Διαστημικό τηλεσκόπιο Hubble: τα πρώτα 20 χρόνια σε 27 φωτογραφίες

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Like a whirl- στροβιλισμός/περιδίνηση/ιλιγγιώδης κίνηση of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, Hubble caught this glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, NASA have released this image of chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina

Picture: AP / NASA

This December 2009 image shows brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of a young stellar grouping, called R136 in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun

Picture: AP / NASA

This image released in December 2009 shows the hidden fires of the Flame Nebula or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion. In this view, taken in infrared light, the cluster of very young stars at the object’s heart is revealed

Picture: PA / NASA

 

This image provided by NASA in November 2009 combines observations from Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra X-ray Observatory to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy using infrared light and X-ray light to see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core

Picture: AP / NASA

 

An image from November 2009 shows the most detailed view of star birth in the nearby spiral galaxy M83, nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel. The sharp «eye» of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants

Picture: NASA

 

This image released in September 2009, taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, shows a celestial object that looks like a delicate butterfly

Picture: AP / NASA

 

This image, released in September 2009 and taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, shows a clash among members of a famous galaxy quintet revealing an assortment of stars across a wide colour range, from young, blue stars to aging, red stars

Picture: AP / NASA

 

This image released in July 2009 reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16 000 light-years from Earth. This was one of the first images taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), installed aboard Hubble in May 2009

Picture: NASA

Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 photographed this image of planetary nebula K 4-55 as its final image shortly before it was decommissioned. The image was released by NASA in May 2009. The colours represent the make-up of the various emission clouds in the nebula: red represents nitrogen, green represents hydrogen, and blue represents oxygen. K 4-55 is nearly 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus

Picture: REUTERS / NASA

 

This false-colour composite image provided by NASA in April 2009 shows the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer’s Far Ultraviolet detector (blue); the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera-2 in B-band visible light (green); the Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) at 8 microns (red); and the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer-S array instrument (purple)

Picture: AP / NASA

This infrared image of the centre of our Milky Way galaxy released in January 2009 combines the sharp imaging of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with colour imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey

Picture: KPS / ZUMA / REX FEATURE

 

In December 2008, NASA released this image which they called a Hubble Snow Globe. It is a composite of archival Hubble data taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Like a whirl of shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, Hubble caught this glimpse of many hundreds of thousands of stars moving about in the globular cluster M13, one of the brightest and best-known globular clusters in the northern sky.

Click here to see a high-res version of the Hubble snow globe

Picture: AFP / NASA / ESA

 

This photo, released in August 2008 to commemorate Hubble’s 100,000th orbit around the Earth in its 18th year of exploration, shows a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074. The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies. In this representative colour image, red shows emission from sulphur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen

Picture: AP / NASA

 

This Hubble Space Telescope composite image released in May 2007 shows a ghostly ring of dark matter in the galaxy cluster ZwCl0024+1652. In this image, a map showing how the gravity of the cluster distorts light from other galaxies is superimposed on a 2003 Hubble image of the cluster. The image is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date for the existence of dark matter, an unknown substance that pervades the Universe

Picture: NASA / JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

This image released in February 2007 shows the «last hurrah» of a star like our Sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star then makes the material glow. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, appears as a white dot in the centre. Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 captured this image of planetary nebula NGC 2440 on February 6, 2007

Picture: NASA

 

This image released in February 2006 shows Messier 101, the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of grand design spirals. The giant disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across or nearly twice the diameter of our Milky Way. The galaxy lies in the northern circumpolar constellation, Ursa Major (The Great Bear) at a distance of 25 million light years from Earth

Picture: NASA

 

The Orion Nebula appears in a Hubble image released in January 2006. The image shows more than 3,000 stars and was formed by astronomers using more than 520 Hubble images

Picture: EPA / NASA 

 

This Hubble image released in April 2005 shows the spiral galaxy M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, and its companion galaxy

Picture: NASA

 

The Tarantula Nebula is the most vigorous star forming region known in the local Universe. Using the power of the freely available ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator package a young amateur astronomer created this panorama of the centre of the Tarantula in December 2004. The original image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

Picture: NASA / ESA

 

The Cat’s Eye Nebula, one of the first planetary nebulae discovered, also has one of the most complex forms known to this kind of nebula. Eleven rings, or shells, of gas make up the Cat’s Eye. It was discovered by William Herschel on February 15, 1786. This Hubble image was released in September 2004

Picture: NASA 

 

This image released by NASA in March 2004, shows spirals of dust swirling across trillions of kilometres of interstellar space. The image shows an expanding halo of light around a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon). V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, placing the star at the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy

Picture: AFP / NASA 

 

In October 2003 Hubble trained its razor-sharp eye on one of the universe’s most photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104). The galaxy’s hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. This galaxy was named the Sombrero because of its resemblance to the broad rim and high-topped Mexican hat

Picture: NASA 

 

The delicate filaments in this image from Hubble released in July 2003 are sheets of debris from a stellar explosion in a neighbouring galaxy. Hubble’s target was a supernova remnant, denoted LMC N 49, within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby, small companion galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the southern hemisphere

Picture: AP / NASA

 

This image captures a small region within M17, also known as the Omega or Swan Nebula. It is located about 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The image was released in April 2003 to commemorate the 13th anniversary of Hubble’s launch

Picture: NASA

 

In April 2002 Hubble Space Telescope’s new Advanced Camera for Surveys took this picture of the Cone Nebula, M17, an H II region in the constellation of Monoceros. It was discovered by William Herschel on December 26, 1785, and is located 2,600 light-years away from Earth

Picture: NASA

 

Interstellar «twisters» appear in the hourglass region of the Lagoon Nebula, 5,000 light years from Earth in the region of the constellation Sagittarius in this Hubble image released in January 1997

Picture: NASA

 

This dark structure is a column of cool molecular hydrogen gas and dust that is an incubator for new stars. The stars are embedded inside finger-like protrusions extending from the top of the nebula. Each «fingertip» is somewhat larger than our own solar system. The pillar is slowly eroding away by the ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars, a process called «photoevaporation». As it does, small globules of especially dense gas buried within the cloud is uncovered. These globules have been dubbed «EGGs» an acronym for «Evaporating Gaseous Globules». The shadows of the EGGs protect gas behind them, resulting in the finger-like structures at the top of the cloud. The stellar EGGS are found, appropriately enough, in the «Eagle Nebula» (also called M16 – the 16th object in Charles Messier’s 18th century catalog of «fuzzy» permanent objects in the sky), a nearby star-forming region 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. The picture was taken on in April 1995 with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2

Picture: ARIZON ASTATE UNIVERSITY / NASA

Πηγή: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/picture-galleries/7624179/Hubble-Space-Telescope-the-first-20-years-in-pictures.html?image=27