May 1, 2002. Copyright 2002. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

Stunning images from HubbleÕs new camera

LONDON, May 1, Graphic News: Astronomers have been bowled over by spectacular new pictures of the universe that were captured by the Hubble Space TelescopeÕs new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument, which was installed during a space shuttle servicing mission in March.

ÒThe ACS is opening a wide new window on to the universe,Ó said Johns Hopkins University astronomer Holland Ford, leader of a team that developed the new camera. ÒThese are among the best images of the distant universe humans have ever seen.Ó

Speaking Tuesday at a news conference where the first four views from the ACS were released, Ford said the new camera increases by 10-fold the visual sharpness of the Hubble and gives the clearest pictures ever of galaxies forming in the very early universe.

He said the new camera will look back in time and distance some 13 billion light years, giving astronomers a glimpse of the few hundred million year period when stars and galaxies were beginning to form after the Big Bang.

One of the four views released (top left) shows an object, identified as UGC 10214 and dubbed the ÒTadpole galaxy,Ó located 420 million light-years away in the constellation Draco.

Top right: resembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea, this object is actually an innocuous pillar of gas and dust. Called the Cone Nebula (NGC 2264) -- so named because, in ground-based images, it has a conical shape -- this giant pillar resides in a turbulent star-forming region. The image, which was captured on April 2, shows the upper 2.5 light-years of the nebula, a height that equals 23 million roundtrips to the Moon. The entire nebula is 7 light-years long. The Cone Nebula resides 2,500 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. 

Below to the left -- and captured just one day earlier -- is an image of the center of the Omega Nebula, a hotbed of newly born stars wrapped in colorful blankets of glowing gas and cradled in an enormous cold, dark hydrogen cloud.

The region of the nebula shown in this photograph is about 3,500 times wider than our solar system. The area represents about 60 percent of the total view captured by ACS. The nebula, also called M17, resides 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

The fourth image is of a pair of galaxies engaged in a celestial dance of cat and mouse or, in this case, mouse and mouse. Located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, the colliding galaxies have been nicknamed ÒThe MiceÓ because of the long tails of stars and gas emanating from each galaxy. Otherwise known as NGC 4676, the pair will eventually merge into a single giant galaxy. 

The images show the most detail and the most stars that have ever been seen in these galaxies. One such galaxy, seen as a dim red dot in the Tadpole image, is shown as it was when the universe was about 10 percent of its current age, said Ford.

ÒThe light we see left that faint red galaxy when the universe was just 1 billion years old,Ó he said.

MUST CREDIT: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)
/ENDS

Source: NASA