The camera that changed the universe
The Hubble Space Telescope made its first picture in 1990, but began to work in full force only in 1993, after the first mission for its maintenance. From that moment on, exploration of the universe began its rapid rise.
A snapshot of the first mission to service the Hubble telescope, 1993.
Astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman dismantles the WFPC 1 wide-angle planetary camera for replacement.
Most of the pictures are clickable.
Of course, it was a tremulous moment. During this mission, not only problems with the main mirror and spherical aberration were corrected, but also the telescope main camera was upgraded.
')
Wide-Angle Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) - completely changed our view of the Universe. Just look at the pictures before and after the maintenance mission!
From 1993 to 2009, the WFPC2 camera was the main workhorse on the Hubble Space Telescope and took many pictures during its operation. But some of these images can be identified as images that have changed our understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s “trick” is his ability to view deep space. If you raise your head and look into the night sky, you will see stars, the space between which appears to be black void. Using binoculars, you can see more stars than with the naked eye, and with a telescope - more than with binoculars. But at some point you will not find anything new.
So, in 1995, with the help of the Hubble telescope, an interesting experiment was conducted. A part of the sky was selected in which no stars, galaxies or clusters, or anything else interesting had previously been observed. It was at this point that the telescope was aimed for several days in order to find out what would come of it.
The photo shows only 1 square degree of view, or only 0.005% of the night sky. So you can imagine how small this part is: the picture of the whole night sky consists of 20,000 square degrees. The area from which the image was taken is highlighted in the photo with the shape of the letter “G” in the photo and has a size of just 0.002 square degrees! In the area we observed there were only five previously known stars — that was all we knew about this site, but that was before Hubble.
After 10 days, the WFPC2 camera made a total of 342 frames in this area, looking at this little part of the starry sky. One photon is here, the other is there, often fixing nothing but darkness for several minutes in a row. After 10 days, all the frames taken by Hubble were combined and we got the following picture:
Do you know what is shown here? Each luminous point in this image does not belong to the light of the five stars previously known to us in this area. Each of them is a separate galaxy! We had no idea how deep, huge and full of things our Universe was until we received this image. Do you have any idea how many galaxies are in this picture? The only thing worth understanding is the image of only 0.002 parts of the firmament in 1 degree. And how many galaxies in the entire universe?
Take 8% of this image, of course, enlarged, so that you can consider it:
And remember, every single highlight, light or distant glowing point is a galaxy! There are about 350 of them in this picture. Turning to mathematics and extrapolating the result over the entire area of ​​the night sky, we get an approximate number of 10 ^ 11 galaxies throughout the universe, think about 100,000,000,000 galaxies !
For the first time, we received confirmation that there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in our universe.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Of course, this is a beautiful sight and Hubble can show us amazing views of its bands and even eruptions on the nearest Jupiter satellite - Io.
Eruption on Io.
But today the coolest thing that we saw was determined by chance. In 1994, a comet hit Jupiter!
On the frames above, there is a fragmentation of the comet, and afterwards we recorded several points of collision with Jupiter itself (photo below), which formed several “holes” with cloudiness turbulence.
And yet, there are even more amazing things that Hubble has done.
Hubble can take pictures of not only spiral and elliptical, but also ultra-rare ring, or ring-shaped galaxies. There are two theories according to which the galaxy becomes a ring and both seem reasonable.
The first hypothesis of ring formation is the accretion of matter from dwarf satellite galaxies.
The most likely mechanism for the birth of ring-shaped galaxies is the collision of giant and dwarf galaxies. When a dwarf galaxy passes through the center of a giant, a star-forming wave begins to propagate from the point of collision of galaxies, which, over time, leads to the appearance of a bright ring.
And Hubble photographed this process.
And now let's welcome Arp 147, the only known pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies with rings! Based on the knowledge of their movement, we can say that galaxies are moving away from each other and are at an equal distance from us.
This means that they are "just" encountered, and because both have rings, the star formation process takes place in each of them. This is the only time when we observed similar things for two galaxies at the same time, and we owe this knowledge to Hubble.
Sometimes we get gifts from the universe. Instead of searching for individual galaxies or their clusters, we get images of two galaxies that are on the same line. When this happens, the galaxy or cluster in the middle acts as a lens, which can both magnify and distort the image of everything behind it.
