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to reveal the first evidence for water vapour in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the result of the thermal escape of water vapour from the moon’s icy surface.

27 May 2021: This spectacular image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the trailing arms of NGC 2276, a spiral galaxy 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. At first glance, the delicate tracery of bright spiral arms and dark dust lanes resembles countless other spiral galaxies. A closer look reveals a strangely lopsided galaxy shaped by gravitational interaction and intense star formation.

23 April 2021: In celebration of the 31st anniversary of the launching of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers aimed the celebrated observatory at one of the brightest stars seen in our galaxy to capture its beauty.

11 March 2021: For the first time, scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence of volcanic activity reforming the atmosphere on a rocky planet around a distant star. The planet, GJ 1132 b, has a similar density, size, and age to those of Earth.

11 February 2021: Scientists were expecting to find an intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397, but instead they found evidence of a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there. New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have led to the first measurement of the extent of a collection of black holes in a core-collapsed globular cluster.

15 January 2021: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has observed the supernova remnant named 1E 0102.2-7219. Researchers are using Hubble’s imagery of the remnant object to wind back the clock on the expanding remains of this exploded star in the hope of understanding the supernova event that caused it 1700 years ago.

7 January 2021: To celebrate a new year, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has published a montage of six beautiful galaxy mergers. Each of these merging systems was studied as part of the recent HiPEEC survey to investigate the rate of new star formation within such systems. These interactions are a key aspect of galaxy evolution and are among the most spectacular events in the lifetime of a galaxy.

10 December 2020: The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disc.

3 December 2020: Astronomers have caught a rare glimpse of a rapidly fading shroud of gas around an aging star. Archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the nebula Hen 3-1357, nicknamed the Stingray nebula, has faded precipitously over just the past two decades. Witnessing such a swift rate of change in a planetary nebula is exceedingly without precedent, researchers say.