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Hubble Probes the Invisible Halo of a Galaxy

Hubble Probes the Invisible Halo of a Galaxy
Distant quasars serve as distant lighthouse beacons that shine through the gas-rich "fog" of hot plasma encircling galaxies. At ultraviolet wavelengths, Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is sensitive to absorption from many ionized heavy elements, such as nitrogen, oxygen, and neon. COS's high sensitivity allows many galaxies that happen to lie in front of the much more distant quasars to be studied. The ionized heavy elements serve as proxies for estimating how much mass is in a galaxy's halo.
  • Release Date
    November 17, 2011
  • Science Release
    NASA’s Hubble Confirms that Galaxies Are the Ultimate Recyclers
    Read the release
  • Credit
    Illustration: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI); Science: NASA, ESA, N. Lehner (University of Notre Dame), T. Tripp (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), and J. Tumlinson (STScI)

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Last Updated
Mar 28, 2025
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Media

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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