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Hubble Snaps Farthest / Oldest Galaxy
starannihilator writes "Astronomers use gravitational lensing, a magnifying effect caused by the gravity / mass of galaxies, to capture images of the farthest / oldest galaxy known - from when the universe was just 750 million years old. Stories from the BBC,
Sign On San Diego, West Hawaii Today, or
Mercury News."
Only the BBC site had pictures. And a small one at that, that did not expand in opera.. with my settings.
Anyone have some really nice new picture links they are talking about?
Hubble will stop working if it is not serviced. It is not a question of lack of users, it is things like propellant to aim it, replacement gyros for the ones wearing out spinning up there, and so on. Hubble asn't designed to work for ever - it was designed for regular service calls. So many of the bits have finite lives, and will reach the end of those lives in anothr couple of years.
I too vote for a service call. But as I understand it, NASA is not doing it on safety rather than money grounds. New safety rules say that the shuttle needs an external inspection before re-entry to avoud the problems last time. At ISS, that is is easy - look through the windows. And if a fault is found, you can wait at ISS while spares come up by rocket or another shuttle. At Hubble, you would have to do a dangerous EVA to check it. And you would have nowhere to wait for spares if you found damage that could not be repaired with on-board resources (Shuttle's endurance is about 10 days).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
On an unrelated note, they also have an awesome wallpaper gallery.
I don't think it matters though.. Didn't NASA already make the decision to cut Hubble?
wired article
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
If you want to see this thing up close, here's a better link. click me
If you're refering to the James Webb telescope, a supplemental page to the one you linked says a launch date isn't scheduled until August of 2011.
WHY are we just letting the Hubble die again?
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently. If we lose one more, that's effectively the end of the shuttle program. We need the shuttles for (1) contingency, (2) the ISS, and (3) future satellite/instrument launches. It is risky to send up 50% of the fleet for a single mission.
On top of that, a replacement will be ready sometime in 2007. The replacement will need a shuttle to launch. Now, if we send up a mission to repair Hubble, and buy it another 3-4 years, what good does that do if we can't launch the sucessor because the shuttle exploded on return to Earth?
Guess we better junk it because it seems we aren't getting any good science out of it.
They never said. You made it up. It's a tough choice, which the NASA administrator admits.
Until then, I think its worth perhaps *outsourcing* a maintinence mission to another country (or private company) who thinks they can get the job done.
No country would be able to fill that contract without spending billions more than a replacement would cost. Dozens of billions probably. The Hubble is big. Real big. It weighs 11,000kb. The Russian rocket classes can handle somewhere between 550 kg to 950 kg, with proposed models that could have handled 4000 kg (into LEO only) scrapped for financial reasons. A repair payload for Hubble would likely run at least 5000 kg, maybe more.
Other nations are equipped for satellite launching, and most barely at that.
Once again, I think NASA really needs to learn a very old saying that you don't junk something until you have a replacement.
A replacement is on the way. However, this is not "NASA junking" something. That implies active plan to junk something. The Hubble is failing, and requires massive, extraordinary measures to save it. It will in all likelyhood require an EVA to repair. It will require a full manned shuttle mission.
Another failed shuttle with a dead crew would likely lead to a dramatic toll being taken on NASA. Or possibly the end of NASA as it is known. It is too risky to rest that all on a single mission with dubious outcomes.
I think you are ignorant and mal-informed as to what the real reasons behind the NASA decision is.
The James Webb space telescope, if it is not cancelled, was intended to augment Hubble, not replace it. They detect two different things, the Webb for mostly infrared, and the Hubble for mostly short wavelengths, visible to humans. Also, it is very hard to get even a little time on the Hubble. Having both would allow for twice the exploration. The current 6 year gap between Hubble going out of service and Webb operating is not the issue at all.
And you are massively overblowing the risks involved. First of all, we have 3 space shuttles, Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery. How do we risk one and a half space shuttles? The only thing that makes it 'riskier' than going to the ISS, is that you can't go from Hubble to the ISS. This is not exactly a suicide mission. And I bet the astronauts would be more than willing to go.
It would only cost 500 million to service the Hubble. Allowing the Hubble to burn up in the atmosphere would waste the billions that we've already invested in it.
Let me put it this way:
the Hubble PR department publishes in the 'West Hawaii today' and 'Mercury News'. ISS results are generally published in peer reviewed journals like 'Cell' and 'Nature'. I suggest you base your conclusions after doing a bit more research.
The fact that you only consider newspapers and TV a valid source of information is rather disturbing.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently.
