Hubble: Return to the Carina Nebula

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Return to the Carina Nebula



Looking like an elegant abstract art piece painted by talented hands, this picture is actually a NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a small section of the Carina Nebula. Part of this huge nebula was documented in the well-known Mystic Mountain picture (heic1007a) and this picture takes an even closer look at another piece of this bizarre astronomical landscape (heic0707a).

The Carina Nebula itself is a star-forming region about 7500 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Carina (The Keel: part of Jason’s ship the Argo). Infant stars blaze with a ferocity so severe that the radiation emitted carves away at the surrounding gas, sculpting it into strange structures. The dust clumps towards the upper right of the image, looking like ink dropped into milk, were formed in this way. It has been suggested that they are cocoons for newly forming stars.

The Carina Nebula is mostly made from hydrogen, but there are other elements present, such as oxygen and sulphur. This provides evidence that the nebula is at least partly formed from the remnants of earlier generations of stars where most elements heavier than helium were synthesised.

The brightest stars in the image are not actually part of the Carina Nebula. They are much closer to us, essentially being the foreground to the Carina Nebula’s background.

This picture was created from images taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Images through a blue filter (F450W) were coloured blue and images through a yellow/orange filter (F606W) were coloured red. The field of view is 2.4 by 1.3 arcminutes.
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1127a/


Also


Hubble makes its millionth observation
Milestone observation used to search for water in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

5 July 2011


The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made its millionth observation since its launch 21 years ago. The telescope was used to search for the chemical signature of water in the atmosphere of planet HAT-P-7b <1>, a gas giant larger than Jupiter which orbits the star HAT-P-7.

Alvaro Gimenez, head of science and robotic exploration for the European Space Agency said: “With a million observations and many thousands of scientific papers to its name, Hubble is one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. As well as changing our view of the Universe with its stunning imagery, Hubble has revolutionised whole areas of science. Thanks to ESA’s participation in the Hubble project, the European scientific community is playing a starring role in these achievements.”

Although Hubble is perhaps best known for its detailed images of astronomical objects, the millionth observation was actually made with a spectrograph. Spectroscopy is the technique of splitting light into its component colours. The gases present in a planet’s atmosphere leave a fingerprint in the form of the distinctive colour patterns that different gases absorb. Analysing this data can give precise measurements of which elements are present in an object too distant to ever be visited by a space probe.

“We are looking for the spectral signature of water vapour. This is an extremely precise observation and it will take months of analysis before we have an answer,” explains Drake Deming of the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who designed Hubble’s millionth observation. “Hubble has demonstrated that it is ideally suited for characterising the atmospheres of exoplanets and we are excited to see what this latest targeted world will reveal.”

more

http://www.spacetelescope.org/announcements/ann1114/