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20 years of Hubble: their five most important discoveries
DailyNews, April 24, 2010


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April 24 One day like today but 20 years ago NASA launched the space one of the telescopes has given more joy to the scientific community: the Hubble. 20 years and this telescope is scanning the universe conscientiously work through which we could admire in great detail, from planets to stars passing by galaxies or nebulae, and got to know more about space and what it spends.

Because of its 20th anniversary everyone is congratulating the Hubble in different ways (he has put the Google doodle today for example) and in this, although we commend a few days ago, we were not going to be less and we repeat today greeting with this second post. In particular I will remember their five most important discoveries, so without further delay I leave with the interesting.

Supermassive black holes

By the year 1915 the great Albert Einstein predicted by mathematical formulas the existence of black holes, but no one had been able to get confirmation until 94. In that year our protagonist found something that had a mass equivalent to 3,000 suns in the galaxy M87, “that something” was a supermassive black hole. The Hubble had made the first test of history, confirming what has been noted by Einstein.

But the Hubble discoveries related to black holes continued. In 96 a group of NASA scientists to an important conclusion reached by Hubble images: almost all large galaxies in the universe are “capped” by a supermassive black hole at its center (also ours, by the way)

Specifying the age of the Universe





In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe expands and made the famous “Hubble constant” that describes the universe’s expansion rate and age. It was a milestone that years later “polished” the Hubble (rightly so named in honor of Edwin) to allow scientists to specify in its images much was made years ago by Edwin Hubble. The final conclusion was that our universe has an age of 13,500 million years.

Evidence of dark energy

There was something that scientists were eager for a long time and was not otherwise be able to see what was happening in deep space, which was finally achieved with the Hubble. These comments were a real booty. Thanks to them we found evidence that supported what Einstein had predicted years ago too, the universe is filled with a form of energy called dark energy, which is causing the galaxies are separated from each other constantly (or said Otherwise, is the force that makes the universe expand.)

Thus was born a planet





Another of the great moments of Hubble arrived in 2005 when he caught the first phase leading to a planet, specifically imaged as a disk of gas and dust around a newborn star was becoming more dense, allows the material is grouped for finally giving rise to a new planet.

Hubble does not miss anything, not the smallest. So much so that in 2008, for the first time, gave an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized exoplanet, HD 189733b. The discovery was important and was a step forward in the aim of achieving identify prebiotic molecules in the atmospheres of planets located in the “habitable zones” around other stars.
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Global Media Coverage: Hubble marks 20 years in space (more)

Photos: Hubble & Spitzer Space Telescopes


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Astronomers around the world this weekend mark the 20th anniversary of the launching of the iconic Hubble, NASA's first orbiting space telescope that has revolutionized human understanding of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed into Space by the Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1993.




A photo taken in 1990 by the STS-31 crew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, shortly before the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed, showing the extended golden solar blanket which supplies power to the Telescope.




A smoothed reconstruction of the total (mostly dark) matter distribution in the COSMOS field, created from data taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. More than any other instrument, the Hubble has stimulated a modern-day infatuation with deep space, beaming to Earth the most spectacular images ever taken of faraway galaxies. (AFP/ESA/HO/File/Ho)




This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around Earth. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on Feb. 1-2, 2010. (REUTERS/NASA)




This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around Earth. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on Feb. 1-2, 2010. (REUTERS/NASA)




The Hubble Space Telescope is seen with the earth in the background in this hand-held video from the aft flight deck window of the space shuttle Atlantis' as the orbiter backs away after releasing the telescope in this image from NASA TV May 19, 2009. (REUTERS/NASA TV)

.Scour.com: Hubble Images on the web




EOS Space Telescopes: www.spacetelescope.org/hubble




> SM3B - Hubble is released

Visibleearth.nasa.gov

Image of Earth’s city lights



Credit Data courtesy Marc Imhoff of NASA GSFC and Christopher Elvidge of NOAA NGDC. Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC.


This image of Earth’s city lights was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS).
Originally designed to view clouds by moonlight, the OLS is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface.

The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. (Compare western Europe with China and India.)
Cities tend to grow along coastlines and transportation networks. Even without the underlying map, the outlines of many continents would still
be visible. The United States interstate highway system appears as a lattice connecting the brighter dots of city centers. In Russia, the Trans-Siberian
railroad is a thin line stretching from Moscow through the center of Asia to Vladivostok. The Nile River, from the Aswan Dam to the Mediterranean Sea,
is another bright thread through an otherwise dark region.

Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, some regions remain thinly populated and unlit. Antarctica is entirely dark. The
interior jungles of Africa and South America are mostly dark, but lights are beginning to appear there. Deserts in Africa, Arabia, Australia, Mongolia,
and the United States are poorly lit as well (except along the coast), along with the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, and the great mountains of
the Himalaya.

The Earth Observatory article Bright Lights, Big City describes how NASA scientists use city light data to map urbanization.

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NASA picks May 14 launch for Atlantis' last flight
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer –May 5


Slideshow: Space shuttle

In this photo taken April 19, 2010, space shuttle Atlantis stands ready in the Vehicle Assembly Building


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. – Space shuttle Atlantis is set to blast off on its final flight next week. NASA's top managers agreed Wednesday to set May 14 as the launch date. Liftoff would be at 2:20 p.m.

