Click photo to enlarge
This image taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope,
shows a celestial object that looks like a delicate
butterfly. (AP Photo/NASA)
A refurbished Hubble Space Telescope is showing Earth the
sharpest photos yet of cosmic beauty, complete with heavenly
glows.
NASA today unveiled the first deep space photos taken by
Hubble since its billion dollar repair mission last spring.
That work included installing two new cameras, other science
instruments and replacing broken parts.
"Hubble is back in action. Together, NASA and Hubble are
opening new vistas on the universe," astronomer and frequent
Hubble user Heidi Hammel said.
The 10 images of galaxies and nebulas - clouds of stellar gas
and dust - are sharper than previous photos taken of the same
places by Hubble before its fifth and final upgrade.
Some have brilliant glows of light that give them halos that
to some people can appear heavenly. And one of those
resembles an eerie cosmic butterfly, but is really a stellar
nursery or nebula not too far away
The butterfly photo shows details, such as gassy folds in
what looks like butterfly wings, that the Hubble previously
could not see, said Hubble senior scientist Dave Leckrone.
The glow in that photo and others is hot gas and dust pushed
out from the stars, Leckrone said. In a way, it's like a
lightbulb, with the star as the filament but the overall glow
from the gas, he said.
The images, especially the butterfly, don't just show
science, but can evoke a sense of spirituality, Leckrone
said.
"What I see is the grandeur of creation, however it got
there," Leckrone told The Associated Press.
The most stunning photos involve the cosmos at its most
violent: the birth and death of stars.
One shows the stellar nursery Carina Nebula, about 7,500
light years away. A light year is nearly 6 trillion miles.
The photo shows an eerie backlit reddish cloud being
bombarded by radiation. When Hubble's new camera uses a
different light spectrum, the cloud disappears and the infant
stars appear. They are only about 100,000 years old with
white jets shooting out.
Those jets are cosmic debris "being blasted out at very high
velocity at what's going to be a planetary system," said
University of Virginia astronomer Bob O'Connell.
Another image shows a compact cluster of thousands of stars -
a field of white glimmering with dots of blazing hot blue
stars and cooler red ones.
All but one of the Hubble photos are from inside the Milky
Way galaxy. The exception caught five spiral galaxies in a
single image.
