Update (April 26, 2007): I somehow missed the fact that the release of this image is also available at the Space Telescope Science Institute itself. Duh! Sorry about the oversight.
Today is the 17th anniversary of Hubble’s launch on April 24, 1990.
Oh, I remember it. There has been so much knowledge gained since then, and so much of it due to that observatory! And it’s changed the way the public looks at astronomy, too. I remember when Hubble was the butt of jokes from magazines to late-night talk shows — it was a colossally expensive endeavor, and it was launched with a flawed mirror.
We’ve come a long way.
To celebrate 6209 days in space, the European arm of the Hubble science community has released the extraordinary image above. It’s of the Carina nebula, a vast complex of gas, dust, stars, forces, and energy sitting 7500 light years away. The image is a mosaic of 50 frames from the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard Hubble. It shows a region only 50 light years wide… and yet there is so much to see!
That picture I posted above does not do the original justice at all. I’ve extracted some highlights below, but you should really do yourself a favor and grab the high-res version of the image and scan across it. If your machine can hack it, try the 200 Mb version. If you happen to have a Cray lying around, then why waste your time with the kid’s stuff? Grab the 500 Mb image! Or, better, you can take a look at a copy safely stored on a computer in Europe, and zoom, pan, and scan to your heart’s delight.
Honestly, 7500 light years distant isn’t enough buffer for my taste. Sitting inside that nebula are a dozen stars with more than 50 times the Sun’s mass, stars guaranteed to explode some day as titanic supernovae. One star, Eta Carinae, is in its death throes, violently expelling gas in eruptive events that are only a hair’s breadth shy of a supernova themselves. The last such, in 1843, expelled two vast lobes of gas — seen in the image above as an elongation in the gas surrounding the star — brightening Eta so much it became the second brightest star in the sky, and it’s nearly 1000 farther away than the first brightest! While those other stars in the Carina nebula will explode in the next million years or so, Eta has far less time, maybe thousands of years… or it may blow tonight. We don’t know. It’s far enough away that it poses no immediate threat to us, but when it does go, it’ll be one of the brightest objects in the sky once again.
Despite the brutal and violent forces tossed around inside the nebula, there are also regions of ethereal and delicate beauty. As gas from a star or a cluster of stars expands, it rams the other gas around it, forming a shock wave. Like the water displaced by the front of a moving boat, the gas shock forms a bow shape. In this case, it’s difficult to tell from where the gas is coming. I see no star at the focus of the arc, no tell-tale signs of a source. Maybe it’s from a long-dead supernova, the original star having torn itself literally to shreds. All that’s left is this ghostly wave of gas, slowly mingling with and mixing into the nebula itself. As it compresses the surrounding gas, it may cause the nebula to collapse locally, forming more stars, and setting the cycle going once again.
There’s plenty of evidence that’s still going on in the Carina nebula. This part of the image shows a dense cluster of newborn stars, shining like beacons amidst the strewn gas and dust. These are most likely young stars, fiercely hot, and like many of their brethren in the nebula, doomed to explode someday. The smudges you see are not image defects: those are extremely dense globules of dust and gas. These are star forming factories in miniature: maybe only a few stars are forming in its core. Maybe only one. It looks like its sitting right in the cluster, but it may be many light years in front of or behind it: one of the maddening aspects of image analysis is the lack of depth. I doubt it’s in the cluster; the violent winds and flood of ultraviolet light would make quick work of such a delicate cocoon.
How do I know? Well, look at this:
This may be my favorite part of this huge image. This is a relatively dense section of the nebula, located above and to the right of the star cluster. See how there appear to be lower-left to upper-right series of alignments in it? Those all point more or less toward the cluster. This knot of gas is definitely being modified by the powerful winds and light from those nascent stars. If you look at a higher resolution image you can see shocks and rammed gas, and outflow all pouring off the dense knots like a snowball being blasted by a blowtorch. This clump of matter may not last more than a few thousand years before being literally blown away by that cluster.
What a place, the Carina nebula! Hundreds of light years across; hundreds of thousands of solar masses of material; stars of all sizes, masses, temperatures, and brightnesses forming; gas and dust blown into all manners of shapes; stars dying, caught in the act. It’s construction and deconstruction on a mind-numbing scale, and it’s all laid out for us to see, thanks to telescopes like Hubble and others on the ground and in space.
In 17 years, Hubble has taken a half million images of 25,000 astronomical objects, producing 30 terabytes of data in the process. If everything goes as planned, NASA will service this magnificent instrument yet again in 2008, and it will have many more years of service. What other images will it take, inviting us to peer farther into the Universe and add even more to our already considerable knowledge?
Or will the Universe itself have something to say about our hubris?
I don’t believe in signs… but I do believe in humor, and if the Universe has a sense of one, it has a funny way of showing it. But you can find everything in that nebula. Even an attitude.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:42 am
That says a lot about our society today when a Nebula can act that way. Sad really.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:00 am
[...] Phil Plait showcases an incredible image of the Carina nebula released by the European Hubble science community. [...]
