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  • Hubble's Nebula Discovery | Spaceter

    Hubble's Nebula Discoveries This is your About Page. It's a great opportunity to give a full background on who you are, what you do and what your website has to offer. Double click on the text box to start editing your content and make sure to add all the relevant details you want to share with site visitors. Beyond the solar system, Hubble has studied star formation and death in our Galaxy and nearby galaxies. As a first example, this image of the Carina Nebula was released for Hubble’s 17th anniversary. At the time (2007), it was one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. It is a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula, where a maelstrom of star birth -- and death -- is taking place. The nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. The stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born. The immense nebula contains at least a dozen brilliant stars that are roughly estimated to be at least 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. The most unique and opulent inhabitant is the star Eta Carinae, at far left. Eta Carinae is in the final stages of its brief and eruptive lifespan, as evidenced by two billowing lobes of gas and dust that presage its upcoming explosion as a titanic supernova. The outflow in the Carina region started three million years ago when the nebula's first generation of newborn stars condensed and ignited in the middle of a huge cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. Radiation from these stars carved out an expanding bubble of hot gas. The island-like clumps of dark clouds scattered across the nebula are nodules of dust and gas that are resisting being eaten away by photoionization. The blast of stellar winds and blistering ultraviolet radiation within the cavity is now compressing the surrounding walls of cold hydrogen. This is triggering a second stage of new star formation. Carina is about 7,500 light years away (2,300 parsecs). Using Hubble’s newer cameras provides a stunning image of an old favorite. This image of the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula has twice the resolution, several times the area, and more than twenty times the pixels of the 1995 version. The image was obtained with the optical bands of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in 2015. This taller image includes the gas at the bottom of the pillars being blown down and trailing away. Numerous small features indicate the pervasiveness of pillars of every size in this region. This is the first of a sequence of three images to be shown relatively rapidly. We begin the anniversary year by revisiting a legendary image: the “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula. This image was the first Hubble image to fascinate the public, and still remains one of Hubble’s most popular images. It was obtained in 1995 with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow as they accumulate more and more mass from their surroundings. The object is 6,500 light years away (2,000 parsecs). Like the pillars in Carina, these dark clouds are being eroded by winds and radiation from hot, young stars. The stars forming within the pillars give them their “creation” nickname. Using the infrared capabilities of Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), one can see the pillars in a whole new light. Much of the gas of the nebula is transparent to the longer wavelengths of infrared light, revealing a tremendous number of stars. The seemingly solid, visible-light pillars are shown in the infrared to be a combination of dense clouds and the shadows they cast behind them. Such high resolution visible light and infrared light comparisons point toward a bright future when Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope observations can be similarly compared and contrasted. This is the first of two images to be shown of the Horsehead Nebula. The transition should be done without too much delay to the next image. In 2001, after asking the public which object should be observed, the Hubble Heritage Project took this image of the Horsehead Nebula with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). While the nebula makes for a striking silhouette, the dark cloud is short on detail in a visible light image. The small inset shows a ground-based optical image of the surrounding region. The distance to the object is about 1,200 light years (490 parsec). Using the enhanced infrared sensitivity of Wide Field Camera 3, Hubble was able to get much more detail in this 2013 infrared portrait of the Horsehead. The relatively featureless dark clouds are transformed into a glowing gaseous landscape that almost appears three-dimensional in the image. There are videos that zoom into the nebula and also show the 3D effect. This image of the Orion Nebula shows the discovery of debris disks – planetary systems in formation around newly created stars. As the gas and dust collapses under gravity, stars are born, and in the process, disks and planets often form out of the residual material. The distance to the Orion Nebula is 1,500 light years (460 parsecs). http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1995/45/ A beautiful composite image of the Orion Nebula from both the HST ACS and the ESO MPI at La Silla is available: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2006/01/ Supplemental Movies: Orion Fly through: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/13/video/a/ Zoom into Orion: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/13/video/a/ At the heart of this star-forming region lies star cluster NGC 602. It is a cluster of newly formed stars that are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to our own Milky Way. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot young stars is sculpting the inner edge of the outer portions of the nebula, slowly eroding it away and eating into the material beyond. The diffuse outer reaches of the nebula prevent the energetic outflows from streaming away from the cluster. Ridges of dust and gaseous filaments are seen surrounding the cluster. Elephant trunk-like dust pillars point towards the hot blue stars and are telltale signs of their eroding effect. It is possible to trace how the star formation started at the center of the cluster and propagated outward, with the youngest stars still forming today along the dust ridges. The Small Magellanic Cloud, in the constellation Tucana, is roughly 200,000 light-years from the Earth. Its proximity to us makes it an exceptional laboratory to perform in-depth studies of star formation processes and their evolution in an environment slightly different from our own Milky Way. This image was taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/04/ X-ray from Chandra plus Hubble observations: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/17/image/a/ The Cat’s Eye Nebula, formally cataloged NGC 6543, was one of the first planetary nebulae to be discovered. Hubble observations show it is one of the most complex such nebulae seen in space. A planetary nebula forms when Sun-like stars gently eject their outer gaseous layers, which eventually form bright nebulae with amazing and confounding shapes. This image taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) reveals the full beauty of a bull's eye pattern of eleven or even more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat's Eye. Each 'ring' is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky — that's why it appears bright along its outer edge. Observations suggest the star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500- year intervals. These convulsions created dust shells, each of which contains as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined (still only one percent of the Sun's mass). These concentric shells make a layered, onionskin structure around the dying star. The view from Hubble is like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer is discernible. The Nebula is 3000 light years (1000 parsecs) away. This beautiful image was taken soon after Servicing Mission 4 as part of the release announcing Hubble’s return to science operations. This planetary nebula is the material blown off of a dying star. A disk around the center restricts the outflows into two oppositely directed lobes, creating a distinct resemblance to a butterfly. Although named the Bug Nebula, many began calling this object the Butterfly Nebula after this image was released. The Crab Nebula derived its name from its appearance in a drawing made by Irish astronomer Lord Rosse in 1844, using a 36-inch telescope. The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did -- almost certainly -- Native Americans. This composite image was assembled from 24 individual exposures taken with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000. The orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the center of the nebula is the dynamo powering the nebula's eerie interior bluish glow. The blue light comes from electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around magnetic field lines from the neutron star. The neutron star, like a lighthouse, ejects twin beams of radiation that appear to pulse 30 times a second due to the neutron star's rotation. A neutron star is the crushed ultra-dense core of the exploded star. This shell, or bubble, is the result of gas that is being shocked by the expanding blast wave from a supernova. Notice its completely different appearance from the Crab Nebula in the previous slide. Called SNR 0509-67.5 (or SNR 0509 for short), the bubble is the visible remnant of a powerful stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Ripples in the shell's surface may be caused by either subtle variations in the density of the ambient interstellar gas, or possibly driven from the interior by pieces of the ejecta. The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per second). http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/27/ Supplemental Movie: 3D look at SN remnant http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/27/video/a/

