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Hubble Space Telescope's Sixteenth Anniversary

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the eye-in-the-sky dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the sixteenth anniversary of the launch of Hubble Space Telescope. 'To celebrate [...] NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), are releasing this image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions.' Wired News also has some nice additional images."

26 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Hubble Ultra Deep Field by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cute picture, but still nothing compares to this. It will make you feel insignificant real quick.

    1. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by helioquake · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, indeed.

      And M82 is truly a bad example of what the Hubble can really do.

      Why?

      Because you can get a picture of M82 from the ground just as well
      as the Hubble does. See here for example.

      The true advantage of the Hubble can be realized when you are looking at
      a smaller object, like V838 Mon or the finer details of the Helix Nebula.

    2. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by xSauronx · · Score: 5, Funny
      I love how my dad, a fundy christian, looks at the deep field, and says to me "and people think there isnt life elsewhere out there, in all of that, there *has* to be", and then sees me reading "the origin of species" and tells me "you know, thats just called the theory of evolution."



      somehow he manages to believe in aliens halfway across the known universe, and that god created the earth and everything on it in 7 days. /rant over

      --
      By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
    3. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by UOZaphod · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I really don't see a contradiction. Presupposing the creation of earth by an omnipotent God, I would be more suprised if there *weren't* similar acts of creation all over the universe. If you read popular fiction nowadays though, the prevailing attitude is that an alien landing on earth would somehow "shut up" all the theists. I doubt it would.

      --
      "The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
    4. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I love that picture -- it's one of my desktops -- but it doesn't make me feel insignificant at all. It makes me feel pretty damn proud to be a member of the species that can not only see things like that, but make at least a good attempt at understanding them.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    5. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I wonder what they'd think if the alien said "Oh yeah, and all those Creationists of yours are absolute retards. Five thousand zloklor ago our scientists and politicians agreed that Creationists were the worst kind of intellectual ingrates, and held official Mock A Creationist Days, and that's why we're landing on your planet instead of you on ours!"

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    6. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I remember seeing the Deep Field images right after they were released. After seeing them, I walked around for weeks with the lingering sense of how enormous, magnificent, and beautiful our universe truly is; a deeply humbling experience. Our galaxy, an ordinary spiral galaxy, is home to approximately 200 million stars. There are billions of galaxies. The universe itself is about 14 billion years old, and many cosmologists argue that it is at least 100 billion light years across. These numbers may seem hard to fathom, but I think everyone should ponder these things at least once in their lives. They may begin to see their own lives and the world around them from a new, and perhaps more enlightened perspective.

    7. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by ModExec · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The universe itself is about 14 billion years old, and many cosmologists argue that it is at least 100 billion light years across.

      Please bear with my ignorance as to physics, but isn't that impossible?

      If the speed of light is supposed to be the fastest speed at which matter can travel is the speed of light, shouldn't the universe at most be 28 billion light years across?

      Or is it that the threshold between this universe and that which lies beyond can travel faster than the speed of light? and if that's the case, why would it only be limited to ~4c?

      /sorry to threadjack
      //just curious
      ///hopes Hubble won't go looking for my car keys.

    8. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by sunwukong · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I prefer this for feeling insignificant.

      Well maybe not insignificant, but at least well aware of what the universe thinks of our place in it ...

    9. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by Rothron+the+Wise · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because you can get a picture of M82 from the ground just as well as the Hubble does.

      Your example (866x972) hardly compares to the massive 9500x7400 pixel hubble image, which has fewer artefacts and far more background detail, but I agree that the ultra deep field image is way cooler, and also quite impossible to take without a space telescope.

      --
      A witty .sig proves nothing
    10. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by xSauronx · · Score: 2, Interesting
      the contradiction is that he believes there are aliens, not because god put them there, but because space is so vast. he has some weird infatuation with alien sightings and such, as well, and never brings up god when he talks about any of it.

      dinosaur fossils are there because of the devil, aliens are there because we dont know what the shiny lights were.

      --
      By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
    11. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by hde226868 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You ask a few good questions that merit a longer answer.

