New Hubble Telescope images / video: Pillars of Creation The Eagle Nebula
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula #39;s Pillars of Creation. This time Hubble has not...
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New Hubble Telescope images / video: Pillars of Creation The Eagle Nebula - Video
Hubble Telescope Re-Captures Pillars Of Creation In Stunning HD
The Hubble Telescope celebrates its 25th anniversary in April, and to get ready for the festivities it recently revisited one of its most popular locales, th...
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Hubble Telescope Re-Captures Pillars Of Creation In Stunning HD - Video
A striking photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the "Pillars of Creation" more than two decades after the cosmic columns of gas were first photographed by NASA's orbiting telescope.
The new high-definition photo is wider and shows the silhouettes of the pillars as they are surrounded by stars.
Located nearly 7,000 light years away in the distant M16 part of the Eagle Nebula, the new image is even more breathtaking than the one captured by Hubble in 1995.
The first photo of the "Pillars of Creation" showed stunning detail of three columns of gas and stars of the Eagle Nebula and captivated those on Earth so much that it appeared everywhere from movies and television shows to a postage stamp.
NASA/ESA
PHOTO: A comparison of the "Pillars of Creation" in 1995 and 2014.
Paul Scowen, one of the co-leaders of the original Hubble observations of the Eagle Nebula, said the most recent image of the pillars was taken "at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution."
"The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into space," he said.
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NASAs Hubble Telescope has snapped a new photo of the iconic Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula 6,500 light years away. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team
In 1995, the Hubble Telescope snapped a stunning photo in the Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light years from Earth. The photo revealed three gigantic columns of cold gas, illuminated by the ultraviolet light from nearby young stars. The Pillars of Creation became one of the telescopes most iconic and popular images.
Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe led the original Hubble observations of the Eagle Nebula. He recalled what it was like seeing the photo for the first time.
We laid the pictures out on the table, and we were just gushing because of all the incredible detail that we were seeing for the very first time, he said in a press release from NASA.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hubble this year, the telescope turned its eyes back to the Pillars of Creation. Photos released Monday from NASA show the gas columns in a wider view with a higher definition. Hubble also snapped photos in near-infrared. The near-infrared photos pierce through the dense gas and dust to see stars being born in the middle of the gas columns.
The stellar nursery has changed significantly in 19 years, Scowen said. Since the original photo was taken, the Pillars seem to be fading away, he said. The massive nearby young stars have been stripping gas away from the Pillars, something astronomers observed in the original photo. Strong stellar winds and heat from close stars have eroded the tops of the Pillars.
Im impressed by how transitory these structures are. They are actively being ablated away before our very eyes. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into space. We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution, Scowen told NASA.
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Hubbles new high-definition pic shows Pillars of Creation fading away and stars being born
"Near-infrared light can penetrate much of the gas and dust, revealing stars behind the nebula as well as hidden away inside the pillars. Some of the gas and dust clouds are so dense that even the near-infrared light cannot penetrate them.
"New stars embedded in the tops of the pillars, however, are apparent as bright sources that are unseen in the visible image.
"The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up by the intense ultraviolet radiation from a cluster of young, massive stars and evaporating away into space. The stellar grouping is above the pillars and cannot be seen in the image. At the top edge of the left-hand pillar, a gaseous fragment has been heated up and is flying away from the structure, underscoring the violent nature of star-forming regions.
"Astronomers used filters that isolate the light from newly formed stars, which are invisible in the visible-light image. At these wavelengths, astronomers are seeing through the pillars and even through the back wall of the nebula cavity and can see the next generations of stars just as they're starting to emerge from their formative nursery."
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NASA released a high-definition version of the famous Pillars of Creation to mark the Hubble Space Telescopes upcoming 25th anniversary.Photo: Getty Images
The Hubble Telescope kick-started its 25th year in orbit Monday by revisiting one of its most popular images ever captured the Pillars of Creation.
