Category: Hubble

It’s time for another amazing image from Hubble. You’re looking at nebula NGC 3603, one of the most spectacular star forming regions in the Milky Way. It’s located about 20,000 light-years away from the Earth, in the Carina spiral arm. Apart from offering up pretty pictures, this region is important for science too. Birth and death, gas and dust, NGC 3603 has it all.

This Hubble image shows many different things happening, all at the same time. Most of the stars in the image were all born in the nebula, and differ in size, mass, temperature and colour. There are some absolute monsters in there, dozens of times the mass of our own Sun. These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly, and blowing out fearsome ultraviolet radiation. The combined radiation of all the stars has carved out an enormous cavity of gas and dust in the centre of the nebula – the clear region in the middle.

According to astronomers, the most massive stars are concentrated into the centre of the cluster. In fact, three of them seem to have more mass than is theoretically possible. Instead of single stars; however, they might be binary pairs, so close that even Hubble can’t distinguish them. The largest star was measured with a mass of 115 times the mass of our Sun. So, either the observations or the theories are wrong; stay tuned to see how this one plays out.

Around the swirling nebula are some darker regions called Bok globules. These are dark clouds of gas and dust with the mass of about 10-50 times our Sun. They’re under the process of collapsing, and will eventually form stars, but for now they’re some of the coldest objects in the Universe. You need cold gas before you can get hot stars.

The entire nebula seems contain about 400,000 times the mass of the Sun. That’s enough material for plenty of stars.

Original Source: ESA Hubble News Release

Planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful objects in the Universe. Don’t let the name confuse you, though, they have nothing to do with planets. They’re all that’s left behind when stars at the end of their lives cast off their outer layers into space. Here’s a nice image released from the Hubble Space Telescope, containing 4 different planetary nebulae.

As a star like our Sun reaches the end of its long life, its ejects its outer layers in a series of dramatic events. The ultraviolet light from the star illuminates the material, causing it to glow like we see in this Hubble photograph. This same ultraviolet light also disperses the cloud of material, pushing it outward so that it eventually fades away into the vacuum of space.

Although the star might have lived for 10 billion years, its planetary nebula lasts for just a moment – only 10,000 years.

In this Hubble image there are 4 planetary nebula.

At the top left is He 2-47, nicknamed the “starfish” because of its shape. It has six different lobes, which indicates that the original star shed material three different times in three different directions. With each ejection event, the star blasted out twin jets of material.

At the top right is NGC 5315, which seems to have an x-shaped structure. As with the previous nebula, it suffered two different ejection events, casting away its outer layers and firing out jets in opposite directions.

IC 4593 is on the bottom left, and it’s in the northern constellation Hercules. My good friend Phil Plait actually did a cool write up about this object, so I link you to his site for the scoop.

And finally, NGC 5307 is down at the bottom right, and has a beautiful spiral pattern. The dying star might have had a serious wobble as it was expelling gas, creating the complex shapes in the picture.

Original Source: Hubble News Release

Let’s go back, way back, to an earlier time when the Universe was a fraction of its current age. Tiny galaxies, just a fraction of the mass of the Milky Way came together, piece by piece, building up larger and larger galaxies. Well, we don’t have a time machine, but we’ve got the next best things: Hubble and Spitzer, which were called upon to look back into the distant Universe, to watch this process unfold.

The new data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope reveal a collection of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever seen. These aren’t the majestic spiral galaxies we know and love, but primordial building block galaxies that played an important role in the evolution of the structure of the Universe. The two great observatories saw these galaxies when they were just a billion years after the Big Bang; in other words, the galaxies are more than 12 billion light years away.

The images from Hubble are key. It saw galaxies that only contained blue stars just a few million years old. These young, hot stars haven’t had a previous generation before them. They’re using the pure raw material of the Big Bang – mostly hydrogen and helium – as their fuel, unpolluted by heavier elements. Spitzer came in after and helped make accurate measurements of the galaxies’ masses.

“These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe,” says Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency in Baltimore, Md.

Three of the galaxies look distorted, with the familiar tadpole shape of a galaxy in a gravitational tangle with another galaxy. And this is how it started. These tiny galaxies merged with one another, growing into larger and larger objects, and eventually spirals like our own Milky Way.

