Hubble's 100,000th Orbit

The Hubble Space Telescope has just recently completed its 100,000th orbit around Earth today, August 11, 2008. The telescope reached that milestone above the Pacific Ocean (Illustration above). It has been a long journey for this famous telescope, 18 years long, one that has let humans learn so much about the universe. However, it has not always been an easy life for the Hubble, marked by quite a few challenges and repairs. To mark this special event, the researchers at the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore, Maryland have decided to do something special.

These researchers decided to point the giant space telescope at a part of the nebula near star cluster NGC 2074. The nebula, 170,000 light-years away from us, is an intense area of star formation that may have been caused by a supernova explosion nearby. It is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite of the Milky Way galaxy.

The colorful image taken by the Hubble, below, reveals many features of the nebula lighted up by strong ultraviolet radiation. Young stars existing in NGC 2074 are emitting strong radiation that is eating away the edges of the nebula. The area covered by the image spans a massive 100 light-years and huge towers of dust come out of the bright colorful walls of gas that form part of a large molecular cloud. To give a sense of scale, the seahorse-shaped tower at lower, right in the image measures about 20 light-years in length, approximately 4 times the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our sun!

This color image was taken by the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope on August 10, 2008. The Red colors show emission from sulfur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen.

Images: NASA

Red Stripe in Space

Image: NASA/ESA

So what exactly is that red stripe in the picture? The picture is one of the latest from the Hubble Space Telescope, and the main focus of the image is a red trail of gas. This gas is part of the remnant of a supernova that took place in our galaxy, and lies 6,850 light years away from Earth. So what supernova caused this?

SN 1006 took place in 1006 C.E. (A.D.) between April 30 and May 1. It had the brightest

 apparent magnitude (brightness viewed on Earth) of any stellar event known! The event has been described by many civilizations, particularly the Chinese and the Arabic, which provide us with detailed descriptions of the explosion as it appeared on Earth. Today, this red band is a part of what is left from the mighty supernova. The image on the right shows the shell of the supernova remnant and to what part of the shell the above image belongs to (outlined). Click on the image to view a larger size.

Find out more about:

• The Hubble Space Telescope Image (HubbleSite)
• SN 1006 (Wikipedia)

A Humongous Star Explosion

The "SN 2006gy" explosion took place in the galaxy called NGC 1260, 240 million light-years away. It was 100 times more powerful than most typical supernovas, the brightest and most energetic ever recorded. It was first detected in September 2006, using ground-based telescopes and NASA's Chandra X-ray space observatory. It picked up brightness in 70 days, and reached 50 billion times the light of the Sun at its peak, 10 times brighter than its own galaxy.

The importance of this discovery is that it leads to a hypothesis that massive star explosions, like this one, were very common in the early universe. It is believed that many of the first stars in our universe were very big, and this explosion indicates what happened when one of them exploded. The star that produced this supernova had expelled a lot of mass prior to the explosion. This is very similar to what we can see at Eta Carinae, a massive star in our own galaxy, suggesting that this star is about to explode as well in a similar fashion. This star is only 7,500 light years away, and astronomers are expecting a spectacular show if it does explode.

This type of supernova is different from others, where they run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity. This explosion may have been triggered under some conditions, where the core of a massive star produces a lot of gamma ray radiation. The energy from this radiation gets converted into particle and anti-particle pairs. The drop in energy causes the star to collapse under its own huge gravity. Afterwards, the thermonuclear reactions continue, and the star explodes. This explosion is suggesting that the first stars of the universe ended up with this fate, rather than completely collapsing to a black hole as previously theorized. This hypothesis is important because it leads to a different outcome. Instead of a black hole sucking and locking away matter forever, a supernova took place, spreading newly formed matter into space.

For more information, visit:

• NASA
• SPACE.com
• Wikipedia(Supernova, Star, Particle physics in cosmology)