The awe-inspiring towers of interstellar gas and dust, which were initially photographed in 1995, were photographed again nearly 20 years later for a special anniversary picture that will be unveiled this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, NASA reports.
Snapped 6,500 light-years away in area M16 of the Eagle Nebula, the images depict a mesmerizing deep space spectacle of three giant columns of cold gas, bathed in the scorching ultraviolet light from a cluster of young, massive stars.
Portrayed in visible light, the new pictures provide enhanced details and better contrast for astronomers studying how the structure changes over time.
We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution, said Arizona State Universitys Paul Scowen, a professor also helped capture the 1995 original. The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into space.
The multi-colored glow of gas clouds and wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust that are seen intertwining with the rust-colored towers in both images depict an interstellar tango unlike anything seen before, Scowen said.
There is the only one thing that can light up a neighborhood like this: massive stars kicking out enough horsepower in ultraviolet light to ionize the gas clouds and make them glow, he explained. Nebulous star-forming regions like M16 are the interstellar neon signs that say, We just made a bunch of massive stars here.
When scientists first stumbled upon the Pillars of Creation, it was the first time anyone had directly seen observational evidence of the erosionary process, not just radiation but the mechanical stripping away of the gas, according to NASA.
But despite its name, the 2014 images now suggest the structure should instead be referred to as the Pillars of Destruction.
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SEATTLE A famous deep-space object imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope 20 years ago has been reborn in an amazing new photo.
Scientists pointed the telescope at the iconic Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 (M16), capturing the famous "Pillars of Creation" in sharper and wider view. The new and improved image was possible thanks to upgrades made to the Hubble Space Telescope over the past 25 years. You can see the new Pillars of Creation image in detail in a breathtaking new video of the Hubble views as well.
"It allows us to demonstrate how far Hubble has come in 25 years of observation," Paul Scowen, of Arizona State University, said during a news conference here at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society Monday (Jan. 5). Scowen was one of the astronomers who helped take the original iconic image. [See more amazing images from Hubble]
"It really is quite remarkable," he added.
Dubbed the "Pillars of Creation" when it was discovered in 1995, the Eagle Nebula view is arguably the most famous of all of Hubble's images. It has appeared on postage stamps, T-shirts and pillows, and even made the rounds in television shows and movies. Located approximately 7,000 light-years from the sun, M16 is a region of gas and dust where stars form at a rapid clip.
The new Hubble image utilizes the Wide Field Camera 3, installed in 2009, to reveal the star-forming region at twice the resolution of the original instrument. As with the original image, taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, elements in the image appear as different colors: Red reveals singly ionized sulfur, blue shows double-ionized oxygen and green highlights hydrogen.
Along with releasing the sharper new photo, the Hubble team revealed an image of the Eagle Nebula in the infrared wavelength, which cuts through the dust and gas to reveal significantly more stars.
"The pillars themselves become quite transparent in the infrared," Scowen said.
The infrared image reveals that the pillars still exist after two decades because their dense heads shadow the gas beneath them. The massive young stars at their hearts are violent places, with rapid stellar winds blowing away the lighter material. Gas between the columns evaporated long ago due to the heat from bright young stars.
The new images also show changes that have taken place in the nebula over the past two decades. Several protostar systems create long jets that Scowen described as "signposts pointing back to 'We just made a star right here.'" Some of these squiggly jets, which cut through the dust and gas, have moved over in the time since the original image was taken.
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Hubble Telescope Captures Spectacular New Views of 'Pillars of Creation'
The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird's-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disk. It's like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And, there are lots of stars in this sweeping view -- over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.
This ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe's population of over 100 billion galaxies. Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area. Most of the stars in the universe live inside such majestic star cities, and this is the first data that reveal populations of stars in context to their home galaxy.
