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STScI Joins the Search for Other Earths in Space 25 Jun 2009
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The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., is partnering
on a historic search for Earth-size planets around other stars. STScI is the data
archive center for NASA's Kepler mission, a spacecraft that is undertaking a
survey for Earth-size planets in our region of the galaxy. The spacecraft sent its
first raw science data to STScI on June 19. The Institute's role is to convert the raw
science data into files that can be analyzed by Kepler researchers and to store the files
every three months in an archive.
| Hubble Photographs a Planetary Nebula to Commemorate Decommissioning of Super Camera 10 May 2009
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The Hubble community bids farewell to the soon-to-be decommissioned Wide
Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In
tribute to Hubble's longest-running optical camera, planetary nebula K 4-55
has been imaged as WFPC2's final "pretty picture."
| Refined Hubble Constant Narrows Possible Explanations for Dark Energy 07 May 2009
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Less than 100 years ago scientists didn't know if the universe was coming or going,
literally. It even fooled the great mind of Albert Einstein. He assumed the universe must
be static. But to keep the universe from collapsing under gravity like a house of cards,
Einstein hypothesized there was a repulsive force at work, called the cosmological
constant, that counterbalanced gravity's tug. Along came Edwin Hubble in 1923 who
found that galaxies were receding from us at a proportional rate, called the Hubble
constant, which meant the universe was uniformly expanding, so there was no need to
shore it up with any mysterious force from deep space. In measuring how this expansion
was expected to slow down over time, 11 years ago, two studies, one led by Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University and Brian Schmidt
of Mount Stromlo Observatory, and the other by Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, independently discovered dark energy, which seems to behave like
Einstein's cosmological constant.
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