Hubble scores cosmic thriller
| • | Hubble photo gallery |
By Paul Recer
Associated Press Science Writer
WASHINGTON — A new, keen-eyed camera on the Hubble Space Telescope is capturing views of distant galaxies with a clarity never before possible. Astronomers say the instrument may dramatically change basic knowledge about the universe.
NASA photo
The Advanced Camera for Surveys "is opening a wide new window onto the universe," said Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University, leader of the team that developed the new camera.
This beast rearing its head from a crimson sea is a pillar of gas and dust called the Cone Nebula and resides in a turbulent star-forming region 2,500 light-years from Earth. The picture was taken by the new Hubble camera.
Speaking at a news conference where the first four views from the ACS were released, Ford said the new camera makes the Hubble's vision 10 times sharper and gives the clearest pictures yet of galaxies forming in the very early universe.
He said the new camera will look back some 13 billion light years, giving astronomers a glimpse of the period when stars and galaxies were beginning to form after the Big Bang.
One view released yesterday shows an object, identified as UGC 10214 and dubbed the "Tadpole galaxy" because of its shape, that has a long tail of stars and gas smeared across 280,000 light years by the gravitational force of a compact, blue galaxy.
The same image, taken in a fraction of the time required by the old Hubble camera, captures the light of more than 3,000 galaxies. One such galaxy, seen as a dim red dot, is shown as it was when the universe was about 10 percent of its current age, said Ford.
"The light we see left that faint red galaxy when the universe was just 1 billion years old," he said.
The new camera took the four views of galaxies through different filters. The images were then combined to make pictures rich in color and detail.
The ACS was installed on the Hubble during a servicing mission to the in March. Space shuttle astronauts also installed new power equipment, a guidance control wheel and a mechanical cooler on the 12-year-old Hubble.
"The Hubble is back in business and works great," said Ed Weiler, the associate administrator for space science at NASA.
Weiler said that since Hubble was launched in April 1990, the orbiting telescope has rewritten astronomy textbooks.
"It showed that some of our most closely held beliefs about the universe were plain wrong," said Weiler.
He said that the more precise vision of Hubble's new camera is expected to lead to even more discoveries.
Hubble's infrared camera, which stopped working because it ran out of coolant in 1998, has been revived with a new refrigeration device that keeps the instrument at minus 333 degrees Fahrenheit. Officials expect to release new images from that camera in June.
Weiler said that although Hubble was originally designed to last only 15 years, it is now expected to last until 2010. After that, said Weiler, plans call for the telescope to be retrieved by the space shuttle, returned to Earth and eventually put on display in a Washington museum.
A new generation of space telescopes, with even sharper vision than the Hubble, is now being planned.
