Hubble's heavenly heritage
Posted: Thursday, October 02, 2008 6:40 PM by Alan Boyle
N. Smith / UCB / NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage
An image released to mark the 10th anniversary of the Hubble Heritage Project
highights a cosmic landscape in the star-forming region known as NGC 3324. Click
on the picture to see larger versions from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
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A star-studded celestial landscape is on display in an image celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Hubble Heritage Project, which finds new wonders in old data from the world's best-loved space telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and began churning out world-class views of the cosmos after spacewalkers installed corrective optics in 1993. It was another five years before the Space Telescope Science Institute established the Hubble Heritage Project to mine the archives for previously unseen beauties.
At least every month, the Hubble Heritage team releases a fresh photo worth putting on a calendar page. The team combs through imagery in multiple wavelengths and fine-tunes the colors to reflect art as well as science. The project even gets its own time on the telescope to point at prime cosmic attractions, said Ray Villard, a spokesman for the Baltimore-based institute.
Aesthetic considerations definitely play a role in the selection process, but the 128 color pictures and 15 black-and-white photos also carry scientific significance. "I would argue that, with Hubble, there's no such thing as a purely pretty picture," Villard said.
The cosmic landscape
Take this month's cosmic landscape, for instance: It's a close-up of a star-forming region called NGC 3324, a nebula that is being carved out by intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds. The energy for the carving is coming from hot, young stars that are well beyond the edge of the picture.
NGC 3324 is located in a corner of the Carina Nebula complex, which is also home to the Keyhole Nebula and the time-bomb star Eta Carinae. The entire complex is about 7,200 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Carina.
Naked stars glitter in the top half of the image, which has been cleared of interstellar dust. The cosmic sculpting has left cloudlike billows and towers of cool gas and dust in the lower half - places like the famous "Pillars of Creation" that could give birth to suns and dusty planetary disks.
The picture is pretty, all right, but it can also show scientists how planets like ours got their start. Just today, other scientists are reporting new evidence that the "Little Bang" of a supernova triggered the birth to our solar system billions of years ago.
Hubble Heritage has chronicled the death as well as the birth of stars: One of the best of the bunch is this view of the planetary nebula NGC 6751, which just happened to be released to mark the space telescope's anniversary back in the year 2000.
Life after death
Speaking of death, it's worth pointing out that the latest Hubble image draws upon data that were collected by a now-dead instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, and by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which is due to be scrapped as soon as the shuttle Atlantis flies its repair mission to the space telescope.
That mission has been put on hold until next year, leaving the telescope in limbo. But even though Hubble itself is currently offline, the Hubble Heritage team can keep right on mining the old data for stunning imagery. And that's just one example of how Hubble's database is the gift that keeps on giving. Earlier this week, the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Team, or ANGST, released a landmark study on galaxy diversity that also drew upon data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Even if, heaven forbid, Hubble were to give up the ghost entirely, Villard said there's enough beautiful imagery in the institute's archive to keep the Hubble Heritage team busy for years.
"Certainly there's no end to the program. ... The universe is clearly a bottomless well of gorgeous things to look at," he said.
To get the latest Hubble imagery, sign up for "Inbox Astronomy" from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Although the institute doesn't offer its own Hubble calendar, this is the time of year when you should start seeing such things popping up in stores. You can also print out your own calendar, courtesy of the European Space Agency's Hubble Web site. (2009 should be available soon.) And don't miss our own Space Gallery, which has Hubble imagery galore.
