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Galaxy Cluster Abell 2218 - a Cosmic Magnifying Glass  Scanning the heavens for the first time since the successful December 1999 servicing mission, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a giant, cosmic magnifying glass, a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 2218. This 'hefty' cluster resides in the constellation Draco, some 2 billion light-years from Earth. Hubble and Keck's newly discovered galaxy 'building block'  his NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a newly discovered very small, faint galaxy 'building block' found via a unique collaboration between ground- and space-based telescopes. Hubble and the 10 metre Keck Telescopes in Hawaii joined forces using a galaxy cluster which acts as a gravitational lens to detect what scientists believe is one of the smallest and most distant objects ever found. The galaxy cluster Abell 2218 was used by a team of European and American astronomers led by Richard Ellis (Caltech, USA) in their systematic search for intrinsically faint distant star-forming systems. Without the help from this cluster's magnifying power (it magnifies by around 30 times) the galaxy building block would have been undetectable with present facilities. The object is seen distorted into two nearly identical, very red 'images' by the gravitational lens. The image pair represents the magnified result of a single background object gravitationally lensed by Abell 2218 and viewed at a distance of 13.4 billion light-years. The intriguing object contains only one million stars, far fewer than a mature galaxy, and Ellis and co-workers believe it is very young. Such young star-forming systems of low mass at early cosmic times are likely to be the objects from which the mature galaxies around us today have formed. Hubble Goes 'Deep' to Sample Young Galaxies  NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reached back to nearly the beginning of time to sample thousands of infant galaxies. This image, taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows several thousand galaxies, many of which appear to be interacting or in the process of forming. Some of these galaxies existed when the cosmos was less than about 2 billion years old. The foreground galaxies, however, are much closer to Earth. Two of them [the white, elongated galaxies, left of center] appear to be colliding.<BR><BR>This image represents less than one-tenth of the entire field surveyed by Hubble. The full field, consisting of about 25,000 galaxies, is part of a larger survey called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), the most ambitious study of the early universe yet undertaken with the Hubble telescope. This survey targeted two representative spots in the sky - one in the Northern Hemisphere and the other in the Southern Hemisphere. This image represents the southern field, located in the constellation Fornax. The entire GOODS survey reveals roughly 50,000 galaxies. Astronomers have identified more than 2,000 of them as infant galaxies, observed when the universe was less than about 2 billion years old.
The Spiral Galaxy M100  An image of the grand design of spiral galaxy M100 obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope resolves individual stars within the majestic spiral arms. (These stars typically appeared blurred together when viewed with ground-based telescopes). The Cartwheel Galaxy  Located 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor, the galaxy looks like a wagon wheel. The galaxy's nucleus is the bright object in the center of the image; the spoke-like structures are wisps of material connecting the nucleus to the outer ring of young stars. The galaxy's unusual configuration was created by a nearly head-on collision with a smaller galaxy about 200 million years ago. Ground-based image of the galaxy cluster CL0024+1654  This is a color image of the galaxy cluster CL0024+1654 obtained with the CFHT12k camera at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea (Hawaii). The cluster clearly appears as a concentration of yellow galaxies in the center of this image although cluster galaxies actually extend at least to the edge of this image. This image measures 21 x 21 arc-minutes.
M100   Hubble Deep Field Details  Representing a narrow 'keyhole' view stretching all the way to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky a tiny fraction the diameter of the full Moon. This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way Galaxy are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more distant galaxies. Galaxy Playing Twister  The Hubble telescope has captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars. The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on. This Hubble Heritage image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that, by contrast, has an unusual twisted disk structure, first seen in ground-based photographs.
Bar in spiral galaxy NGC 2903  This colorful image, obtained by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a close-up of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2903. The galaxy bears a close resemblance to our Milky Way, which is also believed to be a barred spiral galaxy. Huge dust lanes appearing dark in the image and lots of young stars gathered in hot blue clusters, are sprinkled all over the spiral arms. Barred spirals are excellent laboratories with which to study the processes that trigger star formation. An international group of astronomers has used Hubble to study how the galaxy's bar (seen as the reddish glow running diagonally through the image) feeds material to form new stars near the center. The newly born stars show up partly in a so-called circumnuclear ring around the bright yellowish core of the galaxy and partly as bright star clusters (white knots in the circumnuclear ring). The image was combined from three separate exposures in visible light lasting 820 seconds. The red part of the image was exposed through a 820 nm filter, the green through a 520 nm filter and the blue through a 331 nm filter. Hubble Finds Variable Stars in Distant Spiral Galaxy  A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) view of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4603, the most distant galaxy in which a special class of pulsating stars called Cepheid variables have been found. It is associated with the Centaurus cluster, one of the most massive assemblages of galaxies in the nearby universe.<BR><BR>The Local Group of galaxies, of which the Milky Way is a member, is moving in the direction of Centaurus at a speed of more than a million miles an hour under the influence of the gravitational pull of the matter in that direction. Galaxy NGC 3079  A lumpy bubble of hot gas rises from a cauldron of glowing matter in a distant galaxy, as seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
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