ESA Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes

Ever wondered how the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s raw data 🛰️ gets turned into beautiful images like this? Read about each step of the process here: https://ow.ly/RfvN50SJPKt #WebbSeesFarther 📷 ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team. Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

🆕 The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has imaged a cold exoplanet 12 light-years away! 🔴 Astronomers had previously taken indirect measurements of the star Epsilon Indi A ⭐ which hinted at a giant planet ‘tugging’ on it. They then observed the exoplanet directly with Webb. 🔴 Previously imaged exoplanets tend to be the youngest, hottest exoplanets, still radiating much of the energy from their formation. As they cool and contract, they become fainter, with most of their emission in the mid-infrared. 🔴 With its #MIRI and its large mirror, Webb is well-equipped for imaging colder exoplanets! 🔴 This planet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is one of the coldest exoplanets directly detected 🥶 and more similar to Jupiter than any other imaged yet – so it provides a rare opportunity to study the atmospheres of true solar system analogues. Read more about it here: https://ow.ly/gRB950SJ0J9 #WebbSeesFarther 📷 ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, E. Matthews (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Our ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week features an island universe! 🏝️ NGC 3430 is a spiral galaxy which lies 100 million light-years from Earth. That it is such a fine spiral may be why it ended up as part of the sample that Edwin Hubble used to define his classification of galaxies. In 1926, Hubble wrote a paper classifying 400 galaxies by their appearance. The study of galaxies was in its infancy then, and Hubble referred to them as ‘extragalactic nebulae’ in his paper. Once it became clear that they were very different from nebulae, the favoured term became ‘island universe’. NGC 3430 may look as if it still deserves that name, but today we simply call it another galaxy 🌌 Read more: https://ow.ly/zrPP50SHTO8 📷 ESA/Hubble, NASA,C. Kilpatrick

🆕 This artist’s concept shows how WASP-39 b could look 🔵 based on observations from telescopes including the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. WASP-39 b is a hot, puffy gas giant orbiting a star slightly smaller than the Sun. It is tidally locked, with one side always facing its star, so it has a terminator (boundary) where there is eternal sunrise and sunset 🌅 Using a transmission spectrum of WASP-39 b from Webb’s #NIRSpec, astronomers confirmed a temperature difference between morning and evening, with the evening appearing hotter by 200°C. Read more about it here: https://ow.ly/Kqum50SBqKF #WebbSeesFarther Artist's impression: NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI)

Our ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week features the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 5238. Its blobby appearance belies a complex structure which has been the subject of much astronomical research. NGC 5238 is theorised to have had a recent close encounter with another galaxy – the evidence for this is the tidal distortions of NGC 5238’s shape, the kind produced by two galaxies pulling on each other. The culprit was likely to be a satellite galaxy that was devoured by NGC 5238. Traces of it might be found by examining the stars in NGC 5238 ⭐ a task for which the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is perfectly suited! Read more: https://ow.ly/yetZ50SBc7T 📷 ESA/Hubble , NASA, F. Annibali

🆕 A penguin portrait to mark the second science anniversary of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope 🎉 🔴 This duo of interacting galaxies – the Penguin and the Egg 🐧🥚 – are locked in a cosmic dance, and will merge into a single galaxy over hundreds of millions of years. 🔴 The Penguin was once spiral-shaped. Now, its centre gleams like an eye and its arms resemble a beak, head, backbone, and tail. The Egg pulls its thinner areas of gas and dust, causing them to crash in waves and form stars. 🔴 The Egg’s compact shape, however, remains largely unchanged. As an elliptical galaxy, it is filled with ageing stars ⭐ and has much less gas and dust that can be pulled away to form new stars. 🔴 The detail in this image – the haze joining the Penguin and the Egg, and the distant galaxies – is a testament to the sensitivity and resolution of Webb’s infrared instruments. 🔴 In the top right of the image is a quite edge-on young galaxy, teeming with new, blue stars. Since the galaxy’s stellar population is so young, it ‘vanishes’ in Webb's mid-infrared light view. 🔴 Webb’s operations over the last two years have helped astronomers make discoveries about other worlds, the lives of stars, the early Universe, and galactic evolution – helping solve longstanding mysteries, and producing beautiful images like this one! Read more about it here: https://ow.ly/6bcR50SAoFc #WebbSeesFarther 📷 NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

The Draco dwarf galaxy, as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope 🐲 This image shows three different perspectives of the Draco dwarf spheroidal galaxy, which is located 250,000 light-years from Earth. Hubble observed the galaxy over 18 years. This helped astronomers build an accurate 3D map of the movement of the stars within it 🌠 and shed light on dark matter – the Universe’s invisible ‘glue’. Read more: https://ow.ly/ajRF50SzxBj 📷 NASA, ESA, Digitized Sky Survey, Roeland van der Marel (STScI)

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) in Omega Centauri! 🕳️ 🔴 IMBHs are the ‘missing link’ in black hole evolution, with only a few IMBH candidates ever discovered. If they exist, how common are they? How do they form? And can they grow into supermassive black holes? 🔴 Omega Centauri is the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky. It is distinct from other globular clusters as it rotates relatively quickly, appears flattened, and is almost as massive as a small galaxy. 🔴 Astronomers tracked stars in Omega Centauri using hundreds of Hubble images, and discovered seven stars that shouldn’t be there 🌠 they are moving so fast they should have escaped the cluster forever. 🔴 The most likely explanation is that the gravity of a massive object is keeping them close – an IMBH with a mass at least 8200 times that of our Sun. Read more: https://ow.ly/qiTH50SyCXP 📷 ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Häberle

Distance or dust? 🤔 Our ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week features the galaxy NGC 3810, which was host to a Type Ia supernova in 2022. 🔴 Type Ia supernova are used to measure astronomical distance. These supernovae have a very consistent brightness 💥 so we can tell how far away they are from how dim they appear. 🔴 But this is complicated by intergalactic dust between Earth and the supernova – how much of the reduction in brightness is distance, and how much is dust? 🔴 The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope can help by photographing the same supernova in ultraviolet light (blocked by dust) and infrared light (not blocked by dust)! Some of the data used to make this image of NGC 3810 were focused on its 2022 supernova. Read more: https://ow.ly/cB6J50SwGJ0 📷 ESA/Hubble, NASA, D. Sand, R. Foley

🆕 Webb brings you a jewelled ring! Our ESA/Webb Picture of the Month features the gravitational lensing of a quasar! 🔍 🔴 RX J1131-1231 lies six billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater. Its curious portrait was captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s #MIRI 🔴 It is one of the best lensed quasars ever discovered – the foreground galaxy smears the image of it into a bright arc and creates four images of the object, giving the appearance of a jewelled ring 💍 🔴 Lensing allows us to study regions close to the black hole in distant quasars. Measurements of the X-ray emission from quasars indicates how fast the central black hole is spinning, providing clues about how black holes grow. 🔴 Observations suggest that the black hole in this quasar has grown via mergers, rather than pulling in material from many different directions. Read more about it here: https://ow.ly/X1iw50SvL4E #WebbSeesFarther 📷 ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, A. Nierenberg