Stars being formed ... in another galaxy

[pmbryant]

A Cauldron of Starbirth: http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1123_1.asp

The giant nebula NGC 604, some 1,300 light-years wide. Courtesy NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA).

Just saw this spectacular picture of a giant nebula where stars are being formed. A huge cloud of dust and gas, with newly-formed supergiant stars at its core.

Then I read the caption further and realized that this exotic place is not even in our own Milky Way Galaxy (!) It is in a neighboring galaxy 2.7 million light-years away. (For comparison our own galaxy is approximately 100,000 (0.1 million) light-years across.)

Like a billowing firestorm, the giant nebula NGC 604 in our neighboring galaxy M33 burns with the young energy of massive star formation. A swarm of immense blue-white stars with up to 120 solar masses, and surface temperatures up to 40,000 degrees Kelvin, emit copious ultraviolet radiation that stimulates the surrounding gas to fluorecse. Meanwhile, radiation pressure and stellar winds from the stars are sculpting the gas and blowing a large central cavity.

Ten years later, and I'm still blown away at the kinds of images the Hubble Space Telescope can produce.

:wow:

--Peter

[GOPisEvil]

1. That is amazing stuff!

I'm still glad there are people out there smarter than me to figure all this stuff out. :-)

[pmbryant]

2. Just keeping that telescope pointed accurately is plenty hard

And building the cameras, the communication links, and the image processing software, etc etc etc.

A huge amount of work (and money of course) has gone into all this, and the results are indeed quite amazing.

:thumbsup:

--Peter

[TreasonousBastard]

3. It'll be a while...

but I can't wait till the new telescope goes up.

They're talking 20' diameter, and what it will do will be spectacular.

We'll see the footprints of the Martians! We'll see the invading UFOs years before they get here!

Well, what we will see is the universe like we can't imagine it now.

With the talk of another manned mission to the Moon, a lot of people are wondering why we don't so it right and build a real observation station up there.

Think about it-- a real Lunar colony in our lifetime!

Meanwhile, we have the Hubble, and it's doing great.

[Xithras]

18. James Webb is infrared

FYI, the replacement for the Hubble is the James Webb Space Telescope. While it's 20 foot mirror and its position at L2 (instead of LEO) will make it immensely useful to astronomers, it's an INFRARED telescope and the pictures it delivers won't be nearly as beautiful as Hubble's. Fot the most part, Webb will see heat, not light, which will give it a dramatically different (and relatively colorless) view of the universe than we have today.

I just hope that we can keep Hubble up until 2010 or 2011. As of right now, only two of its 6 gyroscopes are working, and the planned 2004 servicing mission is in question because of Columbia. It's possible, though a bit unlikely at this point, that Hubble may have to be deorbited in 2004 or 2005. Either way, we're looking at losing a visible light scope for at least a decade, and probably more.

[pmbryant]

22. Webb telescope

... it's an INFRARED telescope and the pictures it delivers won't be nearly as beautiful as Hubble's.

Cool. I hadn't realized the Webb telescope was going to be an infrared-optimized scope.

I don't know why you think the pictures it generates won't be "nearly as beautiful as Hubble's". It will have a comparable resolution to Hubble's (at least in the near-IR), so the amount of detail it reveals will be just as stunning. It is true that it will be looking through a very different (wavelength) "window" and thus seeing dramatically different views of the universe, but I don't know know any reason why the universe would be any less beautiful at 2 micron wavelengths than at 0.5 micron. ;-)

EDIT: And it won't be "colorless" either, since the telescope's instruments will be sensitive to many different wavelengths, and that's all the color is really. Yes, not our traditional colors, but they are still colors. :-)

--Peter

[ProfessorGAC]

4. Sorry. Can't Be True

Universe formed fully 6000 years ago. No changes, no development, no evolution. It's not expanding. The sun, moon, planets and stars go around the earth.

And don't you forget it.
The Professor

[pmbryant]

5. Ok, but it's still a pretty picture :-)

:D

[ProfessorGAC]

6. OK. I'll Admit That's True

But all that cosmology stuff is blasphemy. And don't forget that either.
The Professor

[Beetwasher]

19. It's the Damn Liberal Media!

Pushing the cawsmawlijy crap on us and planting dinisore fosils and whatnot...God did it! Why can't they just accept that?

[prolesunited]

7. As I recall

the Earth is flat as well. :silly:

Thank you, Peter, for bringing these incredible images to our attention. You look at the sky and the mountains and the ocean, and so many of our petty problems and concerns pale in comparison to the wonders of the universe.

