|
Happy sweet sixteen, Hubble Space Telescope 24-Apr-2006
To celebrate the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 16 years of success, the two space agencies are releasing this mosaic image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). It is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82, a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions.
Each
Image contains TWO
HOT SPOTS.
Click
on the number for a larger image or in the center of each
image for a Hi-Res image. Description of images are to the
right
In M82 young stars are crammed into tiny but massive star clusters which themselves then congregate by the dozen to make the bright patches or "starburst clumps" seen in the central parts of M82. The individual clusters in the clumps can only be distinguished in the ultra-sharp Hubble images. Most of the pale objects sprinkled around the main body of M82 that look like fuzzy stars are actually star clusters about 20 light-years across and containing up to a million stars. The rapid rate of star formation in this galaxy will eventually be self-limiting. When star formation becomes too vigorous, it will destroy the material needed to make more stars and the starburst 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 elongated elliptical shape produced by the 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 6-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. DESCRIPTIONS: 1. Close-up of some of the most interesting parts of the Hubble Space Telescope image of the active galaxy Messier 82 (M82). Left: A portion of M82’s bluish disk, largely composed of hot young stars. Numerous bright blue-white star-forming clumps and wisps of darker, cooler dust and gas appear superimposed on the disk. Center: The central "inner-city" portion of the galaxy shows the combined light of countless stars and reveals numerous star-forming clumps, dark red clouds of gas and dust obscuring the light from the galaxy’s core, and an overall field of fainter red (cooler) and blue (hotter) stars. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI) and P. Puxley (NSF). 2. This image shows the location of the three close-up pictures in the Details in Messier 82 image. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI) and P. Puxley (NSF). 3. Composite of images of the active galaxy Messier 82 from the three Great Observatories: Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and Spitzer Space Telescope. X-ray data recorded by Chandra appears here in blue, infrared light recorded by Spitzer appears in red. Hubble’s observation of hydrogen emission appears in orange. Hubble’s bluest observation appears in yellow-green. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, and JPL-Caltech 4. Composite image of the active galaxy Messier 82 from x-ray observations by Chandra X-Ray Observatory in three energy bands coded in red (lowest energy x-ray photons), green and blue (highest energy). Credit: NASA/CXC/JHU/D.Strickland 5. Composite image of the active galaxy Messier 82 from infrared observations by Spitzer Space Telescope in three wavelength bands coded in red (longest wavelength), green, and blue (shortest wavelengths). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/C. Engelbracht (University of Arizona) 6. The galaxy Messier 82 is located 12 million light-years away. It appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Here Ursa Major is seen in a ground-based image taken by Akira Fujii. Credit: Akira Fujii 7. The spiral galaxy M81 and the neighbor galaxy M82 are forming a physical pair. A few tens of million years ago, the smaller M82 collided with M81. This gravitational interaction deformed M82 and caused its concentrated burst of star formation. Credit: ESA/Hubble and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgments: Davide De Martin (http://www.skyfactory.org)
Notes: In its 16 years of viewing the sky, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken roughly 750,000 exposures and probed about 24,000 celestial objects. Hubble does not travel to stars, planets and galaxies. It snaps pictures of them as it whirls around Earth. In its 16-year lifetime, the telescope has made nearly 93,500 trips around our planet, racking up almost 4 billion kilometers. That mileage is slightly more than a round trip to Saturn. The telescope's observations have produced more than 27 terabytes of data, equal to roughly 400,000 compact discs. If those compact discs were stacked on top of each other, they would be nearly two times taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. Each day the orbiting observatory generates about 10 gigabytes of data, enough information to fill up the hard drive of a typical home computer in a week. In Hubble's 16-year lifetime, about 4,000 astronomers from all over the world have used the telescope to probe the universe. Astronomers have published more than 6,300 scientific papers on Hubble results. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA. Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI) Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI) and P. Puxley (NSF)
|
|
||
|
|
