Prometheus
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2010
- Messages
- 4,942
- Reaction score
- -7
- Country
- Location
Hubble celebrates 20 years with dramatic image of Carina Nebula
Twenty years after the launch of the the Hubble Space Telescope, the team behind the project is celebrating the anniversary with a dramatic new image of the Carina Nebula.
The picture shows a cosmic pillar of gas and dust piled high with stars and swirls of radiation created by stellar winds.
Hubble has looked at more than 30,000 celestial targets and amassed more than half a million pictures in its archive.
The most recent astronaut-servicing mission to Hubble, in May 2009, made the telescope 100 times more powerful than when it was launched.
In addition to a wealth of scientific information, including demonstrations of the existence of dark matter and insights into the life and death of supernovae, Hubble has captured the publics imagination.
Hubble is undoubtedly one of the most recognised and successful scientific projects in history, said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa Headquarters in Washington.
Last years servicing mission left the observatory operating at peak capacity, giving it a new beginning for scientific achievements.
To create the latest image, Hubbles new Wide Field Camera 3 took portraits of the Carina Nebula through six filters three in visible light and three in infrared.
All were radioed to Earth as black-and-white images, then coloured and combined into a composite image.
We wanted to have an image that will be at least as spectacular as the iconic pillars of creation, said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, referring to a widely reproduced 1995 Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula.
Hubbles road to success has not always been smooth.
Soon after the telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, astronomers realised that the mirror was the wrong shape, which produced a blurred halo around the first images.
Hubble also suffered from unexpected shaking due to solar winds as it went from sunlight to darkness on each orbit, and the press was quick to label the telescope a techno turkey.
However, its successes soon began to outweigh technical hitches. Hubble has allowed us to peer into the distant past, to when the Universe was only 10 per cent of its current age, to an era before galaxies were formed and the Universe consisted of clumps of glowing, diffuse gases that had not yet condensed into stars.
More recently, it has begun to address the possibility that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe through the hunt for Earth-like planets.
During the past ten years astronomers have learnt that large numbers of potentially habitable worlds exist in orbit around other stars
Hubble celebrates 20 years with dramatic image of Carina Nebula - Times Online