[ProfessorGAC]

8. Well, It's Not Flat

It's slightly curved. But it does have edges where you can fall into the abyss.
The Professor

[pmbryant]

14. Petty problems

Alas, I'm afraid if the Bushies get their way, we won't be able to appreciate the mountains (mountaintop removal mining), the oceans (pollution), and even the wonders of the universe (too much money devoted to war equipment/cronyism to afford fancy telescopes/probes).

:scared:

I'm glad you enjoyed the picture. :D

:hi:

--Peter

[Wwagsthedog]

9. This has been posted before.

If you don't have broadband, you'll need patience but it's worth it.

http://wires.news.com.au/special/mm/030811-hubble.htm

[pmbryant]

11. Great compilation there

Thanks for posting that link.

--Peter

[RebelOne]

21. Awesome, totally awesome. So much activity going on out there.

[INTELBYTES]

27. After seeing this site, I had to kick this thread!

Thanks for the link! It is, for lack of a better word, awesome!

[Dudley_DUright]

10. Thanks Peter

Yet another spectacular HST picture. This one is definately going to be my new desktop photo when I get back from Xmas break. :-)

[THUNDER HANDS]

12. like all NASA photos...this is fake

sort of.

The NASA graphics dept. fills in all the color from these photographs. This is not what it actually looks like in space..only what the graphics people imagine it does.

So says my old high school astronomy professor, who used to work for NASA.

[pmbryant]

13. "Fake" is not a fair word to use at all

Yes, the colors are not what your eye would see. Your eye wouldn't see anything, though, since it is far too faint, so I don't think that is really a fair comparison to make.

The colors represent real differences in the wavelengths of light, just as colors we see do.

In this particular image's case, I would guess based on the caption that the blue represents ultraviolet (which we cannot see) and thus represents the high-energy radiation. The green represents visual light (which we do see). The red represents near-infrared (which we cannot see) and thus is the low energy radiation.

So yes, it is "fake" in the sense that the colors do not match what your eye would see, but it is quite real in the sense that the colors represent real physical differences in the light. So in that sense, the image is not at all "fake".

--Peter

[proud patriot]

15. Wow

This is so interesting . I love the color that is coming back.

for the longest time everything was coming back black
and white in space . The hubble's pictures amazing .

[pmbryant]

16. About the color...

You might want to see post #13. :-)

When you see black-and-white astronomical photos, it is because they were just taken at one particular band of wavelengths. Much simpler (and cheaper) to produce an image that way.

The Hubble team has lots of money though (by astronomers' standards ;-) ) so they can spend the time to assemble images from multiple bands of wavelengths and thus produce these beautiful color images. Though of course the "colors" are not the same as the colors we see with our own eyes.

--Peter

[Beetwasher]

20. I always knew these photos were "touched up" as it were

but I'm wondering, would the nebula be invisible to the naked eye? Or would it appear to be mostly white light? How would it look really to an outside observer?

[Xithras]

23. Mostly white light

The distance to most of these objects are so great that very little color is perceptible to the naked eye without processing (the limitation isn't the light itself, but our inability to accurately discern color in faint objects). When I take a color image of a galaxy or nebula, I'll typically take one photo in white light, one in red, green and blue, and then feed the photos into Adobe Photoshop for final processing. I don't "touch up" the photo's, per se, but instead "layer" the color images to let the natural bands caught by the filters come out. This way, you ARE seeing the real colors, they're just enhanced to make them more visible to the naked eye.

With Hubble, you have to look at the image documentation to figure out what the colors represent. Many Hubble photo's use a technique similar to what I described here, but other images are color enhanced to show off things like cloud density, heat, or speed. While the images are usually beautiful, they aren't always what you'd see with your unaided eye and a telescope.

[pmbryant]

24. Get a small telescope...

and take a look at the Orion nebula (a similar, much smaller, but much much closer nebula than the one in the picture above) some winter night. That will probably give you an idea of what this particular nebula will look like to an outside observer.

My quick guess is that it would look faint and diffuse, with little or no apparent color, because our eyes are very insensitive to color except in bright light conditions. (Notice even under a full moon, at night everything looks shades of gray.)

If you get a pretty big telescope and take a look at the Orion nebula, you may well start to see some real colors, but just faintly I would think. (Alas, I have not had access to a naked-eye telescope in many years, so I am a bit out of practice. :-( )

--Peter

[curse10]

17. That's so cool

thanks peter! :-)

[pmbryant]

25. Alas, I had nothing to do with it ;-)

But it is cool!

:kick:

--Peter

[Cleita]

26. That's an awesome picture.

Thanks for posting. The article was interesting too.