...and many more
The Hubble Space Telescope turns 30 tomorrow, Friday, April 24! It’s one of the greatest scientific instruments ever built.
I won’t talk about the history of the Hubble or try to get into how it works, because plenty of others have done a great job of that. This is more about appreciation of the good, and even a little bit of escapism, because I think we can all use that.
I wish images were allowed to be wider here on Daily Kos, but I’ll provide links so you can still see these images in their full glory. You can zoom in on a lot of them after you go to the link by mousing over and clicking the little + sign.
The Hubble has taken over a million images, and your favorites will no doubt be different from mine. A good place to browse is the gallery at The Hubble Heritage Project, but even that is only the tip of the iceberg. Another fun one is the Atlantic’s Hubble Advent Calendar. By all means, share your favorite shots in the comments.
You can even find the best image taken on your birthday at NASA’s website. Why, let’s take a look at Joe Biden’s birthday, November 20:
Arp 148 (500 million light-years away!) is the aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and an elongated companion. The shapes and arrangement of the galaxies suggest that this is a snapshot of an ongoing collision.
Now what we seem to have here is a blue galaxy mercilessly consuming an unnaturally orange galaxy headfirst. Coincidence? Or a cosmic harbinger of what is to come? You decide.
Anyway, I want to start with a real icon, something that anyone with even a passing interest in the night sky will know, and show how the Hubble redefined it.
This is the fabulous Horsehead Nebula, viewed through a very good 8-inch backyard telescope with a 5-minute exposure. It’s not easy to find or image for amateurs because of the very bright objects near it:
Hey, there it is!
We can do a lot better with a big ground-based telescope like the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii:
Whoa, great silhouette! Definitely a horsehead … or possibly a spray bottle of disinfectant
But now let’s see what the Hubble was able to show us with a near-infrared image:
Gah! Are you kidding me?
That really brings out the 3-D nature of it! Now we see much more clearly the origin of its shape. The illumination from nearby stars makes it look like some kind of dreamland.
Now, I know a lot of people would pick big, grandiose images like the Pillars of Creation (and I mean, yeah, click the link, because it’s frickin’ awesome), but I’ve got a real soft spot for this:
Protostar IRAS 20324+4057
This is a protostar, a star actually caught in the process of being born, about 4,500 light-years away from us. The bright material at the head will condense to form a star, maybe a Sun like ours that will warm a planet that will harbor life one day. Gravity is pulling things at the core together, but ionizing radiation from nearby stars is eroding gases away. How big will the star end up? It’ll take about 100,000 more years for everything to settle so we can find out. Best of luck to you, young solar system! You’ve got a lot of history to write.
An object you may have been lucky enough to spot in a telescope is the Ring Nebula, a popular target at star parties:
The Ring Nebula through an 8-inch telescope, 140-minute exposure
But how about a couple of Hubble versions? A wider-field view:
Wide field for all the fainter details of the shape
Or a close-up:
Ummmmm….
The white dwarf star in the center is what our own Sun should look like in a few billion years.
The Hubble’s longevity is a real asset, because we can follow things over time. First let’s look at a dramatically beautiful region like the Veil Nebula:
Called the Veil Nebula, the debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants, deriving its name from its delicate, draped filamentary structures. The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering six full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.
...but then we can also compare images from 1997 and 2015, to view the nebula’s motion over 18 years. These massive objects seem to be still, but they are not:
The Veil Nebula in action
Want to feel the scale of the Universe a little? Let’s check out a galaxy called Hercules A:
Radio galaxy Hercules A
The bright white dot in the center is an entire galaxy 1,000 times more massive than our own Milky Way, and each of the jets shooting out of it, caused by its central black hole, extend out over a million light-years. That’s the distance from Earth to Pluto … times about 2 BILLION. And the whole Hercules A complex is an adorably tiny speck of the Universe. So what kind of carpeting were you thinking of for your living room again?
Mind-stretching, but not aesthetically pleasing enough? I think we can fix that:
The Eskimo Nebula, a Sun-like star about 10,000 years after its outer layers got ejected.
The complex forms of the gas clouds of the Eskimo Nebula are still not well-understood. But that’s OK, because it’s one of the coolest space objects you’ll ever see.
This tour could go on for a very, very long time, but I’ll conclude with the giant Carina Nebula, a vast area of star-forming activity right here in our own Milky Way Galaxy:
The Great Carina Nebula, 300 light-years across, 7,500 light-years away
One of its highlights is a symbol as big as our entire Solar System — one that should reassure you that we’re all in this together if you’ve ever felt like you’re cosmically screwed — the “Finger of God”:
A divine sense of humor
What a fascinating Universe! Made even more so by the Hubble Space Telescope, 30 years young and — I can unreservedly say — a national treasure.
❤️ ❤️ ❤️