Thanks to WFPC2, we were able to detect a large number of gravitational lenses and get a huge number of shots:
But that is not all. When you observe galaxies or clusters, you may get lucky and there will be galaxies / clusters behind them. These background objects can act as lenses. See those blue arcs that look like part of a circle? These are the same galaxies, photographed several times. Due to the high resolution of the HFble WFPC2 camera, we were able to capture images of this galaxy and reconstruct it.
In the near future, we will be able to use this method in order to determine at what point certain events occurred, since we can get 4 different time snapshots of the same galaxy.
And finally, how are the stars born and die? Perhaps none of the tools we have could give us so much information about how stars are born and die, like the HFble camera WFPC2. At the end of their lives, many stars turn into a luminous planetary nebula that “lives” for up to ten thousand years.
The Hubble telescope detected a cat-eye planetary nebula more than fifteen years ago and took a picture with its WFPC2 camera. What came out of it?
Seriously, can you say anything other than "Lord Jesus"? What you see is the “debris” of the Milky Way.
There are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy. Each lives about 10 billion years, which means that on average about 40 of them "perish" per year. Those. At any given time in our galaxy there are approximately 400,000 planetary nebulae. There are some very impressive ones that came under the eye of the WFPC2 camera, for example, the Hourglass Nebula:
Nebula number 5:
The Mz3 nebula, called the "ant":
So, Hubble could tell us a lot about how stars die, but he also told us about how they are born! As you can see, these nebulae are not only scattered over several thousand years, but also “spit out” a huge amount of gas from which new stars are formed. One of the most spectacular photographs of this process was obtained from the Eagle Nebula:
So, thanks to all the methods described above, Hubble was able to change our view of the universe. But this is not the end, as you might think. In 2009, another Hubble maintenance mission was carried out and now, in all respects, we have even more opportunities than before. Recent images of deep space showed us that now we can look almost twice as far as before:
And getting more detailed images of galaxies like never before:
Nebulae of dead stars:
A snapshot of a gravitational lens that we did not have before
And finally, the picture of the “Pillar of Creation” is better than we could even dream of:
The universe is around us. All we need is to look.
The material is a translation of this publication . Posted by Ethan Siegel .
A snapshot of the first mission to service the Hubble telescope, 1993.
Astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman dismantles the WFPC 1 wide-angle planetary camera for replacement.
Most of the pictures are clickable.
Of course, it was a tremulous moment. During this mission, not only problems with the main mirror and spherical aberration were corrected, but also the telescope main camera was upgraded.
')
Wide-Angle Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) - completely changed our view of the Universe. Just look at the pictures before and after the maintenance mission!
From 1993 to 2009, the WFPC2 camera was the main workhorse on the Hubble Space Telescope and took many pictures during its operation. But some of these images can be identified as images that have changed our understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s “trick” is his ability to view deep space. If you raise your head and look into the night sky, you will see stars, the space between which appears to be black void. Using binoculars, you can see more stars than with the naked eye, and with a telescope - more than with binoculars. But at some point you will not find anything new.
So, in 1995, with the help of the Hubble telescope, an interesting experiment was conducted. A part of the sky was selected in which no stars, galaxies or clusters, or anything else interesting had previously been observed. It was at this point that the telescope was aimed for several days in order to find out what would come of it.
The photo shows only 1 square degree of view, or only 0.005% of the night sky. So you can imagine how small this part is: the picture of the whole night sky consists of 20,000 square degrees. The area from which the image was taken is highlighted in the photo with the shape of the letter “G” in the photo and has a size of just 0.002 square degrees! In the area we observed there were only five previously known stars — that was all we knew about this site, but that was before Hubble.
After 10 days, the WFPC2 camera made a total of 342 frames in this area, looking at this little part of the starry sky. One photon is here, the other is there, often fixing nothing but darkness for several minutes in a row. After 10 days, all the frames taken by Hubble were combined and we got the following picture:
Do you know what is shown here? Each luminous point in this image does not belong to the light of the five stars previously known to us in this area. Each of them is a separate galaxy! We had no idea how deep, huge and full of things our Universe was until we received this image. Do you have any idea how many galaxies are in this picture? The only thing worth understanding is the image of only 0.002 parts of the firmament in 1 degree. And how many galaxies in the entire universe?
