Tagged: telescope

After years of planning, construction and assembly, a gigantic observatory billed as the world’s most complex array of ground-based telescopes has opened its eyes in South America and captured its first image. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, is now officially open for business...

The graceful arcs at the center of this image from the Hubble Space Telescope are actually the distorted light of distant galaxies, twisted to form an “Einstein ring” by the gravitational influence of the closer galaxy cluster SDSS J0146-0929. The perfect circle surrounding a galaxy...

SEATTLE — Despite recent issues with one of its instruments, the Hubble Space Telescope is expected to last at least another five years. A new report suggests that the iconic spacecraft has a strong chance of enduring through the mid-2020s. “Right now, all of the...

One of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most famous images peered even deeper into the cosmos than scientists had thought. That photo is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), which combines hundreds of images taken by the space telescope over multiple years into the deepest view of...

NASA’s newest planet-hunting telescope is hard at work gathering its first data — but just how many planets might it hunt down? According to new estimates put together by scientists on the team behind the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, the instrument should identify...

Before we get into the meat of the question, let’s start off by explaining why we’re asking about the oldest thing ever spotted through a telescope. The set-up sounds suspiciously like an astronomy-themed vaudeville routine or something: “I looked through the Hubble Telescope and saw...

It would be lovely to think that when a telescope is very, very old, it’s driven to a really nice farm outside the city where it’s free to spend its days gazing at pastoral scenes. Unfortunately, the reality is much more varied — and occasionally,...

If you’ve been following the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope (set for a 2018 launch), you might’ve heard it described as an improvement on the Hubble Space Telescope. Unlike old lame Hubble, which is barely able to see anything, JWST is going to...

Notice the caveat included in the question: the first telescope humans (emphasis on humans) launched into space. When we talk about space exploration, we upright mammals get a little bit high on our horses, thinking we’re the masters not only of our domain, but also...

For thousands of years our species has gazed at the stars. First we built myths to explain the movements of the heavens. Later, we built technology to examine these events: things like astrolabes, telescopes and the Antikythera mechanism. And here’s the thing: We’re still building....