  • Dark Energy | Spaceter

    Dark Energy In the late 1990s, astronomers found evidence that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down due to gravity as expected. Instead, the expansion speed was increasing. Something had to be powering this accelerating universe and, in part due to its unknown nature, this “something” was called dark energy. What Is Dark Energy? In the late 1990s, astronomers found evidence that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down due to gravity as expected. Instead, the expansion speed was increasing. Something had to be powering this accelerating universe and, in part due to its unknown nature, this “something” was called dark energy. Hubble plays an important role in verifying, characterizing and constraining dark energy. Both Hubble and ground-based observations measures a special type of stellar explosion, a white dwarf supernova, to measure accurate distances to galaxies. A galaxy located a billion light-years away provides a data point for the universe as it was a billion years ago. Meanwhile, as the universe expands, the light traveling to Earth from distant galaxies (and their supernovas) is stretched out to longer wavelengths — a phenomenon called cosmological redshift. The cosmological redshifts of galaxies at different distances provides a history of the expansion of the universe over time. However, only Hubble had the resolution to extend these observations to very distant galaxies. The discovery of supernova 1997ff, located about 10 billion light-years away, provided evidence for dark energy. About halfway into the universe’s history — several billion years ago — dark energy became dominant and the expansion accelerated. While ground-based studies had measured this accelerating period, Hubble’s observation of 1997ff stretched back to the decelerating part of the expansion. This shift between two different eras of the universe — a change from a decelerating universe to an accelerating universe — showed that dark energy exists. Hubble continued to explore the nature of dark energy with observations such as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), structured to help uncover distant supernovas. The 42 supernovas found by Hubble not only solidified the conclusions about dark energy, but also began to constrain some of its possible explanations. Later Hubble results identified how early in the universe dark energy began to influence the expansion as well as constrained the current expansion rate. The view that emerged was that dark energy was consistent with the slow, steady force of Einstein’s cosmological constant, a concept that the physicist had initially introduced into his equations to prevent his theoretical universe from collapsing, then later retracted when the expansion of the universe was discovered. But instead of holding the universe in a steady state, dark energy is pushing outward to expand the universe faster and faster. The discovery of dark energy was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. Astronomers now know that there is much more to the universe than meets the eye. The luminous and non-luminous normal matter makes up about 4 percent of the total mass and energy density of the universe. Dark matter, which emits no light and cannot be directly observed, comprises another 24 percent of the total, while dark energy dominates with about 72 percent. Most of the universe is unknown and only indirectly detected. We can see its effects on galaxies and the expansion of the universe, but we have yet to identify the underlying source. That may seem unsettling, but to a scientist, it is exciting. There are more great mysteries to explore and solve! The universe is expanding, and that expansion stretches light traveling through space in a phenomenon known as cosmological redshift. The greater the redshift, the greater the distance the light has traveled. Within the Hubble Deep Field-North region, astronomers pinpointed a blaze of light from one of the farthest supernovas ever seen. In a close-up view of that region (left) a white arrow points to a faint elliptical, the home of the exploding SN 1997ff. The supernova itself (right) is distinguished by the white dot in the center. This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart. This image is a portion of the GOODS-North field. The field features approximately 15,000 galaxies, about 12,000 of which are forming stars. Hubble’s ultraviolet vision opened a new window on the evolving universe, tracking the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years back to the cosmos’ busiest star-forming period about 3 billion years after the big bang. Spiral galaxy NGC 3021 (background) was one of several hosts of Type Ia supernovae observed by astronomers to refine the measure of the universe's expansion rate, called the Hubble constant. Hubble made precise measurements of Cepheid variable stars in the galaxy, highlighted by green circles in the inset boxes. Other Articles...... Zombie Planets Multiness of Thoughts The Dream Mission Creation of Mind Loop STAR VFTS102 KEPLER-186f Proxima Centauri b TRAPPIST-1