Hubble traces densely packed stars extending from the innermost hub of the galaxy, seen at left. Moving out from this central galactic bulge, the panorama sweeps from the galaxy's central bulge across lanes of stars and dust to the sparser outer disk. Large groups of young blue stars indicate the locations of star clusters and star-forming regions. The stars bunch up in the blue ring-like feature toward the right side of the image. The dark silhouettes trace out complex dust structures. Underlying the entire galaxy is a smooth distribution of cooler red stars that trace Andromeda's evolution over billions of years.
Because the galaxy is only 2.5 million light-years from Earth, it is a much bigger target in the sky than the myriad galaxies Hubble routinely photographs that are billions of light-years away. This means that the Hubble survey is assembled together into a mosaic image using 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings.
The panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. Images were obtained from viewing the galaxy in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble. This cropped view shows a 48,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy in its natural visible-light color, as photographed with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in red and blue filters July 2010 through October 2013.
The panorama is being presented at the 225th Meeting of the Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
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The above story is based on materials provided by Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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"Ave Maria" (Bach/Gounod) 2014, Anne Milligan.
Anne Milligan (singer and soloist) continues this prayerful series of various Ave Maria compositions to the accompaniment of spectacular images of the universe from the Hubble Telescope.
By: Anne Milligan
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US Navy Reveals Laser as Powerful as the Hubble Telescope!
The Navy has revealed a radical new laser weapon it says can shoot down missiles, boats and even drones from a warship is already is active service. Source: ...
By: ShantiUniverse
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US Navy Reveals Laser as Powerful as the Hubble Telescope! - Video
NASA VIDEO ADMITS HUBBLE TELESCOPE IMAGES ARE ALL PHOTOSHOPPED
"Hubble images are made, not born. Images must be woven together from the incoming data from the cameras, cleaned up and given colors that bring out features...
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NASA VIDEO ADMITS HUBBLE TELESCOPE IMAGES ARE ALL PHOTOSHOPPED - Video
Ave Maria 2014 December
Anne Milligan sings Schubert #39;s "Ave Maria" to spectacular images of the universe from the Hubble Telescope. December 13, 2014. Please share this song prayer. Let there be peace, peace, and...
By: Music by Anne Milligan of Kentucky Tennessee
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The Hubble Telescope - a brief summary in 3 minutes
By: Stephen Sorensen
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The Hubble Space Telescope viewed by the STS-125 shuttle repair crew in 2009. Credit: NASA
The Hubble Space Telescope has delivered an amazing near quarter-century of science from all over the universe. Even this year, its delivered results to think about: the shrinking Great Red Spot on Jupiter (see picture below), helping New Horizons hunt for flyby targets after Pluto, and enhancing our view of deep space.
But that didnt come cheap. Four astronaut servicing missions (including one to fix a mirror that was launched with myopia) were required to keep the telescope going since 1990. Hubble has never been more scientifically productive, according to a recent NASA review, but a new article asks if Hubble is destined to die a fiery death when its orbit decays in the next eight to 10 years.
NASA doesnt have any official plans for upgrading the telescope, meaning its hardware will grow old and out-of-date in the coming years, reads the article in Popular Science. Without assistance, Hubble cant maintain its orbit forever, and eventually Earths gravity will pull the telescope to a fiery death.
Thats not to say NASA is going to abandon the cosmos far from it. Besides NASAs other space telescopes, the successor James Webb Space Telescope is planned to launch in 2018 to chart the universe in other wavelengths. But a review from April warns that ceasing operations of Hubble would not be prudent until James Webb is up, running, and doing its own work productively. Thats a narrow window of time considering Hubble is expected to work well until about 2020.
The Hubble Space Telescope shows the shrinking size of Jupiters Great Red Spot in this series of images taken between 1995 and 2014. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)
The Hubble Space Telescope senior review panel submitted a report on March that overall praised the observatorys work, and which also talked about its potential longevity. As is, Hubble is expected to work until at least 2020, the review stated. The four science instruments are expected to be more than 85% reliable until 2021, and most critical subsystems should exceed 80% until that same year.
The report urges that experienced hands are kept around as the telescope degrades in the coming years, but points out that Hubble has backups that should keep the observatory as a whole going for a while.
