Hubble Space Telescope's Sixteenth Anniversary

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."

Comments

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[helioquake]

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.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[xSauronx]

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

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[MightyMartian]

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!"

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Rothron the Wise]

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.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[hde226868]

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).

Re:Hubble's afterlife

[NoTheory]

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.

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

I dunno.

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

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[slashname3]

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?

There's a REALLY good book waiting to be written

[bobcardone]

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...

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

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

Man, I suck at funny.

FS M82

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[dfjghsk]

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

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

Haha, FUNNY, guys and gals.

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[dfjghsk]

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