via HubbleSite and cnet
The Hubble telescope is again working well. The first images were published by the NASA. Simply extraordinary!
The Hubble Space Telescope got back to business this summer after an intensive repair and upgrade mission in May by a crew aboard the space shuttle. This week, an exultant NASA praised the work done by the astronauts–“Bottom line, these professionals left Hubble as a new state-of-the-art telescope,” said Ed Weiler, the agency’s associate administrator for space science–and released a series of photos that offer fresh and spectacular glimpses of the interstellar realm.
Three fantastic examples of these new “shots”.
Butterfly Nebula
This image, taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3, shows the Butterfly Nebula (or Bug Nebula, cataloged as NGC 6302), at the center of which is a dying star that once had five times the mass of Earth’s sun. The wings of this butterfly are actually gas heated to 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit and traveling faster than 600,000 miles per hour, NASA says. The nebula is some 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, within the Milky Way galaxy. The outer edges of the butterfly wings arise from light emitted by nitrogen, while the white areas show light emitted by sulfur.
Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
Galactic wreckage
The Wide Field Camera 3 captured this still life of Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies. (It’s also known as Hickson Compact Group 92.) At the top right is NGC 7319, a barred spiral, and those blue and red specks are clusters of thousands of stars.
At the center are two galaxies that appear from this perspective almost as one, where there’s “a frenzy of star birth” going on. (For the record, they’re NGC 7318A and NGC 7318B.) At bottom left is NGC 7317, which NASA describes as “a normal-looking elliptical galaxy.”
At upper left is the dwarf galaxy NGC 7320, where the blue and pink dots represent bursts of star formation. It’s actually much closer to Earth (40 million light-years away) than the other four galaxies here (290 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus).
Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
A huge pillar of star birth
A “huge pillar of star birth” taking place in the Carina Nebula is seen here in two images from the Wide Field Camera 3, the top one taken in visible light and the bottom one in infrared. In the infrared image, only a faint outline of the cloudlike pillar remains, allowing astronomers to see fledgling stars and other details more clearly.
At the center of each image is an infant star that is shooting out a jet of cosmic material to the left and to the right. The jets are thought to be moving at speeds of up to 850,000 miles an hour.
Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team