There are no single-point failure modes on Hubble that could take down the entire observatory. It has ample redundancy. Planned mitigations for numerous possible sub-system failures or degraded performance have been developed in advance via the projects Life-Extension Initiatives campaign. Hubble will likely degrade gracefully, with loss or degradation of individual science instrument modes and individual sub-system components.
In NASAs response to the Senior Review for several missions (including Hubble), the agency said that the telescope has been approved (budgetarily speaking) until 2016, when an incremental review will take place. Further in the future, things get murky.
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Workaholic Hubble Telescope Will Eventually Burn To Death: Report
Provided by Popular Science
Last month, six astronauts convened in New York City to discuss STS-125, the last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, which happened in 2009. As it approached its 20th birthday, the telescope was in desperate need of an upgrade. The orbital optics, batteries, and other equipment had slowly deteriorated due to sun exposure and age.
Space Shuttle mission STS-125 was deployed to renovate the telescope in a series of space walks. For a lot of missions, they say dont worry about things, we can always get that done next time, you dont have to try and rush, Scott Altman, the former mission commander of STS-125, tells Popular Science. But we knew this was the last time anyone was going, so anything we didnt get done, wasnt going to get done.
Eventually Earth's gravity will pull the telescope to a fiery death.
Despite the pressures of the operation, the crew members recalled how they managed to upgrade Hubble as much as possible during five long, arduous space walks, ensuring the telescopes operational capabilities well beyond the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
Now Hubble is coming up on 25 years old, and NASA doesnt have any official plans for upgrading the telescope, meaning its hardware will grow old and out-of-date in the coming years. Without assistance, Hubble cant maintain its orbit forever, and eventually Earth's gravity will pull the telescope to a fiery death.
Provided by Popular Science
Just like an iPhone, the Hubble used to get an update every couple of years. From 1993 to 2002, the space agency sanctioned four servicing missions to the telescope, in which astronauts would replace old or degraded technology with newer optics and hardware. Originally a fifth servicing mission was scheduled for 2005, but in 2003, with the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, everything changed.
The disaster put an intense spotlight on all subsequent shuttle missions -- notably the importance of having a 'Plan B.' During trips to the International Space Station, astronauts could easily seek refuge aboard the station if something happened to the shuttle. But for trips to the Hubble, there was no place to hide. So if there was damage to the shuttle, the crew members would either die in space or die during reentry.
Provided by Popular Science
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Awesome NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope Hi Res render! (HD)
Chinese Simplified: 3D Chinese Traditional: 3D French: Vue 3D du tlescope Hubble HD tonnante ! German: HD-Hubble-Telesk...
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Awesome NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope Hi Res render! (HD) - Video
Hubble Telescope Images: Eta Carinae Supernova Fantastic astonomy photos NASA Hubble Space Telescope
Join me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spaceisamazing Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmazingSpace2 Google+ : http://goo.gl/1WCBn9 A huge, billowing pair of gas and dust clouds are captured...
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14:58 03 December 2014
St Albans astronomer Dr Jim Geach has been studying the evolution of galaxies
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The NASA Hubble space telescope has helped a St Albans astronomer uncover new insights into the processes that have helped shape galaxies.
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An international team of astronomers, including local researcher Dr Jim Geach from the University of Hertfordshire, has been unlocking mysteries of the universe including how all the galaxies we see around us came to be.
Before their study, it was assumed that stars alone could not drive out gas to the velocities the team observed, and that something more powerful like a black hole would be needed.
The astronomers have now challenged that belief; showing that if a galaxy is compact enough and forming stars at a high rate, it will produce the velocity required without needing a central black hole.
Dr Geach, co-author of the paper led by Paul Sell, Texas Tech University in Lubbock, said: We have discovered a remarkable class of galaxy that compared to the Milky Way is extremely compact and it has recently been forming stars hundreds of times faster.
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St Albans astronomer investigates mysteries of universe using Hubble telescope