Is 18 years ago "recently"? And why are there multiple posts claiming that the US has only two shuttles, when it has three ("Endeavour", "Atlantis" and "Discovery")? I know Americans are used to having multiples of everything but surely it should be possible to figure out how many space shuttles you have.
Another failed shuttle with a dead crew would likely lead to a dramatic toll being taken on NASA. Or possibly the end of NASA as it is known.
Uh-huh.
Journalistic shorthand. It is the furthest galaxy yet discovered. Typical anthropocentricity - like Columbus "discovering" America, as if there hadn't been know to its native inhabitants for 11,000 years.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I would guess this is a tradeoff between resolving power and light gathering capacity. The high resolution of the Hubble was needed to observe that the two apparent galaxies were identical and therefore the same galaxy lensed by the intevening cluster. This needs the high resolution of Hubble, unaffected by the atmosphere. But with its relatively small mirror, Hubble cannot gather enougb photons for a good esposure. So you point Keck, with its 10 metre mirror, at the blur which it cannot resolve - and probably give it a longer exposure than you can get time for on the overbooked Hubble. And you get a much better spectrum. But it was Hubble which made the discovery, whaich arguably could not have been made from beneath the atmosphere.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
No, the universe has no edge. And the farthest you can see is the cosmic microwave background.
It was never equipped for space. It was just the test version. It could have been refitted for space in the early to mid 80s, but they decided it would be cheaper to build new ones. How it was handled since then has made it basicly impossible to ever use in space. The Smithsonian kept it in a hangar from 85-03, and is now being restored and on display in their new air and space museum, with the Enola Gay, an SR-71, a Concorde, and lots of other cool stuff. I'm going to go see Enterprise once its ready, it'll look great. Sure would be nice to see the Hubble in there next to it... One of those Russian shuttles is a resturaunt now... The other had holes drilled in it so it couldn't be used. It's a shame.
The Enterprise is also currently missing the leading edges of its wings. They were taken for use during the Columbia inquiry. Have you been to the Udvar-Hazy center yet? It's awesome.
Don't mind me; I'm just a karma whore.
They said the same thing after Challenger.
Lie to me once, shame on you. Lie to me twice, shame on me...
Because it was a flight test article never designed for the rigors of space. It was heavier (airframe) than all subsequent shuttles, and never had the TPS installed. AFAIK a number of important bits, such as engine hookups and plumbing, where also left off the craft.
In short, it would take just as much effort to make Enterprise space-rated, as it would to finish the X33.
Thanks to all those who provided updates since I posted this, when the news broke. I thought I'd add a few more: The news from Hubblesite, The Discovery Channel, Yahoo News, and from Innovations Report
As a previous poster said, a galaxy like ours takes a couple hundred million years to rotate, and formation times tend to be on that order, also. The fact that this galaxy exists so early is, in some ways, evidence for the existence of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) - a population of heavy elementary particles that we think comprises much of the universe's "missing mass". The argument is that if CDM didn't exist, then galaxies (and more importantly, galaxy clusters) would take a very long time to form - the gas dynamics of the early universe tends to resist their collapse. CDM provides a way out of this - the dark matter isn't affected by any of that, and it can collapse more quickly to form big "seeds" for galaxies to form around once the gas cools down.
While a couple of hundred million years is a reasonable timescale for a galaxy like the Milky Way, it is important to realize that galaxies typically rotate differentially and in the case of ellipticals without a single well defined rotation axis. Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way have "flat" rotation curves such that the velocities are constant no matter the radial distance, so it takes stars at larger radial distances much longer to orbit around than stars closer in. Individual stars in sprial galaxies to not all rotate together with a fixed pattern speed. Galaxy formation is a much trickier business. This particular "galaxy" is very tiny compared to to the Milky Way (think more like the Magellanic Clouds). It may just be a small galaxylet that will, in its future, merge with other similar pieces to form a larger galaxy. In such a heirarchical scenario it can be difficult to define a single time of formation. In some sense the size/mass of the galaxy and the age of the universe provide constraints to test formation models. OK, I shoulf go prepare my real lecture for today on the Doppler effect.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
If you guys seriously want to do something from the comfort of your computer, you can:
/.ers outside of the US) go to: http://www.moontomars.org/notices/contact.asp and spam the hell out of the website and request that NASA for once get a goal of getting a moon-based observatory up there!(or any other ideas you may have)
Sign the Save the Hubble Petition (which is probably useless by now):
http://www.savethehubble.org/petition.jsp
or all of us (including
It might not do much (I wonder if they really do read the write ins), but maybe if they get a significant amount of requests in, they might pay attention more.
Or you can do it the proper way and write your Congress-critter.
Try not to let life get in the way of living.