Happy Birthday Hubble!

The title says it all: Happy 21st Birthday Hubble Space Telescope!

Hubble Deep Field

One of the greatest images that have come from the Hubble Space telescope is the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) image. Astronomers selected one tiny region of the sky and imaged it for 10 consecutive days straight with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on Hubble. The purpose of the HDF was to find very distant very faint objects. The HDF image above is from the northern hemisphere and contains over 3000 sources, almost all of which are distant galaxies. The most distant galaxy in the image is ~12 billion light years away! This means we are seeing the galaxy as it appeared a mere 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang! (In astronomer terms that's very close to the beginning of the universe!)

You can also see the variety of different types of galaxies in this image. Some appear spiral shaped, which others appear more like fuzzy blobs, or point sources. HDF helped astronomers understand the properties of distant galaxies and how they are dispersed throughout the universe. A second HDF was taken in the southern hemisphere, and revealed a similar stunning image of the distant universe.

Image Credit: NASA/HST

Hubble's "Broken" Mirror

The Hubble Space Telescope is responsible for a majority of the pretty pictures you find online of stars, galaxies, supernova and other cool things. Hubble was launched on April 24th, 1990 on the space shuttle Discovery. It was placed in a low earth orbit, meaning that it orbits earth like a satellite, and is accessible by human beings. Hubble was supposed to be the best telescope ever launched at the time, but after Hubble transmitted back it's first images, scientists were very worried. Hubble should have sent back crystal clear images, but instead we received fuzzy out of focus images. The problem was that the 2.5m mirror was improperly shaped. It should be a perfectly smooth and specifically curved piece of glass, but during the polishing process, the glass was flattened by an extra 2.2microns (~1/1000 of a millimeter). This tiny error resulted in a huge error in imaging as can be seen below. 

 

                                               Galaxy before corrections                      Galaxy after Correction

The image on the left was taken with the original mirror, while the image on the right was taken after an adaptive optics system was placed on the telescope to correct for the error. Good thing we placed Hubble in an orbit where we could get to it!

Stay tuned for more information about Hubble, as we lead up to it's 21st Birthday on Sunday!

Fun fact for those who live in Rochester, NY: Hubble's mirror was constructed by Perkin-Elmer company. Kodak was contracted to build the exact same mirror as a backup, in case something went wrong. The stubborn people at Perkin-Elmer refused to let Kodak check their work, and therefore the mirror error was not caught until after Hubble was launched. The mirror Kodak built is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution, and is 100% correct. Yay Kodak!

Image Credit: NASA/HST

End of the Shuttle Program

 NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour

Many of you may have heard talk of the end of NASA's shuttle program. Sadly, it is true. NASA no longer has funding for manned space flight missions. (One of the many budget cuts that we are all dealing with nowadays.) This doesn't mean that NASA isn't launching things to space, it just means that they are no longer sending humans to space. There are two missions left, one using Space Shuttle Endeavour, the other Space Shuttle Atlantis. Both missions are scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early this summer. NASA will still launch satellites, telescopes, rovers, and other goodies into space, but until the government grants us more money, space will have to be studied using robotic instruments. Other agencies, such as the European Space Agency, will continue manned missions to the international space station as funding permits. So if you want to be an astronaut, you'll have to move out of the United States. *sadness*

Gravitational Lensing.... Nature's Telescope

The title sounds really fancy and complicated, but gravitational lensing is really an awesome recent discovery and is pretty simple to understand. Think about how a magnifying glass works. You hold it over a book, and the light bouncing off the book goes through the glass and makes the writing appear bigger. The magnification is due to light being bent by the curved magnifying glass . Well it turns out the gravity from large objects can act just like a lens!

The picture above is a combination of a Hubble (visible light)  and Spitzer (infrared light) image that shows an example of gravitational lensing. That really bright fuzzy spot in the center is actually a cluster of hundreds of galaxies. Together, the gravity holding them together acts as one giant lens or magnifying glass. The wispy lines around the outside of the cluster are actually images of different galaxies, far behind the galaxy cluster, whose light has been bent and magnified (they have also been stretched out a bit too). So these galaxies (the book pages) are technically hiding behind the big galaxy cluster (the magnifying class) and normally we wouldn't be able to see them. But the cluster has acted like a lens by bending the light around the outside of the cluster, and magnifying it so that these hidden galaxies are visible.  It's like nature has provided us with a super massive and super powerful telescope! The galaxies in this specific image are actually 13.5 billion years old! They are currently the oldest know objects in outer space.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CRAL, LAM, STScI

The Face On Mars?!?!

We can't help but speculate the idea that life exists on other planets, and it's been long thought that alien life may exist on planets as close to us as Mars! One of the iconic images that really got people thinking is this photograph of the Martian surface taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976.

Notice anything strange about the picture? (Remember, Photoshop wasn't invented yet!) Clearly there is some sort of rocky structure that looks like a human face!  Is this evidence for an ancient Martian civilization? Maybe it's the Martian's Mount Rushmore? For almost 25 years after this image was taken it dazzled the world and created a hype about the possibility of alien life. In 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor took a closer look at the structure, hoping see more evidence of civilization. Sadly (at least for those who like alien hunting), the new sharper image of the face on Mars revealed that it is just an ironically shaped mountain that when viewed at low resolution happens to resemble a human face (see below).

 I know, I know, definitely not the ending you were hoping for. But the search for alien life on Mars is still on! Stay tuned for further updates ...

Don't forget to leave feedback and reactions!!!

Image Credits: NASA/JPL

Haumea, The Egg Shaped Dwarf Planet

The term dwarf planet is a new classification of astronomical bodies. A dwarf planet is a body that is within our solar system, but is too small or has to strange of an orbit to be classified as a regular planet. Pluto is now a dwarf planet, along with a handful of other objects in the Kuiper belt (the chain of "leftover" planet material  at the edge of our solar system). Most dwarf planets are small, round and rocky, and some even have moons! Haumea (pronounced how-me-ah) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt with two peculiar properties:

 1) It is believed to be egg shaped
 2)  It's made of Crystalline water

 

The image above is an artists impression of what we think Haumea and its moons look like.

As you may have noticed, pretty much everything in the universe (except for galaxies) is shaped like a sphere. Why this planet is shaped like an egg, no one knows. It's also incredibly strange that it's made of crystalline water. It's too far away from the sun, and therefore not  technically warm enough, to have water in crystal form on its surface. Astronomers have a few theories about how this could happen, but it's still in the investigation stage. It's funny, most people think that astronomers know everything there is know about the universe, especially our solar system. And yet there is still so much more to learn!

Image credit: NASA