Servicing Mission 4 went off without a hitch in May, a team of astronauts successfully completing what was perhaps the most challenging Hubble mission ever. Since then, Hubble has been slowly coming awake as scientists and engineers carefully restore its many components to full power. It’ll be another month before the first official new images from Hubble, but in July an unexpected astronomical event gave us a sneak preview of one of the telescope’s new instruments.

• What's Next For Hubble?
• Hubble Captures Rare Jupiter Collision

Betelgeuse and its location in Orion.

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is shrinking, and astronomers aren’t sure why. One of the largest stars we know, Betelgeuse could occupy the space from the Sun out to the Planet Jupiter, engulfing the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Since 1993, it’s shrunk about 15 percent. Betelgeuse’s size determines that it will die as a supernova, lighting up Earth’s skies for months after the light from its explosion reaches us.

• New Scientist on Betelgeuse's size changes.
• HubbleSite on Betelgeuse.
• Universe Today on the biggest stars around.

The changing orbits of planets have the potential for danger.

Astronomers calculate that there’s a tiny chance, a billion or more years from now, that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth. The new finding comes from simulations that show how orbits of planets might evolve. There’s also a chance that Mercury could strike Venus and merge into larger planet, that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter, or even that Jupiter’s gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of the solar system.

• BBC article and video clip on the potential orbits.
• Space.com story on planet collision.

Newborn stars in the center of the Milky Way

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a chaotic, harsh place, home to shock waves, intense radiation, and a supermassive black hole. You might think all these elements would prohibit new stars from forming or rip apart any object shortly after it was formed. But a few years ago, infrared observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope indicated that clusters of stars could indeed form in this region. Now new observations have detected brand new stars near the galaxy center. The “baby” stars can be distinguished from similar-looking older stars because they are still imbedded in the molecular cloud in which they formed. Might these objects form planetary systems, since they have lots of dusty material around them?

• Spitzer Space Telescope news release on the discovery.

Hubble blocked the light of the central star to directly observe a planet, larger than Jupiter, in this solar system.

Astronomers are inventing new ways to find planets around other stars. Most of the methods used thus far don’t involve actually seeing the planet; its presence is inferred from observations of the parent star. A large, Jupiter sized planet can be detected b y the “wobble” its gravity causes in the parent star’s motion. Other planets pass in front of their host stars, making them detectable by the dimming of the stars’ light.
A new idea is to block out the light from a bright star so that faint planets can be detected. This technique would be used to obtain direct images of the planets that normally cannot be seen right next to the bright star.
The device that blocks the starlight is called a starshade and would be placed in orbit far from the main telescope. The starshade is a clever concept, but would be tricky to engineer.

• Scientific American on the starshade concept.

The composition of a neutron star.

Neutron stars are the remnants of dead stars that have collapsed into small objects with incredible density. Their crusts could be 10 billion times stronger than steel. Forces from within the star crack the crust during “star quakes,” events similar to earthquakes, and blast powerful gamma rays into space.

• Space.com on neutron star crusts.
• National Geographic on neutron star crusts.

An asteroid strikes Earth in this artist’s depiction. Credit: Don Davis/NASA

Asteroids – were they a boon or bane when they struck Earth billions of years ago? One would think the period of bombardment was not a good thing for a planet! But a new study shows that the bombardment may actually have created environments where microbial organisms could have survived if they were already there. The study also suggests that such environments may have existed on other planets, such as Mars.

• NASA reports the study.
• University of Colorado news release on the study.
• NASA's astrobiology page.

Astronaut Scott Parazynski on Mount Everest.

A former NASA astronaut is searching for signs of hardy life on Mount Everest, which could provide a window into extreme environments that organisms might inhabit on hostile-appearing planets elsewhere in universe. Scott Parazynski’s mission makes him the first astronaut to scale Mount Everests.

• AOL on the astronaut's trip.
• Discovery Channel Q&A with astronaut Scott Parazynski.
• Space.com on the climb.