Astronomy

Like a blooming rose, a nearby nebula glows pink and white in an image released by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula N11A looks flowerlike because of the glow from radiation of massive stars at its heart, the European Space Agency said in a statement. Visible in true color at hubble.esa.int, N11A lies in a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth.

The "big bang" will not be followed by the "big crunch," say five teams of astronomers who used different techniques to gather evidence on the future of the universe. Ruth Daly, a Princeton University astronomer, said, "It is quite clear now that the universe will expand forever." The astronomy teams, in effect, were trying to determine if there is enough matter in the universe to force it to one day stop its current expansion and start collapsing inward.

Astronomers have detected what could be a "missing link" in the development of the universe: midsize black holes that are neither supermassive nor as small as a single exploded star. The middling black holes were spotted using the Hubble Space Telescope in two globular star clusters in Earth's celestial neighborhood, astronomers said.

"I wouldn't hire a contractor to build a new bathroom without finding out how much it would cost and how long it would take," Martin Harwit explained during a visit to Caltech in June. "So why should we astronomers go about exploring the universe without knowing how many new phenomena are left to find, how much it is going to cost and how long it will take us to finish the job."

An imaginative new technology that could have a profound impact on astronomy, making it possible for just about any university to own its own major telescope, passed a critical milestone here last week when scientists created in just 24 hours what will become the 11-foot mirror for a new telescope.

Astronomers in Hawaii and California, in separate discoveries, said Monday that they have found a collection of fuzzy interplanetary ice balls in the outer reaches of the solar system that should shed new light on where comets are born and, perhaps, how they die. In the first discovery, U.S. Geological Survey astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County observed bright "pearls on a string" near Jupiter.

Sometimes, astronomy is unreal. Really. Those spectacular pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope of exploding stars and nebulous gas clouds and stars emerging from dusty cocoons are all--to one extent or another--computer-enhanced. The rose-red Martian landscapes and candy-colored rings around Saturn don't reflect what you'd see in a telescope from your backyard. The images are processed, spiffed up, airbrushed and painted like so many Hollywood stars.

Scientists led by a Pasadena astronomer said Tuesday they have used an extraordinarily long exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope to create sharp images of a 4-billion-year-old galaxy cluster that confirms theories that the universe is evolving--"and at a pretty rapid rate." At the same time, in the background of those images, the astronomers serendipitously stumbled upon what appears to be a previously unknown, 10-billion-year-old galaxy cluster.

A group of U.S. astronomers has reported finding what could be dark matter, a key missing component of the universe, in a distant galaxy. The find appears to bolster a similar discovery reported last year. Scientists have been searching for years for evidence that dark matter exists.

A celestial show that has delighted sky-watchers for the past 1,900 years will paint the northeastern sky with meteors this weekend in what is expected to be the best Perseid Meteor Shower in several years. The shower peaks every year on Aug. 10 or 11, when the Earth crosses a broad stream of debris left over from the passage of Comet Swift-Tuttle. But this year, for the first time since 1988, the meteors will streak through the Earth's atmosphere on moonless nights.