Hubble telescope looks back at 20 years Pillars of Creation … – publico

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                 

 
                         

The Pillars of Creation Tower in the middle of the Milky Way. At about 6500 light years from Earth, three columns of dense dust and gas are circumvented by a green light. Red Star area around the dot, which in turn is filled with various shades of blue. When we first saw in 1995, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the strength and the beauty of the Pillars of Creation immediately made this place famous and Hubble in space since 1990, became even better known.

                     

                         Over the years, the lenses of this telescope were s howing other landscapes of space, which gave substance to the vast territory and often abstract that is the universe and were a great source of scientific information for astrophysicists. But few landscapes revealed by Hubble will be as iconic as the Pillars of Creation.

Now, on the anniversary of 25 years of the Hubble, and marking the 20th anniversary of the first image of the Pillars of Creation, astronomers turned to point the telescope for a few tens of hours to the constellation of the Serpent, more precisely for the Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 (M16), where the pillars rise.

The images result of new observations have now been disclosed at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, USA. A shows the light in the visible wavelength, so that human eyes can assimilate; other recorded the infrared radiation emitted by the Pillars of Creation. Each allows to observe different aspects of this place – which is a star nursery and now appears at the most detailed ever

The Eagle Nebula has been known since the eighteenth century. Was part of the elaborate catalog in 1771 by the French astronomer Charles Messier, with over one hundred objects. It was the object 16, hence this nebula is also known as M16.

In 1995, it was known that the region was a star nursery. In these regions, the dust and gas are at such high densities that contract on itself, reaching high enough pressure to start the nuclear process that makes stars shine.

It is thought that the stars Nebula Eagle is part of a star cluster with 5.5 million years and that are still to form new stars. But when astronomers Paul Scowen and Jeff Hester, both from Arizona State University in the United States, initially decided to point the Hubble – which belongs to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) – for the Eagle Nebula, did not expect that result as spectacular.

Paul Scowen now recalls his surprise when he began to treat information obtained through the telescope. “I called Jeff Hester and told him: ‘You must have come here,’” says, quoted a statement from NASA. “We put the pictures on the table, and we were esfuziantes due to the incredible detail.”

One of the first details that caught the attention of the two astronomers were the blue and glowing gas that was escaping the dark columns, and radiating, as shown in the image. “There is only one thing that can light up a neighborhood like this: massive stars that emit ultraviolet light with enough power to ionize and shine clouds of gas,” explains Paul Scowen. . In this case, the ionization occurs when the energy of ultraviolet light makes the electrons jump from hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur

“The nebulous regions of star formation like M16 are like Neon interstellar saying, ‘ We have just concluded a date of massive stars’, “the astrophysicist.

In the creation and destruction
The new images were obtained in September 2014, with the Chamber Course Largo 3, installed on the Hubble telescope in 2009 and captures it from ultraviolet, through visible light to the near infrared. The fact that it was introduced this improvement allowed the new images were even sharper than the 1995 already had blown in. The telescope, which is about 560 kilometers away from Earth and is not that the interference of the atmosphere on the observation of the universe (unlike earth-based telescopes), spent nearly 53 hours for the new images.

As the Pillars of Creation are about 6500 light-years away, the picture emerging from today shows how these structures were there about 6500 years – the time it took the light to reach the Hubble camera. The largest of the pillars has a height of four light years – that is, the light takes four years to go from one end to the other of this structure. Or, put another way, is 37.84 billion kilometers (million million kilometers) high, almost as much as the distance from our Sun to the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, 4.2 years- light.