Slashdot Mirror
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."
Hubble needs this sort of thing to keep it serviced. This is very interesting and in my mind at least partially justifies Hubble.
vampirical
Yay! Even more reasons to keep this guy around! It's a damn shame they want to deorbit Hubble. With this much invested into a telescope that STILL continues to function fine, why not just open it up for other uses rather than deorbit it?
I can't recall how many hundreds of times I have seen Hubble in the headlines over the last few years. The waiting list for Hubble time is insane, and the science has been among the best that NASA has ever done.
It's amazing to me that this "it's too risky" reasoning for the cancellation of the repair missions to Hubble is still being floated.
It's franky disappointing to me as American that we are such a nation of wimps now. I personally think it's more of a risk to send people to the space station in regards to the scientific return.
While I have seen hundreds of "discovered by Hubble this week" I have not seen one discovery in the news come from the station. It's usually fighting with the Russians or announcing it's going to cost ten times more than we thought to do one twentieth the science.
Yes, I am off-topic. But I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!
WHY are we just letting the Hubble die again?
.. lets study it to learn more about the origins of the galaxy! Oh, we can't lease any more time on the Hubble because we're junking it remember?.
Oh yeah, thats right, NASA says that it costs too much to maintain, and it's getting close to its estimated end of life date.
Guess we better junk it because it seems we aren't getting any good science out of it. Whats that? oldest known galaxy huh? Cool!
Once again, I think NASA really needs to learn a very old saying that you don't junk something until you have a replacement. When the JWT is operational and snug in its lagrange point, then we can talk about whether or not to scrap the Hubble. 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.
Who says we *have* to use the shuttle? Or is there something I am missing about the shuttle being the only craft that can work on the Hubble?
Then again, I can't think of anyone else that can get there at the moment either. And if they can, I suppose they would probably be more apt to put their own agenda's ahead of a NASA maintinence mission.
Oh well.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
It takes light a whole lot of years to make it this far. It sounds like this story should have started with: "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away..."
if NASA is only bitching about not being able to finance the repairs, then why not lease it to another country? With some "creative legalties" we can have the leasing country fix it for us and return it good as new... But how many countries'll fall fall for that one?..
Try HubbleSite - their article includes a full-res JPEG/TIFF image.
(N.b. Apologies to their webmasters/hosting company)
I understand the stupidity of de-orbiting Hubble, and I do think NASA should extend its life a little longer by doing the service mission. But don't you think all the sentimental slashdot comments is a little too sentimental? Just maybe Hubble is getting old, and it's time to put up a new telescope for replacement (hopefully or eventually)?
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
If you want to see this thing up close, here's a better link. click me
...there's no mention of this at Dr. Dino, clearly this is a clever hoax... It's impossible anyhow since we all know the earth (and therefore the universe) is only 6000 years old!
(humor folks, humor)
In fact over 13 bilion years old...
So, we can apparently see [the light from] something 13 billion light years away, and find something 750 million years old, meaning we can see about 95% of the life of the universe.
How long will it be before we can get to the point where the whole universe was invisible?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Convince all the young talentless people that everyone on Earth is going to die from a nasty virus and pack Brittney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Busted and all the Pop Idols on the first colonization ship...
Then the rest of us can enjoy proper music in the mainstream again!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Don't the astronauts have to do EVA anyway while doing the Hubble service ? I mean, they should be able to spare 10mins for checking the shuttle... No reason for a second EVA.
Ping times for that galaxy must be terrible!
May the source be with you!
I'm coming increasingly to believe the space station is a bit of a dead duck and the issues that prevented the location of ISS in a higher orbit should have been addressed, so that it could do something really useful - like being a base where servicing missions can start and end from.
Then one would deliver a true shuttle which would flit between ISS and whatever hardware needed upgrading. Fuel and personel would be delivered to the space station alone as a starting and ending point.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
In typical cya fashion, O'Keefe called on Harold Gehman, who led the Columbia accident inquiry, to review the decision. It's a bit of neener neener on O'Keefe's part because Gehman's commission nailed NASA for sloppy safety management policies.
What O'Keefe is saying to Gehman is "Look you SOB - you try running an agency that's being pulled 20 different ways and see if you don't start cutting corners."
Problem for O'Keefe is that there are plenty of ideas on how to both service Hubble and adhere to the Gehman's commission's advice. Not surprisingly, NASA management choses to ignore its engineers instead of listen.
Nasa will be well rid of Mr. O'Keefe when he leaves. Next time, maybe the powers that be will appoint someone with an engineering background to run the agency.
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.
You're right, there's risk involved. The question is which projects do you decide to spend the remaining shuttle flights on? Do you continue to pour money down an ISS rat hole that has delivered ZERO peer-reviewed science, has no reason to exist other than pork barrel or do you allocate the flights to maximizing the remaining science?
NASA has already killed Compton, is on its way to killing Hubble and you think O'Keefe and gang will fund Webb? Perhaps you didn't notice, Webb has already been scaled back twice - the ISS money vacuum will continue to wreak its damage. Other posters have already pointed out that Webb and Hubble are not interchangeable - they see different spectrums.The problem is is that NASA will continue to lose public support if its only reason to exist is to fly the Shuttle back and forth between ISS. The ISS has no value other than job creation. Hubble on the other hand, provides both jobs and real science - the kind of science that gets published in Science and Nature. ISS science is the kind of science you find at the local county science fair, i.e., "What color does my dog like?"
Your post and O'Keefe's decision to kill Hubble clearly illustrate how poorly educated this country is. Equating Hubble and Webb and choosing ISS over Hubble are examples of what happens when half our children aren't taught science well enough to know that it takes a year for the earth to circle the sun. The cost of that poor education is you get people like O'Keefe running Nasa and the public doesn't know enough to say boo about it. We've lost the super collider, we're going to lose Hubble, 50/50 Webb will not fly, manufacturing, accounting, customer service and software have been outsourced but we'll have a worthless missile "defense" and plenty of boobies on fark.com. That's the cost of poorly educating people.
Keck was used for high res spectroscopy. It takes hours to get a single spectrum of something this dim. You could find these efficiently using Keck in a survey mode. Keck and HST complement one another quite while (as does the VLT and Gemini). JWST was meant to work wel with HST/Keck too by allowing yet another wavelength range to be examined at very loew sensitivities.
The mistake made by some politicians and non-scientists is that they think that there must be a "best telescope" one can build to do ALL science. This is wrong.
IF we had a permanent base on the moon AND a lunar-based telescope, we'd have exposures of up to two weeks long!
BUT if Bush's plan is only a political game to win votes in Florida and Texas, we might as well try to make NASA change its mind on Hubble.
Only 750 million years after the big bang, this primal galaxy formed!!! That is amazingly quick. Our galaxy is purported to have taken a lot longer for it to form. The implications are immense.
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