Take 8% of this image, of course, enlarged, so that you can consider it:
And remember, every single highlight, light or distant glowing point is a galaxy! There are about 350 of them in this picture. Turning to mathematics and extrapolating the result over the entire area of ​​the night sky, we get an approximate number of 10 ^ 11 galaxies throughout the universe, think about 100,000,000,000 galaxies !
For the first time, we received confirmation that there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in our universe.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Of course, this is a beautiful sight and Hubble can show us amazing views of its bands and even eruptions on the nearest Jupiter satellite - Io.
Eruption on Io.
But today the coolest thing that we saw was determined by chance. In 1994, a comet hit Jupiter!
On the frames above, there is a fragmentation of the comet, and afterwards we recorded several points of collision with Jupiter itself (photo below), which formed several “holes” with cloudiness turbulence.
And yet, there are even more amazing things that Hubble has done.
Hubble can take pictures of not only spiral and elliptical, but also ultra-rare ring, or ring-shaped galaxies. There are two theories according to which the galaxy becomes a ring and both seem reasonable.
The first hypothesis of ring formation is the accretion of matter from dwarf satellite galaxies.
The most likely mechanism for the birth of ring-shaped galaxies is the collision of giant and dwarf galaxies. When a dwarf galaxy passes through the center of a giant, a star-forming wave begins to propagate from the point of collision of galaxies, which, over time, leads to the appearance of a bright ring.
And Hubble photographed this process.
And now let's welcome Arp 147, the only known pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies with rings! Based on the knowledge of their movement, we can say that galaxies are moving away from each other and are at an equal distance from us.
This means that they are "just" encountered, and because both have rings, the star formation process takes place in each of them. This is the only time when we observed similar things for two galaxies at the same time, and we owe this knowledge to Hubble.
Sometimes we get gifts from the universe. Instead of searching for individual galaxies or their clusters, we get images of two galaxies that are on the same line. When this happens, the galaxy or cluster in the middle acts as a lens, which can both magnify and distort the image of everything behind it.
Thanks to WFPC2, we were able to detect a large number of gravitational lenses and get a huge number of shots:
But that is not all. When you observe galaxies or clusters, you may get lucky and there will be galaxies / clusters behind them. These background objects can act as lenses. See those blue arcs that look like part of a circle? These are the same galaxies, photographed several times. Due to the high resolution of the HFble WFPC2 camera, we were able to capture images of this galaxy and reconstruct it.
In the near future, we will be able to use this method in order to determine at what point certain events occurred, since we can get 4 different time snapshots of the same galaxy.
And finally, how are the stars born and die? Perhaps none of the tools we have could give us so much information about how stars are born and die, like the HFble camera WFPC2. At the end of their lives, many stars turn into a luminous planetary nebula that “lives” for up to ten thousand years.
The Hubble telescope detected a cat-eye planetary nebula more than fifteen years ago and took a picture with its WFPC2 camera. What came out of it?
Seriously, can you say anything other than "Lord Jesus"? What you see is the “debris” of the Milky Way.
There are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy. Each lives about 10 billion years, which means that on average about 40 of them "perish" per year. Those. At any given time in our galaxy there are approximately 400,000 planetary nebulae. There are some very impressive ones that came under the eye of the WFPC2 camera, for example, the Hourglass Nebula:
Nebula number 5:
The Mz3 nebula, called the "ant":
So, Hubble could tell us a lot about how stars die, but he also told us about how they are born! As you can see, these nebulae are not only scattered over several thousand years, but also “spit out” a huge amount of gas from which new stars are formed. One of the most spectacular photographs of this process was obtained from the Eagle Nebula:
So, thanks to all the methods described above, Hubble was able to change our view of the universe. But this is not the end, as you might think. In 2009, another Hubble maintenance mission was carried out and now, in all respects, we have even more opportunities than before. Recent images of deep space showed us that now we can look almost twice as far as before:
And getting more detailed images of galaxies like never before:
Nebulae of dead stars:
A snapshot of a gravitational lens that we did not have before
And finally, the picture of the “Pillar of Creation” is better than we could even dream of:
The universe is around us. All we need is to look.
The material is a translation of this publication . Posted by Ethan Siegel .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/375833/
All Articles