Press Releases

23 May 2006: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first-ever picture of a distant quasar lensed into five images. In addition the image holds a treasure of lensed galaxies and even a supernova.

27 April 2006: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is providing astronomers with extraordinary views of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 as it disintegrates before our eyes. Recent Hubble images have uncovered many more fragments than have been reported by ground-based observers. These observations provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the demise of a comet nucleus.

24 April 2006: To celebrate the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope's 16 years of success, the two space agencies are releasing this mosaic image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). It is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82, a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions.

18 April 2006: Hubble has captured the most detailed images to date of the open star clusters NGC 265 and NGC 290 in the Small Magellanic Cloud - two sparkling sets of gemstones in the southern sky.

28 February 2006: This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of "grand design spirals", and its supergiant star-forming regions in unprecedented detail. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released from Hubble.

11 January 2006: In one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is offering an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula. This turbulent star-formation region is one of astronomy's most dramatic and photogenic celestial objects.

13 December 2005: White dwarfs are important to theories of both stellar and cosmological evolution. New results published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society provide for the first time an accurate measurement of the weight of the nearest white dwarf, Sirius B, companion of the brightest star in the sky. It turns out that Sirius's companion, despite being smaller than the Earth, has a mass that is 98% that of our own Sun.

1 December 2005: A new Hubble image - among the largest ever produced with the Earth-orbiting observatory - gives the most detailed view so far of the entire Crab Nebula. The Crab is arguably the single most interesting object, as well as one of the most studied, in all of astronomy. The image is the largest ever taken with Hubble's WFPC2 workhorse camera.

10 November 2005: This Hubble Space Telescope view shows one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. At the centre of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. A dramatic structure of arched, ragged filaments with a distinct ridge surrounds the cluster.

27 September 2005: Two space observatories, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have teamed up to "weigh" the stars in several very distant galaxies. One of these galaxies is not only amongst the most distant ever seen, but it appears to be unusually massive and mature for its place in the young Universe. This has surprised astronomers because the earliest galaxies in the Universe are commonly thought to have been much smaller agglomerations of stars that gradually merged together later to build large majestic galaxies like our Milky Way.

20 September 2005: Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have identified the source of a mysterious blue light surrounding a supermassive black hole in our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Though the light has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade, the new discovery makes the story even more mysterious.

14 September 2005: The detection of a super massive black hole without a massive host galaxy is the surprising result from a large Hubble and VLT study of quasars. This is the first convincing discovery of such an object. One intriguing explanation is that the host galaxy may be made almost exclusively of dark matter.

8 August 2005: With the release of version 2 of the popular ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator image processing software it is now easier and faster than ever before to create colour images from raw observations from for instance the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESA's XMM-Newton and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope.

4 July 2005: This series of Hubble Space Telescope images captures the ejection of a bright plume of dust following the July 4 collision between an 370 kilogram projectile released by the Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 9P/Tempel 1. The image sequence dramatically shows the evolution of material that was blasted off the comet as it expands and diffuses into interplanetary space.

27 June 2005: In a dress rehearsal for the rendezvous between NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 9P/Tempel 1, the Hubble Space Telescope captured dramatic images of a new jet of dust streaming from the icy comet.

7 June 2005: A violent and chaotic-looking mass of gas and dust is seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image of a nearby supernova remnant. Denoted N 63A, the object is the remains of a massive star that exploded, spewing its gaseous layers out into an already turbulent region.

25 April 2005: During the 15 years that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has orbited the Earth, it has taken three-quarters of a million photos of the cosmos - images that have awed, astounded and even confounded astronomers and the public alike. Today NASA and ESA released new views of two of the most well-known images Hubble has ever taken: the Eagle Nebula, and spiral galaxy M51, known as the Whirlpool Galaxy.

14 April 2005: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is one of the biggest scientific projects of all time and is approaching the 15th anniversary of its launch. To mark the event on 24 April, the European Space Agency is presenting a series of unique activities in collaboration with partners all over Europe. These includes an exclusive, full-length DVD film (one of the most widely distributed documentary films ever), a CD of the film soundtrack, a full-colour book and additional educational material. All over Europe, there will be Hubble Day events, press events and planetarium shows about Hubble.

16 February 2005: The dancing light of the auroras on Saturn behaves in ways different from how scientists have thought possible for the last 25 years. New research by a team of US and European planetary scientists led by John Clarke of Boston University, USA, has overturned theories about how Saturn's magnetic field behaves and how its auroras are generated. Their results will be published in the February 17 issue of the journal Nature.

3 February 2005: The Hubble Space Telescope's latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.