The earliest time of the Universe is gradually coming into focus, thanks to these observatories.

Original Source: Hubble News Release

All right, this is the coolest thing ever. You know Google Earth, that cool software application that lets you explore satellite photography of the whole planet. Well, some clever Google engineers have flipped the software inside out, letting you explore the Universe with a similar interface.

This new addition to Google Earth is called “Sky in Google Earth”. It allows you to zoom around the heavens, with various Hubble Space Telescope images highlighted. You can click on the special objects, like the Orion Nebula, and then see the Hubble photograph of the region.

The images of the entire sky are made up from the Digitized Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Digitized Sky Survey covers almost the entire sky, contains about a million objects. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey only has about 25% of the sky covered, but in much more detail, comprising hundreds of millions of images.

For all the images captured by Hubble, you can see bigger versions of the images, and then link out to press releases and additional resources on the web.

I’ve got to say, I’m really impressed with the way this project has started out. I can envision a future where more and more sky surveys are put into the program, and maybe even different observatories, so you can see what the sky looks like in X-rays, infrared, etc.

I think this will also help highlight how little of the sky has actually been captured in any detail. Perhaps this will spur on the development of additional robotic sky surveys to continue capturing the Universe in greater and greater detail. Still, it’s an amazing start – nice work Google.

To get a copy of Google Earth, go to http://earth.google.com/. The latest version of the software, 4.2, contains the additional sky watching features.

Original Source: Hubble News Release

Now this is one of the coolest images I’ve seen captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in a long time. It’s just a portion of the Veil Nebula; all that remains from a star that exploded about 5-10,000 years ago.

The star that created this wreckage was once much larger than our own Sun. Instead of dying out to a white dwarf – the fate for our Sun – it detonated as a supernova. The explosion swept out a huge bubble in its surroundings, heating up gas and dust, and becoming visible in our telescopes.

The Veil Nebula is huge. The entire shell covers about 3 degrees of the sky. That’s the same amount as 6 full moons. So these images captured by Hubble only reveal tiny portions of it. If you follow along to the original press release, you’ll see a series of 8 images in total, each focused on a different part of the nebula.

Scientists think that the original star exploded 5-10,000 years ago, and would have been seen by ancient civilizations. Anyone fortunate enough to be alive then would have seen light from the star increase until it was as bright as a crescent moon. But all this light would be streaming from a single point source. Amazing.

If you want to see the Veil Nebula for yourself, it’s located in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. The brightest star in the region is named 52 Cygni, and can be seen with the unaided eye on a dark night. You’ll need binoculars to see a hazy bit where the nebula is, and and a nice telescope to reveal more.

Original Source:ESA Hubble News Release

This latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the dwarf galaxy NGC 4449, located about 12.5 million light-years away. Although the galaxy has been around for billions of years, it recently went through a period of intense star formation.

Most starburst galaxies concentrate their stellar formation around the crowded galactic core, but in NGC 4449, the active regions extend out across more of the galaxy. This will only last for another billion years or so, when the gas supply that feeds the star forming regions runs out. It will then stay quiet until it has a close encounter with another galaxy, starting the process all over again.

A galaxy like NGC 4449 resembles what the first primordial galaxies probably looked like, formed shortly after the Big Bang when the Universe was young. Many small galaxies merged together forming larger and larger galaxies until they became the majestic spirals we see today. Each new merger brings in a fresh supply of raw materials as well as the gravitational interactions to force gas clouds to collapse.

Original Source:Hubble

Kaboom kaboom. That’s what an international team of astronomers saw when they tracked the death of one of the most massive stars that can exist.

Japanese supernova hunter, Koichi Itagaki, first discovered an exploding star in the galaxy UGC4904 back in 2004. It flared briefly and then faded away over the course of 10 days. Two years later, he discovered another supernova in exactly the same location.

Subsequent observations with larger telescopes confirmed that the supernova, named SN2006jc, did indeed happen at exactly the same location as the previous detonation. The 2004 event must have just been a large outburst, similar to what was seen on Eta-Carinae back in the 1850s.

The researchers think this kind of event could actually be more common than previously believed. A new survey called Pan-STARRS may check up on previous supernova events to see if there’s any new activity.

Original Source: Queen’s University Belfast News Release