      First of all, it is important to note that Einstein, in his theory of general relativity, showed that space can be curved. It is only because of this that one can even talk about something like the "diameter" of the universe. In simple GR, and using some fairly broad assumptions about the properties of the universe, there are three principal "shapes" for the universe: the universe can have a "positive curvature" and a finite volume, it can have an infinite volume and be "flat", or it can have a "negative curvature" and an infinite volume.

      In three dimensions, these spaces are very difficult to imagine for us humans, but a 2d analogy might make things clearer: The analogy in 2d for a positively curved space is the surface of a sphere, for a flat space it is a plane, and for a negatively curved space a hyperboloid, and the "volume" would be the respective surface area. Note that locally, e.g., for small ants living on a huge sphere (or humans living on the Earth), it is very difficult to distinguish between these three possibilities. For example, it took 1000s of years for humans to realize that the Earth was not a flat disk, just because our Earth is so tremendously big that in our everyday life, its curvature just does not matter to us (unless you are an airline pilot that is...).

      In the past 20-30 years, we were able to develop methods that allowed us to infer in what type of universe we live. Essentially, these methods boil down to measuring the amount of gravitating stuff in the universe, which is summarized in a parameter we astronomers call "Omega". If Omega<1, the universe is infinite and open (has an infinite volume), for Omega equals 1 it is flat and open, and for Omega>1 it has a finite volume.

      Several measurements, using the Hubble Space Telescope, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, X-ray data from galaxy clusters measured with ROSAT, XMM-Newton, and Chandra, data taken with balloon experiments etc. have allowed us to build what is called the so-called concordance model of cosmology, i.e. the baseline model that most of the astronomicical community agrees with. This model has an age of around 14 billion years and has Omega=1. This means that in this model the universe is flat and infinite in size. Therefore, giving the "diameter" of the universe for the concordance model, as quoted by the original poster, does not make sense in this model.

      Now, astronomers often are sloppy people, and this is especially true for the people who write press releases for NASA, because they have the incredibly difficult job to summarize a piece of very complicated physics in a 1-2 minute sound bite. What is often meant when you read something like "the universe is 100billion light years across" is a statement about that part of the universe that is visible to us. So, consider a photon that was emitted shortly after the big bang. This photon happily moves through space for about 14 billion years, and is eventually detected by us. So, the distance traveled by the photon was 14 billion light years. However, while the photon traveled, the Universe expanded, i.e., it increased in volume. This means that the distance that the source of light has from us now is much larger. It is this distance which is often quoted as the "size of the universe". How far it is depends on the model assumptions one makes, i.e., the expansion history of the universe, but one can get values which are much larger than cT, where c is the speed of light and T the age of the universe.

      So much for my very simplified answer of what proves to be far more complicated questions than one might think. I hope it clarified matters a little bit, if you want a little bit more detail, a good WWW page to check out is Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial (http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_03.htm).

    12. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by rufty_tufty · · Score: 2, Informative

      Space had been expanding whilst the photos are in transit:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_light_horizon

      --
      "The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
    13. Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field by iamlucky13 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Astronomers estimate there are on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the universe with an average of 100 billion stars each. That gives us roughly 10^22 stars (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe. If somebody wrote an almanac with a one page article about each of those stars, it would be about 25 times as thick as the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri.

      The largest nuclear bombs detonated by humans have released an energy of approximately 400 quadrillion joules. This is about 20,000,000 times the energy expended by a Saturn V rocket, one of humanity's most impressive feats of engineering. In comparison, the time it takes our sun alone to generate the same amount of energy as that 100 megaton bomb is a single billionth of a second, almost long enough for a crew capsule propelled at top speed by that Saturn V to travel the thickness of a layer of saran-wrap!

      Insignificant, yes, but the only life we know of with the ability to recognize that fact. When I think about God creating all this, awestruck doesn't even come close (hey, if people are going to keep getting modded up for flying spaghetti monster wisecracks, it seems fair to share my perspective, too).

  2. Re:Hubble's afterlife by NoTheory · · Score: 4, Funny

    I hope you realize that NASA is going to use the Hubble until the satellite falls out of space and burns up on reentry. If you can figure out how to use it after that, i'm sure NASA's got a job for you.

