This image of a pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273 was released to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The space observatory known as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was conceived during the 1970's. Although the idea of a space telescope was originally proposed in 1923 the technology to build and launch one didn't exist then. Originally scheduled to launch in 1983 delays, both technological and monetary, meant it was not launched until 1990. It's low-Earth orbit allows observation without the distortion of the atmosphere. Since then it has changed many of the original suppositions about the Universe and posed new questions.
This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing colour — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
The telescope has a 2.4m mirror and can observe in ultra-violet, visible and near infra-red regions of the electo-magnetic spectrum. This allows it to look further and to see more than any telescope before, even enabling it to determine the rate of the expansion of the Universe. Additionally it was built so that it could be visited and maintained by astronauts. Five missions have so far serviced the Hubble, the first managing to correct an optical distortion caused by the incorrect grinding of the mirror prior to launch. It is still operating and could function until some time between 2030 and 2040.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-coloured elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.
The HST was built by NASA with input from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the next stage space telescope, due to be launched in 2021 and called the James Webb Space Telescope, contains eighteen hexagonal mirror segments increasing the mirror to a massive 6.5m diameter. The Canadian Space Agency is also a part of this project. As well as having a mirror six times larger that HST it will be able to look at other ranges in the electro-magnetic sphere and so bring pictcures from space of new objects not previously observed.
The star-forming region NGC 3603 - seen here in the latest Hubble Space Telescope image - contains one of the most impressive massive young star clusters in the Milky Way. Bathed in gas and dust the cluster formed in a huge rush of star formation thought to have occurred around a million years ago. The hot blue stars at the core are responsible for carving out a huge cavity in the gas seen to the right of the star cluster in NGC 3603's centre.
But HST has already brought many fantastic photographs of distant galaxies, exploding stars, hydrogen clouds that are the mixing bowl for new galaxies and even the edges of the universe where light has already taken billions of years to reach us.
This stunning image of NGC 1275 was taken using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in July and August 2006. It provides amazing detail and resolution of the fragile filamentary structures, which show up as a reddish lacy structure surrounding the central bright galaxy NGC 1275. These filaments are cool despite being surrounded by gas that is around 55 million degrees Celsius hot. They are suspended in a magnetic field which maintains their structure and demonstrates how energy from the central black hole is transferred to the surrounding gas. By observing the filamentary structure, astronomers were, for the first time, able to estimate the magnetic field's strength. Using this information they demonstrated how the extragalactic magnetic fields have maintained the structure of the filaments against collapse caused by either gravitational forces or the violence of the surrounding cluster during their 100-million-year lifetime. Astonishingly, they distinguished threads a mere 200 light-years across. By contrast, the filaments seen here can be a gaping 200 000 light-years long. The entire image is approximately 260 000 light-years across. Several striking filaments of blue newborn stars are seen crossing the image.
As a part of the government contract with NASA images produced by them and the Space Telescope Science Institute are freely available for use and I acknowledge their role in producing the images used here.
What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to nearly 20 000 degrees Celsius. The gas is tearing across space at more than 950 000 kilometres per hour . A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the centre of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the Servicing Mission to upgrade and repair the (then) 19-year-old Hubble. NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3800 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The central star itself cannot be seen, because it is hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, which appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the centre. The thick dust belt constricts the star's outflow, creating the classic "bipolar" or hourglass shape displayed by some planetary nebulae. The star's surface temperature is estimated to be over 220 000 degrees Celsius, making it one of the hottest known stars in our galaxy.
You can see the top one hundred images produced by HST by clicking here. A book, The Expanding Universe published by Taschen is also available and contains 260 pages in a 29cm square format. Click here for details.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed Saturn on 20 June 2019 as the planet made its closest approach to Earth this year, at approximately 1.36 billion kilometres away.
