I recently stumbled upon the 100 best images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope, for the uninitiated, is one of NASA’s most successful and long-lasting science missions. It has beamed hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth, shedding light on many of the great mysteries of astronomy. Its gaze has helped us determine the age of the universe, the identity of quasars, and the existence of dark energy. Since the earliest days of astronomy, the time of Galileo, astronomers have shared a single goal — to see more, see farther, see deeper into space. The Hubble Space Telescope’s launch in 1990 sped humanity to one of its greatest advances in that journey. Hubble is a telescope that orbits Earth. Its position above the atmosphere, which distorts and blocks the light that reaches our planet, gives it a view of the universe that typically far surpasses that of ground-based telescopes.
Why a Space Telescope, you may ask? The answer to this question lies in a problem that telescopes have faced since the very earliest days of their invention: the atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere distorts the view of telescopes on the ground, no matter how large or scientifically advanced those telescopes are. This "atmospheric distortion" is the reason that the stars seem to twinkle when you look up at the sky.
The most effective way to avoid the problems of the atmosphere is to place your telescope beyond it. Or, in Hubble’s case, 353 miles (569 km) above the surface of Earth. Every 97 minutes, Hubble completes a spin around Earth, moving at the speed of about five miles per second (8 km per second) — fast enough to travel across the United States in about 10 minutes. As it travels, Hubble’s mirror captures light and directs it into its several science instruments. All of Hubble’s functions are powered by sunlight. Hubble sports solar arrays that convert sunlight directly into electricity. Some of that electricity is stored in batteries that keep the telescope running when it’s in Earth’s shadow, blocked from the Sun’s rays.
Here, I have presented the five best images taken by Hubble from the 100 that I scanned. This collection is the result of a personal choice and I must agree that it was one of the most difficult five pictures I have had to choose. Some of the pictures that did not make it to this list were equally dramatic and compelling. But, apart from the astounding imagery, the colours of nature in deep space, I also chose these pictures for a certain character and meaning that I saw in them. I will talk about it when I am talking about the pictures.
Jupiter’s Moon
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed Jupiter and four of its largest moons. The one called Io, (shown here) is the most geologically active in our Solar System, due to its many volcanoes. Although it appears to be skimming the planet’s cloud tops, Io is actually 3,10,000 miles from the surface of Jupiter. The black dot to the right is the moon’s shadow. It takes Io just 42.5 hours to revolve once around Jupiter. Here you can see Io looking like a delicate maiden close to Jupiter, who menacingly looms large, like the over-bearing, dominating, protective lover, meaning to say, “don’t mess with her”.
Crab Nebula
In 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers witnessed a stellar explosion in the constellation Taurus. One thousand years later, the tattered remnants of the super dense neutron star’s explosion, also known as a supernova, are still visible, sweeping up gas as it expands at a rate of 1,500 kms per second. One of the most spectacular sights for astronomers, the Crab Nebula looks more like an ‘eye’. It is located at around 6,500 light-years from Earth and has a diameter of 11 light-years. At the center of the nebula is the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star, 28-30 kms across, which emits pulses of radiation and spins 30.2 times per second.
Deep Field View
In 1995, the telescope peered into a tiny spot in the sky for ten days, which surprisingly revealed the existence of at least 10,000 galaxies, some billions of light years away. Each dot in this image is a galaxy. This is the deepest visible light image ever made.
A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars, interstellar dust, and dark matter. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million stars, up to giants with a hundred trillion stars, all orbiting the galaxy’s center of mass. The Sun is one of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, look at this image again and see how small and insignificant we are compared to the immensity of the (observed) Universe. A Universe that we have still not fully seen!
Butterfly Nebula
One of the most complex structures ever observed in the Universe, the butterfly-shaped nebula consists of heated gas made up of oxygen and nitrogen, the whole of which tears through space at speeds in excess of 60,000 miles. Called NGC 6302 or the Bug Nebula, a white dwarf star was recently discovered at the center of the nebula. The spectrum of NGC 6302 shows that its central star is one of the hottest stars in the galaxy, with a surface temperature in excess of 2,00,000 K, implying that the star from which it formed must have been very large. Here, with its wings spread, it truly looks like a galactic organism, splendidly opening its wings to the Universe and flying alone in deep space.
Saturn Aurora
Every drawing of a planet in childhood would have an image of Saturn. It is the favourite of all children, simply because of its planetary rings and the mystery that surrounds those rings. Many space probes latter, we have found that the rings are not solid but made up of ice particles, rocky debris and dust. Here we see our favourite planet with a bright aurora around its south pole. The aurora has been created due to a large amount of solar wind activity from the sun, rising more than a thousand miles above its cloud tops. Looks like a halo on the planet’s head (overturned actually). Shani (from Hindu mythology) would be pleased to see this.
Courtesy TIME, www.wikipedia.org and www.hubblesite.org.
Narsi's Space 