    --
    There are lives at stake here!
  3. Re:What kind of pisses me off... by helioquake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I dunno.

    If I were the guy who built the original primary mirror, I wouldn't want the world to know...

  4. Some day by invader_allan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some day we'll see space mechanics, and they'll bid on the service contract for fixing old out of service equipment. Hopefully the civilian shops will be running soon before Hubble becomes completely useless. Perhaps people will try to buy this thing long into the future, and have to redesign new parts to refurbish it and get it back in working order.

  5. Re:What kind of pisses me off... by slashname3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    If I were the guy who built the original primary mirror, I wouldn't want the world to know...

    Wasn't it Perkin-Elmer that built the primary mirror?

  6. There's a REALLY good book waiting to be written by bobcardone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    About the concept, design, development, engineering, construction, deployment, repair and usage of this wonderful device.
    Let's hope it takes a while before the last chapter is written...

    --
    What, me worry?
  7. Re:What kind of pisses me off... by helioquake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I went for funny and I got "insightful"...

    Man, I suck at funny.

  8. FS M82 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, you don't need more proof of His Noodliness existance than this

  9. Hubble Reentry skid ?! by bzdang · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Check out this photo of parts for a Hubble Telescope Reentry Skid at http://cstcomposites.com/images/NASA.JPG . No doubt a brainchild of those greedy scheming curators at the Smithsonian. Sending it into the sun would be cool too, but pushing it into the ocean would be cheapest.

  10. Re:What kind of pisses me off... by dfjghsk · · Score: 5, Informative
    How did this get modded up? It's completely false.

    If you google now for "TRW Hubble" you'll find a whole bunch of articles mentioning that TRW was selected to build JWST, "Hubble replacement", but not too many mentioning that we did actually built the original Hubble.


    So either everyone is covering up the work TRW did on Hubble, or you are wrong.. I'm going to go with the latter...

    Lockheed was the primary contractor.. they produced the protective outer shroud and the support systems module, and assembled and integrated everything. Perkin-Elmer produced the mirror.

    http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/clafleur/HST-Histor y.html
    http://sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/messages/78.html
    http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp= fec&ci=14783&rsbci=5&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400
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    Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
  11. Re:What kind of pisses me off... by helioquake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Haha, FUNNY, guys and gals.

  12. Re:What kind of pisses me off... by dfjghsk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What do you want them to do; mention every contractor who worked on Hubble in every press release, announcement, or mention of hubble?

    They certainly aren't trying to hide the fact that Lockheed, Perkin-Elmer, and many other companies worked on Hubble:

    A Brief History of the Hubble Space Telescope
    The following year, design of the telescope began in earnest, with the award of contracts to the Perkin-Elmer Corporation to construct the mirror and optical assembly and the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company to construct the spacecraft and its support systems.

    NASA history: Hubble Space Telescope:
    Page 1, Paragraph 4:
    Perkin-Elmer Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut, was chosen to develop the optical system and guidance sensors. Lockheed Missiles and Space Company of Sunnyvale, California, was selected to produce the protective outer shroud and the spacecraft systems for the telescope, as well as to assemble and test the finished product.

    NASA Hubble Team Receives International Academy of Astronautics Award (2004)

    LOCKHEED MARTIN HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE TEAMS RECEIVE NASA HONORS (2005)

    A DECADE OF DISCOVERY: HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE -- THE DISCOVERIES AND THE PEOPLE (2000):
    Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the Hubble Space Telescope, ...

    NOTE TO EDITORS: MEDIA INVITED TO JOIN IN PUBLIC CELEBRATION OF TEN YEARS OF THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE (2000):
    Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the Hubble Space Telescope, ...

    Google search for "site:nasa.gov lockheed hubble":
    Results 1 - 10 of about 14,400 from nasa.gov

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    Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
  13. last anniversary? by peter303 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The Hubble will probably die by 2010 when too many gyros fail or it sinks too low in the atmosphere. There is a shuttle missile repair kit in mothballs. NASA lacks mission time to do this if it only do oneor two launches a year. Plus the Hubble orbit is too out of sync with the International Space Station to be safe. Should the shuttle get into trouble, it lacks the capacity to change between the two orbits.