Atlantis will fly to the International Space Station, carrying up a crew of six and a load of supplies. Much of that is crammed inside a Russian-built module that will be attached permanently to the orbiting lab complex. The astronauts will venture out on three spacewalks to plug in fresh batteries and tack on a spare antenna.

The 12-day mission is scheduled to be the last for Atlantis. NASA is retiring its three shuttles at the end of this year. After this flight, only two will be left. But Atlantis won't be dismantled and head to a museum when the flight is over. Instead, the spaceship will be prepped for a potential rescue mission for NASA's very last shuttle flight. That final trip, by Endeavour, is scheduled for November at the earliest. Discovery is supposed to make its last trip in September.

At a news conference, NASA's shuttle program manager noted that the mission comes on the heels of Discovery's recently completed trip to the space station. "It's 15 days since we last landed. Nine days until we launch," program manager John Shannon said. "This is the kind of pace that this team thrives on."

Launch director Mike Leinbach said shuttle workers are not distracted by the end of the program — at least not while they're on the job. Any venting is saved for lunch time or the end of the day, he said. "They know the end is coming and they're making their plans," Leinbach said. "We've gotten past the denial stage of change, and we're into the exploration and the acceptance change."

President Barack Obama visited Kennedy Space Center on April 15, laying out a strategy for sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by 2035. In doing so, he canceled plans made by his predecessor in 2004 to return astronauts to the moon. He also did not call for any additional shuttle missions, as some had hoped. If there is to be one additional flight to the space station, NASA officials said they would like to know by June so they have enough time to train a crew and prepare the cargo.
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On the Net:
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shutt ... index.html

Discovery News

OUR WEIRD UNIVERSE NOT AS 'CONSTANT' AS WE THOUGHT
Analysis by Nicole Gugliucci, May 10, 2010





There are some things in life that we just expect to be the same. The fundamental constants of physics, such as the speed of light, the strength of gravity, the mass of a certain particle, are just some things we've learned to accept as given. However, there is tantalizing evidence that favors the hypothesis that these so-called constants change with time, thanks to some clever techniques used by radio astronomers. Theoretical physicists have been trying to come up with a "theory of everything" for some time now, and we hear about efforts to do so, such as string theory.

These models make predictions that can only be detected with energies much higher than any device we can dream of today, so they lie mostly out of the range of scientific testability. There is however one piece of evidence that we can search for today, a changing of the values of fundamental constants over the lifetime of the universe. Who is well suited to look back that far in time? Astronomers, of course! Since distant galaxies are SO far away, we see their light as it was emitted millions or billions of years ago, and can thus look back into time.




ANALYSIS: Can life exist in alternate universes? By tweaking the fundamental constants of nature, 'multiverse' life might be possible.


This is what astronomers Nissim Kanekar, Jayaram Chengalur, and Tapasi Ghosh have tried. They looked at one of my favorite galaxies, PKS 1413+135, and detected the OH molecule (containing an oxygen and a hydrogen atom -- a.k.a. hydroxide) in both emission and absorption. This means that the molecule both absorbs the surrounding radiation at a specific frequency and emits radiation at a specific frequency, making a "dip" and a "bump" in the spectrum. (An everyday example of spectral lines might be the specific color of a laser, or the single color emitted by neon gas in a sign.)

They looked at the shape of the line, or profile, to determine that the emission and absorption both came from the same gas cloud. This is very important, since you want to test for only changes in the fundamental constants, not the different environments that produced the spectral lines. Then, they measured the redshifts of the lines. As a source of emission moves away from us, which this galaxy is, the spectral line will show up at a longer wavelength, or lower frequency. You can hear redshift of sound (known as the Doppler Effect) as a train speeds past you blowing its horn!

Usually, we assume we know the rest frequency of the line as measured in the lab and can use redshift to measure the motion of the gas or galaxy. Instead, they use the fact that the lines come from the same gas, and thus must move in the same way with respect to us, and determine that the rest frequencies of the lines are slightly different from what we would expect! The wavelength or frequency at which an atom or molecule emits light depends on the fundamental constants of the universe, such as the "fine structure constant," which determines the strength of the electromagnetic force. This keeps the negatively charged electron orbiting around a positively charged atomic nucleus, for example. These observations suggest that some fundamental constant is indeed changing since the time of this galaxy, almost 3 billion years ago.




- CAPTION: From Kanekar, Chengalur, and Ghosh (2010). The top panel in red shows the absorption line, flipped to look like emission for easy viewing. The middle panel shows the emission line of OH. The Bottom shows the sum of these two, showing they cancel out, or have the same shape. On the left is from Westerbork, the right is from Arecibo.


This study joins a list of similar observations that suggest this, but the new technique of finding lines from the same gas cloud reduces a lot of the uncertainty of previous measurements. It was also observed and confirmed with both the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico (pictured top) and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands. Is this enough to determine the "theory of everything"? Certainly not, but it does clue us in to the possibility that the universe is indeed more weird that we can imagine.

.www.fe-lexikon.info


.Space Videos: Hubble's View Of The Universe

.http://blog.savcds.org

A COOL COMPILATION OF HUBBLE IMAGES: http://scour.com