April 24th, 2007 at 8:02 am
The colors are added to the images by computers, right?
April 24th, 2007 at 8:19 am
That is very cool! If you zoom in on the two big stars in the centre of the image (on the ESA page), you can see not only the familiar diffraction pattern from the spokes that hold the mirror in place (the four “rays”), but also the diffraction from the edge of the telescope aperture.
Brian W, I believe this is true colour. The reason why pretty much everything in the sky looks black and white to us is that the light levels are so low that only the rods in our eyes are working. There is no reason why the universe shouldn’t be a colourful place. Different areas will generally have different temperatures and different chemical compositions.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Ah, i just noticed this in the SpaceTelescope.org article:
“The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulphur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.”
beautiful either way.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:08 am
I smell new desktop wallpaper! Has anyone ever noticed how a lot of beautiful women come by your desk and ask questions about astronomy when you have a picture like this on your desktop? :Sigh: Me neither.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:22 am
If you ask me (and I’m well aware that you didn’t), the last image should be on the cover of the BA’s next book. It’d be appropriate, given the theme that the universe is basically trying to kill us.
Just my $0.02…
April 24th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Heh. Yeah… Death From Above, and So There Too!
April 24th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Zaphod Beeblebrox to Arthur Dent: You were there when your planet got the finger, yeah?
Remember Towel Day – May 25th. We still miss you, Doug.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Bruce Almighty Says: “Zaphod Beeblebrox to Arthur Dent: You were there when your planet got the finger, yeah?”
Excellent! I just got the BBC DVDs of the original series. Highly recommended for those that think the movie was the story.
“Remember Towel Day – May 25th. We still miss you, Doug.”
Why is it May 25? Adams died on May 11. I remember because it’s my birthday.
- Jack
April 24th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Jack: from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_day
(Sorry if the link doesn’t work right)
-rz
April 24th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
“…only 50 light years [= tens of trillions of km/mi] wide…”
Only an astronomer can say that.
Happy birthday, Hubble. First much worse than expected, later much better than originally designed…
April 24th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Jack,
Google is your friend…
http://www.towelday.kojv.net/
April 24th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Ah, finger licking good!!!
Did you notice the Enterprise in the fourth frame and the tiger in the center of the fifth? MAybe that’s what the finger was for, to let us know,,,we’re not aloooone,,,
Ah, dysp,,,dypsol,,,crieky, I can’t remember what that’s called, but seeing images is what art is all about. Now, where’s my brush,,,?
SOOOO COOOOLL!
GAry 7
April 24th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Why the mars-face guru hasn’t yet jumped on the Big Finger thingy? That’s a much more difficult trick for the aliens to pull off.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Phil, you have such a cool job. Thanks for breaking the image down so well. I’m a novice at this stuff but you always find a way to inspire me to look up more often. I bet it would be cool to have access to your big brain while looking through a telescope and wondering what that cluster of light might be. Thanks for another great post.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
So, that last image is the universe’s way of saying “Kiss my gas?”
Ba dum bah!
OEJ
April 25th, 2007 at 3:13 am
That’s all we need, a nebula with attitude. Up your’s too nebula.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:03 am
I’m trying to post, but it won’t let me!
Maybe it’s ’cause I’m trying to post a link, so I’ll try it without…
Anyway, I could study this image for years, and not grow bored with it! For those interested, Astronomy Picture of the Day has a link to an annotated version of this pic.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Woo-hoo! It was the link that was keeping me from posting. So go to APotD, or if I’m not mistaken, right to the Hubble page under ‘Supplemental’ for the annotated version of this pic.
April 25th, 2007 at 10:12 am
[...] 8 – Hubble’s 17th: Chaos, birth, and near-death [...]
April 25th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Oh, yessssssssss…new wallpaper…and if it’s a geek-o-babe magnet, so much the better…
April 26th, 2007 at 1:45 am
And another picture for my astronomy wall.
Thank you Phil.
April 29th, 2007 at 6:59 am
[...] dados novos para os astrônomos entenderem que é um local de nascimento e morte de estrelas. Tem muita fÃsica e arte nesta figura. [...]
April 30th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
[...] Hubble’s 17th birthday on April 24th and Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has a post over the insanely beautiful image of the Carina Nebula that was released [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
[...] Original post by Bad Astronomy Blog [...]
June 14th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
[...] there are exceptions. In the 1870s, the star Eta Carina underwent a massive and violent outburst, releasing so much energy it was really a mini-supernova [...]
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:59 am
Someone told me today , Scientist discovered a wall of light at the end of the universe. I found nothing, has anyone heard of this?
July 17th, 2007 at 10:06 am
[...] resized version of this Hubble image of the Carina Nebula (though the credit for finding it goes to Phil Plait, not [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
[...] Of course, the most famous molecular cloud is that of the Carina Nebula giving the universe the finger. There are different types of molecular clouds called Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs), Small [...]
February 12th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
[...] regions in the galaxy. This shows only a piece of it 144 light years across (if it looks familiar, Hubble took a similar shot in 2007). Click the image to get a bigger version, or, if you have the time and bandwidth that could [...]