Carbon Monoxide Abundance Points to Comet's Birth Around Cooler Star: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has once again observed the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. New data offers chemical clues to the composition of an object born around another star. Comets are made of gas, ice, and dust that are part of a planet's building blocks. Borisov's unusual abundance of carbon monoxide, as deduced through Hubble ultraviolet spectroscopic observations, is largely unlike comets belonging to our solar system. Researchers say this abundance points to the comet originating from a circumstellar disk around a class of star called a cool red dwarf.

Name: 2I/Borisov
Type: Milky Way : Interplanetary Body : Comet
Category: Solar System
Release date: 5 May 2020, 09:47
Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Meech (University of Hawaii), and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

HST WC/PC first light image: On the right is part of the first image taken with NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) Wide Field Planetary Camera. It is shown with a ground-based picture from Las Campanas, Chile, Observatory of the same region of the sky. The Las Campanas picture was taken with a 100-inch telescope and its typical of high quality pictures obtained from the ground. All objects seen are stars within the Milky Way galaxy. The images of the stars in the ground-based picture are fuzzy and in some cases are overlapping, because of smearing by the Earth's atmosphere. The same stars in the HST frame are sharper and well resolved, as shown by the double star at the top of the image. By avoiding the Earth's atmosphere, the HST gives sharper images and better resolution. In this early engineering picture, the HST images are roughly 50 percent sharper than the ground-based images.

Name: HD96755
Type: Milky Way : Star
Category: Stars
Distance: 1700 light years
Release date: 20 May 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA

The resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope: The image on the right is a portion of the first image returned by the Wide Field Planetary Camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. On the left is a ground based image of the same area of the sky. The object shown in these images is a double star: the pair of stars is well separated in the HST image but blurred together in the ground based image.

Name: Double Star
Type: Unspecified : Star
Category: Stars
Release date: 22 May 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA

ESA's faint object camera first images: Two views of a small (4.6 by 6.2 arcsecond) star field in the galactic cluster NGC 188 containing two stars separated by 2.9 arcseconds in the sky. Located at a distance of about 5,000 light years, both stars are far too remote for their surfaces to be resolved, and are therefore suitable point sources for evaluating optical imaging quality. The ground-based image on the left was obtained with the 2.5 meter Nordic Optical Telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma. At the time this exposure was taken the atmospheric conditions were such that the stellar images were blurred to an apparent diameter of 1.9 arcseconds - somewhat poorer than typically found at this excellent site.

Name: NGC 188
Type: Milky Way : StarMilky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster
Category: Galaxies
Distance: 6000 light years
Release date: 22 June 1990, 06:00
Credit: ESA and NASA

Hubble Space Telescope resolves gaseous ring around supernova: HST has resolved, to an unprecedented detail of 0.1 arc second, a mysterious elliptical ring of material around the remnants of Supernova 1987A. In this image, taken with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on August 23, 1990 the ring appears as a yellow ellipse. The tightly knotted debris from the stellar explosion appears as a red blob near the center of the ring. The blue stars to the left and right of the ring are not associated with the supernova.

Name: LMC SN, SN 1987A
Type: Local Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 29 August 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA and ESA

HST image of a galaxy's Nucleus: This Hubble Space Telescope view of galaxy NGC 7457, was taken on August 17, 1990 with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera. The picture on the left with high contrast shows the central portion of the galaxy. Predictably, the density of the starry population smoothly increases toward the galactic center. The picture on the right is of the same galaxy, but the contrast has been adjusted to reveal a surprisingly high concentration of stars pinpointed exactly at the galaxy's core. The nucleus is so compact it is even beyond HST's .1 arc second resolution. Stars are crammed together at least 30,000 times more densely than they are in our own stellar neighborhood. It is not yet known how this tight core is gravitationally held together.

Name: NGC 7457
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Component : Center/Core
Category: Galaxies
Distance: 40 million light years
Release date: 29 August 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA

HST and ground based telescope photo: The accompanying illustration consists of four images of the remarkable cluster of tightly-packed young stars in the 30 Doradus Nebula, 160,000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy. Panel A (upper left) is a portion of a photograph made with the Wide Field/Planetary Camera on HST on August 3, 1990. The camera photographed four adjoining sky regions simultaneously, which are here assembled in a mosaic.

Name: 30 Dor, 30 Doradus Nebula, R136
Type: Local Universe : Star : Grouping : ClusterLocal Universe : Nebula
Category: Nebulae
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 13 August 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA

Star cluster R136 - wide field and planetary camera: Computer processing of the HST image sharpens the appearance of the cluster by subtracting stellar halos introduced by spherical aberration in the HST optics.

Name: 30 Doradus, R136
Type: Local Universe : Star : Grouping : ClusterLocal Universe : Nebula
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 13 August 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA

Star cluster R136 - ESO 2.2m Telescope: This is a 2.7 X 2.7 arc minute view of star cluster R136 as seen from a ground-based telescope under exceptional observing conditions. Star images are as small as 0.6 arc second.

Name: 30 Doradus, R136
Type: Local Universe : Star : Grouping : ClusterLocal Universe : Nebula
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 13 August 1990, 06:00
Credit: George Meylan and ESO

Star cluster R136 - wide field and planetary camera: This unprocessed image, taken with NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, yields stellar diameters of 0.1 arc second, allowing many more stars to be distinguished than in previous ground-based telescope images.

Name: 30 Doradus, R136
Type: Local Universe : Star : Grouping : ClusterLocal Universe : Nebula
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 13 August 1990, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA

Globular star cluster M14: This pair of images of a region in the globular star cluster M-14, (located 70,000 light-years away) clearly demonstrate the high spatial resolution of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, as compared to the view from a ground-based telescope. The image on the left, taken with the 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, has a resolution of 1.5 arc seconds. The image on the right, taken with European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera (FOC) aboard HST, yields stellar diameters of 0.08 arc second.

Name: M 14, Messier 14, NGC 6402
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : Globular
Category: Star Clusters
Distance: 35000 light years
Release date: 14 October 1990, 05:00
Credit: NASA/ESA