Happy Sweet Sixteen, Hubble Telescope!

[Jay-qu]

To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 16 years of success, the two space agencies involved in the project, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), are releasing this image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions.

 

Throughout the galaxy's center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside our entire Milky Way Galaxy. The resulting huge concentration of young stars carved into the gas and dust at the galaxy's center. The fierce galactic superwind generated from these stars compresses enough gas to make millions of more stars.

 

In M82, young stars are crammed into tiny but massive star clusters. These, in turn, congregate by the dozens to make the bright patches, or "starburst clumps," in the central parts of M82. The clusters in the clumps can only be distinguished in the sharp Hubble images. Most of the pale, white objects sprinkled around the body of M82 that look like fuzzy stars are actually individual star clusters about 20 light-years across and contain up to a million stars.

 

The rapid rate of star formation in this galaxy eventually will be self-limiting. When star formation becomes too vigorous, it will consume or destroy the material needed to make more stars. The starburst then will subside, probably in a few tens of millions of years.

 

Located 12 million light-years away, M82 appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the "Cigar Galaxy" because of the elliptical shape produced by the oblique tilt of its starry disk relative to our line of sight.

 

The observation was made in March 2006, with the Advanced Camera for Surveys' Wide Field Channel. Astronomers assembled this six-image composite mosaic by combining exposures taken with four colored filters that capture starlight from visible and infrared wavelengths as well as the light from the glowing hydrogen filaments.

 

Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

 

 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

 

Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI), and P. Puxley (National Science Foundation)

 

original article and higher resolution pictures can be found here

[Amtekoth]

It's too bad that NASA and the administration are willing to let Hubble die so young. Has there been any news of a reprieve?

 

Ed

[Jay-qu]

not that I know of.. the only mission I heard might be going is one that will make sure that it crash lands in an ocean and not on land - its because its so big, most things will burn up but they think hubble might be big enough to survive to the ground!

[Tarantism]

i remember doing a science project about the hubble when i was in 3rd grade. good stuff!

[pgrmdave]

Are there any plans for another telescope to go up in the future?

[Jay-qu]

yes there is, its the Next-generation space telescope (NGST) aka the James Webb Space telescope(JWST). The problem is it is not scheduled to launch untill 2013, leaving astronomers without their primary tool for observation for a few years - the hubble beams down 10GB worth of images a day :D

http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/

[Tormod]

There ARE plans for a rescue mission, folks. Mike Griffin (NASA chief) announced it a while back. They are planning on installing new gyros and perform servicing for one last time in the hope that it will last until 2010 or so. :D

[Jay-qu]

Thanks T, I was looking round the nasa site (bit of a mess) trying to find the most recent decision about the hubbles fate - all I could find was that the new NASA chief was going to reconsider a servicing mission.. but still there is going to be a 3 year gap before the NGST gets up and running