The 100 Meter Green Bank Radio Telescope
11.03.2002

The largest single-dish fully steerable radio telescope began operation in 2000 August in Green Bank, West Virginia, USA. Dedicated as the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the device weighs over 30 times more than the Statue of Liberty, and yet can point anywhere in the sky more precisely than one thousandth of a degree.

VLT: A New Largest Optical Telescope
1.09.1996

What is the largest telescope in the world? In the optical, this title was long held by the Hale 200-inch, and is presently held by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. But an even larger optical telescope is being built.

Galaxy Cluster Abell S1063 and Beyond
22.07.2016

Some 4 billion light-years away, galaxies of massive Abell S1063 cluster near the center of this sharp Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. But the fainter bluish arcs are magnified images of galaxies that lie far beyond Abell S1063.

Star Forming Region Hubble V
25.12.2001

How did stars form in the early universe? Astronomers are gaining insight by studying NGC 6822, a nearby galaxy classified as irregular by modern standards but appearing more typical of galaxies billions of years ago. Inspection of NGC 6822 shows several bright star groups, including two dubbed Hubble-X and Hubble-V.

Roque de los Muchachos Observatory
19.08.2002

Above the clouds, atop an island off the coast of Africa, a group of cutting-edge telescopes inspects the universe. Pictured above are telescopes at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, Spain. The site is one of the premier observing locations on Earth.

Galaxy and Cluster Create Four Images of Distant Supernova
8.03.2015

What are the unusual spots surrounding that galaxy? They are all images of the same supernova. For the first time, a single supernova explosion has been seen split into multiple images by the gravitational lens deflections of intervening masses. In this case the masses are a large galaxy and its home galaxy cluster.

Swift Launches
22.11.2004

Where do gamma ray bursts occur? To help find out, NASA launched the Swift satellite on Saturday, as pictured above. What Swift is designed to do better than any previous satellite is to quickly locate these enigmatic explosions in both sky position and distance.

The Hercules Cluster of Galaxies
27.04.2005

These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of "island universes" a mere 650 million light-years distant. This cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star forming, spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars.

A Telescope Laser Creates an Artificial Star
7.02.2005

What do you get when you combine one of the world's most powerful telescopes with a powerful laser? An artificial star. Monitoring fluctuations in brightness of a genuine bright star can indicate how the Earth's atmosphere is changing, but many times no bright star exists in the direction where atmospheric information is needed.

Planck Maps the Microwave Background
22.07.2018

What is our universe made of? To help find out, ESA launched the Planck satellite from 2009 to 2013 to map, in unprecedented detail, slight temperature differences on the oldest optical surface known -- the background sky when our universe first became transparent to light.