NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has trained its sights on a rather puzzling astronomical discovery. Nine young, compact galaxies spanning only 5,000 light-years across were spotted recently. The weird thing about them was that they weigh as much as 200 billion times the mass of our own Sun. Find out more about this in our full article after the jump.

More inspiring images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have been released to give us a glimpse of crashing galaxies. To celebrate the telescope's 18th anniversary, the Space Telescope Science Institute unleashed rare pictures of merging galaxies that you don't want to miss. See the article for more details.

We reported a couple of weeks ago regarding the interesting find by NASA regarding a Jupiter-sized planet that contains organic molecule CH4 or methane orbiting the star HD 189733. Today, NASA shares some more information and an image of that find. The full story awaits after the jump!

Ever wonder if there's life outside planet Earth? If so, then you might probably be interested by the new found information by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Ideally, this planet should be filled with carbon monoxide, but in reality the astronomers were able to detect water vapor. More information in the full article.

Back in 1999, Comet Holmes was too small for the Hubble telescope to measure. One night, the comet suddenly brightened over a million-fold in a single day with a debris cloud measuring 1.4 million kilometers, only slightly larger than our own sun. What caused this sudden eruption of dust and light? Unfortunately, Hubble still doesn't have the answers. Check the full article for more details.

  

Galaxy Messier 81 is a spiral galaxy, much like our very own Milky Way, located 11.6 million light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope of NASA recently took high resolution image captures of M81. And through a series of collaborating space observatories around the globe, they were able to collect new information regarding the mysterious galaxy not very dissimilar from our own.

"The view we have of M81 is similar to what an astronomer in Andromeda would see if they looked at the Milky Way," explained Andreas Zezas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It's also surprising that the Hubble, named after Edwin Hubble who first discerned that the stars in Andromeda marked the galaxy distinct from our own, repeated such a feat 80 years after, with a galaxy five times farther away.

 

If fact, NASA pegs M81 as one of the brightest galaxies that can be viewed from Earth. With a penchant for discerning colors and lights, star gazers could find the Milky Way look-alike high up in the northern sky close to the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It's obliquely angled to the Milky Way, so much of the galaxy is viewable.

Click on Full Article to get a more detailed image of the galaxy and find out more of M81.

NASA's soon-to-be-of-drinking-age eye in the sky is set to get a new set of upgrades this 2008, and unlike the last five trips which were done just to keep it running, this new mission is set give the Hubble some cool new gear that'll vastly improve its performance. The first upgrade involves swapping out its main camera, the 13-year old Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, with a brand new Wide Field Planetary Camera 3. The new lens will carry all the functions the old camera had, only better.

The next major upgrade is a totally new tool for Hubble. It's a device called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and according to Popular Science Correspondent Michael Moyer's interview with NASA investigator James Green, the COS is designed to track normal matter in the universe - like the gas clouds that just float along and absorb light from nearby stars and quasars.

The COS will pick up how much light these gas clouds absorb, and from there identify what these clouds are made of; very much like how your typical lab spectrum analyzer works, only...IN SPACE! Speaking of space, the COS is currently undergoing vacuum and temperature tests for two straight months to verify if it can handles the extremes (IN SPACE!) before it's launched along with the Wide Field Camera 3 to the Hubble (IN SPACE!) in May.

NASA is hoping that with these two upgrades will keep the aging (and admittedly glitchy) Hubble running until 2013, the year it's finally retired and replaced with the James Webb Space Telescope.

Sixteen potential planets have been detected in a region in the center of our Milky Way, also known as the Galactic Bulge. Given that the Galactic Bulge is a mass of stars and hot gas 26,000 light-years away, this "bonanza" of planets are the most distant worlds we've discovered.

Of the sixteen detected bodies, seven are likely planet candidates, while the remaining 9 still await confirmation. If all 16 are confirmed, then we've got another milestone. This would be the largest number of new planets ever detected in a single observation.

A team of astronomers detected the planets during a week long survey of the constellation Sagittarius, using the Hubble Space Telescope last February 2004. A notable revelation is that planets turn out to be plentiful around distant stars as they are around stars closer to our solar system. But all of you "who boldly go" already knew that, right?


Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Hubble Project says, "They are there, even at the center of the galaxy. ...This allows us to say now with a very high degree of confidence that there are literally billions of planets in our galaxy."

The newly-found bodies are the fastest-orbiting planets ever detected and constitute a whole new class of "ultra-short period" planets. Five of the new planets even orbit their respective stars in just one Earth day or less. Another one  completes its orbit in only ten hours. The interesting bit here is that the planets are gas giants about the size of Jupiter, and they orbit closer to their stars than any other known worlds. Scientists explain that they are only able to survive such proximity because the stars they orbit are relatively light and dim.

The astronomers were able to spot the planets using a pair of clues. One is a "wobble" that a star often adopts in its path through space when a planet is orbiting it. The other is a slight dimming that occurs when a planet passes in front of a star.

Okay, so now that we've got sixteen new planets (excuse me umm, I mean seven confirmed planets) I wonder what we'll name them?

The Hubble Space Telescope has successfully identified and characterized the host star of one of the most distant planetary systems yet discovered, reports astronomer David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame University. The method used is called "microlensing," which observes distant objects indirectly by keeping track of "light-bending."

What happens is that light waves from a visible star are gravitationally bent when a smaller, invisible object with mass passes in front of it. This causes the visible object - known as the "lensing" star - to brighten and dim over a period of time. The "spike" in brightness indicates that a smaller object - a planet, or in this case, an entire solar system - too small to be observed directly is passing in front of the lensing star.

Unfortunately, if the passing object is an entire solar system, this kind of observation tells astronomers little about the host star beyond the fact that it exists. Bennett's team was able to determine the specific characteristics of this particular star (dubbed "OGLE-2003-BLG-235L/MOA-2003-BLG-53L") because it's color was different than that of the lensing star behind it.

The researchers concluded that the host star - some 19,000 light years distant - has little over 3/4 of the Sun's mass. Although smaller in terms of mass, it appears to have greater density. The planet is similar to Jupiter in terms of make-up (a gas giant) and orbit, although it is over two and a half times as big.

The upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society will contain a model that may shatter most of the established beliefs about the primordial star. Contrary to the previous "fact" that the first star soaked into existence some 155 million years after our universe exploded into life in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, recent studies show that it may have occurred earlier when the universe was only 30 million years old.

Details on how the first star was born plus the sequence of steps that allowed other stars - and galaxies - to form have been reconstructed by astronomers with the aid of computer simulations. Looking at these models, one is lead to believe that the first star formed in a dense cloud of dark matter and gas and that many of the present-day galaxies are products of mergers between smaller galaxies found in the universe's early days.

Although it was easy to pinpoint the conditions that led to the birth of the first star, the same can't be said with regards to the date when the birth happened. Study leader Rennan Barkana, an astrophysicist at the University of Tel Aviv, said, "To estimate when the first stars formed, we must remember that the first 100,000 solar mass clumps collapsed in regions that happened to have particularly high densities early on.... There were initially only a few such regions in the entire universe, so a simulation that is limited to a small volume is unlikely to find such [regions] until much later."

The first star shone brighter than most of the stars we see today and had a life of only 2 to 3 million years, whereas present day stars have up to several billion year lifetimes.

When the primordial star spent its fuel, it exploded in a titanic stellar cataclysm (known as supernova) throwing heavy elements into space and setting the stage for later stars to appear. "After a short time, stars began appearing in greater abundance throughout the universe," Barkana explained.

Light once emitted by the first star is still till detectable, however, you'll be needing a telescope about 100 million times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope to do that.