You owe it to yourself to view these ten spectacular images, all but one of them taken by the Hubble telescope. This series of images was featured in Discover Magazine. I find myself imagining what Galileo himself would have said if he had been able to see these images. Or how Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953) would have reacted. These are truly billion dollar pictures. Below, the Spindle Galaxy:
This is really a treat. Go to this link and see ten photos taken by the recently refurbished Hubble telescope, along with detailed commentary. The image below is one of the ten. It depicts the "Butterfly Nebula." The inset photo is of barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217.
Here's the description of the above photo, from NASA:
A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. The central star itself cannot be seen, because it is hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, which appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the center.
Check out this mind blowing 3D simulation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. The context is all-important. The image was of a patch of empty sky as small as a grain of sand at arm's length. Also, this fantastic image was gathered in 1993, before the most recent upgrades to Hubble. This image is a big reason why I would be tempted to check the box for "spiritual but not religious." Here's a bit of history of the deep field images.
Want to watch/read an entertaining and inspiring three-part discussion covering the frontier of astronomy? All you need to do is follow this link to the article and videos at Discover Magazine. The participants include Saul Perlmutter, Debra Fischer, Mike Brown and Andrea Ghez, in a panel moderated by Discover's Phil Plait. It's lively, accessible and mind-blowing. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: [Debra Fischer]
We started out with a solar system where many planetesimals were forming, and that evolved into a system where all the stable niches are filled. To me that’s one of the most exciting discoveries in this field.
[Mike Brown][I]t’s the small objects that really matter. The small ones are little particles that sit in the outer solar system, and they’re gravitationally swept around by planets. The analogy I like is that these objects in the outer solar system are the blood splattered on the wall after some horrendous murder. I love this analogy—it’s disturbing, but I love it. As Debra just suggested, there might have been additional planets that used to be here in our solar system [but were ejected due to gravitational instability]. The bodies have all been removed.
[Andrea Ghez]The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just “Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?” But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions. What happened with my research is that the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart. We have no idea how these stars formed. So that’s one of the major questions we’re trying to address today: “How do baby stars form next to this completely inhospitable object?”
And now, a short intergalactic interlude, brought to you by the Hubble telescope.