BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Hubble Space Telescope - 27th birthday Aptil 2017

Wow!

Mona, that just seems so hard to believe!

Last year's birthday image was of NGC 7635, The Bubble Nebula. It's located 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)

Wow! Amazing picture!

Where to begin when there are so many interesting things in this Hubble image . . .

I suppose the showpiece is what looks like glitter spread across the image. This is the galaxy ESO 318-13. (Few galaxies have names, most are named by catalog references.) In the center of the galaxy is what looks like a star bright enough to be a supernova. However it's an ordinary star – just not in ESO 318-13, which is millions of light years away. It looks so bright because it's in our own Milky Way galaxy.

In the upper right hand corner of the image is an elliptical galaxy. It's bright, but slightly fuzzy, objec. It's bigger than ESO 318-13, but also farther away.

Galaxies have more space in them than stars, so we can often pick out objects behind a galaxy. If you look closely at the right hand side of ESO 318-18 you should be able to find a distant spiral galaxy.

And you can probably pick out some more very distant galaxies scattered around the image, as well as Milky Way foreground stars.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA 

Fantastic!

NGC 3597 was produced when two large galaxies collided. It's slowly evolving into a giant elliptical galaxy. This type of galaxy has become increasingly common over time. NGC 3597 is located approximately 150 million light-years away in the constellation of Crater (The Cup).

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

This bright galaxy is near the equator of the Milky Way’s galactic disc, where the sky is thick with glowing cosmic gas, bright stars, and dark, obscuring dust. There's a lot of material to look through, so IC 342 is relatively difficult to spot and image, giving it the nickname: the “Hidden Galaxy”.

A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the very central region of the galaxy. There's a beautiful mixture of hot, blue star-forming regions, redder, cooler regions of gas, and dark lanes of opaque dust, all swirling together around a bright core.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This very deep image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy NGC 4921 along with a spectacular backdrop of more distant galaxies. It was created from a total of 80 separate pictures through yellow and near-infrared filters.

The galaxy reminds me of a swirl of whipped cream. Yum.

Credit: NASA, ESA and K. Cook (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)