  • KEPLER-452b | Spaceter

    KEPLER-452b Kepler-452b, often referred to as "Earth's cousin," is an exoplanet that was discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. It was announced as a significant discovery in July 2015. Here's a detailed explanation of Kepler-452b, including information about its characteristics, atmosphere, and the potential for extraterrestrial life 1. Characteristics of Kepler-452b: Size and Mass: Kepler-452b is considered a super-Earth, as it is larger than Earth, with an estimated radius about 1.6 times that of Earth. However, its exact mass is still uncertain, as it depends on its composition, which is not precisely known. Orbit: Kepler-452b orbits a star known as Kepler-452, which is very similar to our Sun in terms of both size and temperature. Its orbit around Kepler-452 takes approximately 385 days, making it roughly analogous to Earth's year. Distance from Star: Kepler-452b is located within the habitable zone of its parent star. The habitable zone, also known as the "Goldilocks zone," is the region around a star where conditions may be right for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface—a key factor for the potential development of life as we know it. Age: The host star Kepler-452 is older than our Sun, estimated to be around 6 billion years old, which could have allowed more time for life to potentially develop on Kepler-452b. 2. Atmosphere of Kepler-452b: The exact composition and characteristics of Kepler-452b's atmosphere are not currently known. The detection and analysis of exoplanet atmospheres are challenging tasks and often require advanced instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch) to provide more detailed information. The presence and composition of an atmosphere are critical factors in determining the potential habitability of an exoplanet. An atmosphere can help regulate temperature, protect against harmful radiation, and play a role in supporting life processes. 3. Potential for Extraterrestrial Life: Kepler-452b's location within the habitable zone of its star makes it an intriguing candidate for the potential existence of extraterrestrial life. The habitable zone represents the region where conditions might be suitable for liquid water, a fundamental ingredient for life as we know it, to exist on the planet's surface. However, the presence of liquid water alone does not guarantee the existence of life. Many other factors, such as the planet's atmosphere, geological activity, and the availability of essential chemical ingredients, would also influence its habitability. Detecting signs of life on Kepler-452b or any exoplanet is extremely challenging and would likely require advanced telescopes capable of analyzing the planet's atmosphere for biomarkers (e.g., oxygen and methane) or other potential signs of biological activity. Kepler-452b and Earth are both planets, but they have some significant differences, as well as similarities. Here's a comparison between the two: 1. Size and Mass: Earth: Earth is approximately 12,742 kilometers (7,918 miles) in diameter and has a mass of about 5.972 × 10^24 kilograms. Kepler-452b: Kepler-452b is estimated to be about 1.6 times the size (radius) of Earth, but its mass is not precisely known. It's considered a super-Earth. 2. Orbit and Parent Star: Earth: Earth orbits the Sun, a G-type main-sequence star (G2V), at an average distance of about 149.6 million kilometers (93 million miles). Kepler-452b: Kepler-452b orbits a G-type main-sequence star (G2V) known as Kepler-452, which is very similar to the Sun. Its orbital period is approximately 385 Earth days. 3. Habitability and Atmosphere: Earth: Earth has a diverse and life-sustaining atmosphere composed primarily of nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), with trace amounts of other gases. It has liquid water on its surface and a stable climate, making it highly habitable. Kepler-452b: The exact composition of Kepler-452b's atmosphere is not known, and its habitability is still uncertain. It's located within the habitable zone of its star, indicating the potential for liquid water, but more information about its atmosphere is needed to assess its suitability for life. 4. Age: Earth: Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Kepler-452b: The host star Kepler-452 is estimated to be about 6 billion years old, making it older than the Sun. This could have implications for the potential development of life on the planet. 5. Surface Conditions: Earth: Earth has a diverse range of surface conditions, including continents, oceans, and various climate zones. It supports a wide variety of life forms and ecosystems. Kepler-452b: The specific surface conditions of Kepler-452b, such as the presence of oceans or continents, are not known due to limited observational data. 6. Potential for Extraterrestrial Life: Earth: Earth is known to host a vast array of life, from microorganisms to complex multicellular organisms, including humans. Kepler-452b: Kepler-452b is considered a potentially habitable exoplanet due to its location within the habitable zone, but the presence of extraterrestrial life on the planet is purely speculative at this point. More research and observations are needed to assess its habitability and the potential for life. Other Articles...... Dark Energy Multiness of Thoughts The Dream Mission Creation of Mind Loop STAR VFTS102 KEPLER-186f Proxima Centauri b TRAPPIST-1

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