Astronomers will have new opportunities when the James Webb Space Telescope is launched. It's a good time to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us.
Astronomers rarely use their telescopes to take pictures. The pictures in astrophysics are usually created by a process of scientific inference and imagination, and sometimes visualized in artist's impressions of what the data suggests.
It was difficult to choose just a few images. I limited my selection to images produced by publicly-funded telescopes, which reveal some interesting science. I tried to avoid popular images that have already been seen.
I'm sure many readers would advocate for different choices if they had a choice. You can share them in the comments.
1. Jupiter's poles.
Sean Doran and Gerald Eichstdt are both from NC-SA.
The first image I chose was produced by NASA's Juno mission. The image was taken in October of last year when the spacecraft was close to Jupiter's clouds. It shows the first view of Jupiter's poles in the Northern Hemisphere.
This picture is based on images that show complex flow patterns similar to a storm in Earth's atmosphere, and striking effects caused by the variety of clouds at different altitudes.
I chose this image for its beauty and the fact that the parts of the planet near the north pole look very different to the parts we have seen closer to the equator. We saw a different view of Jupiter when we looked down on the poles.
2. The Eagle Nebula is a body of water.
G. Li Causi is from Italy.
Astronomers can build telescopes that are sensitive to the light of colors beyond what our eyes can see. Physicists call the electromagnetic spectrum a fraction of the rainbow of colors.
TheIR has less energy than optical light. The human eye can see objects that are too cool. It can see through dust in space, which obscures our view.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be the largest of its kind. The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory has been the largest until now. Herschel view of star formation in the Eagle Nebula is the next image I've chosen.
A cloud of gas is in space. The Eagle Nebula is very close to Earth. The site of vigorous star formation is this nebula.
The "Pillars of Creation" is a close-up view of a feature near the center of the image. The pillars look like a thumb and forefinger, and protrude into a giant cloud of gas and dust. The wind is blowing out of the cloud and taking out the cavity.
3. The center of the universe.
NASA, JPL, and S. Stolovy are involved.
This image shows the center of our universe. This time, it combines data from two NASA telescopes.
The center of our universe is in the bright white region in the lower right of the image. It contains a massive black hole called Sagittarius A*, a cluster of stars and the remains of a massive star which exploded as a supernova about 10,000 years ago.
There are other star clusters. The stars' winds have cleared the local gas and dust in the lower left corner of the image. The Arches cluster is in the upper left and was named for the illuminated arcs of gas which extend above it and out of the image. Some of the most massive stars are in these two clusters.
4. Abell 372.
J. Lotz is a member of the HFF Team/STScI.
The universe is structured as a web of long connected strands of dark matter. The most dramatic visible objects are clusters of galaxies.
We can see that Einstein was correct when he said that mass curves space. Hubble's image of Abell 370 is one of the prettiest examples of this warping of space.
Abell is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies that are 5 billion light-years away from us. The arcs of light can be seen in the picture. The magnified and distorted images of distant galaxies are what these are.
The mass of the cluster distorts spacetime and bends the light from the more distant objects, magnifying them and in some cases creating multiple images of the same distant galaxy. The warped spacetime acts like an optical lens.
There is a bright arcs to the left of the center of the picture. The arcs are made up of two images of a distant galaxy at its head and tail. The arcs of the dragon's body can be seen from several other distant galaxies.
The magnification of these images reveals more detail of the distant object than would otherwise be seen. The population of stars can be looked at in detail.
5. The field of the Hubble.
The HUDF Team is made up of NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith/STScI.
Astronomers decided to point Hubble at a blank patch of sky for a few days to see what distant objects might be seen at the edge of the observable universe.
Almost all of the objects in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field are very distant. The universe was only half a billion years old when the light from some of these galaxies traveled for 13 billion years.
Some of these objects are very old. Here we are seeing light from ancient stars.
When the universe first became bathed in starlight, it was able to separate electrons from hydrogen. The last major change in the properties of the universe was this one.
Light carries so much information that it is possible to piece together the history of the universe. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope will give us some vastly improved images, and will inevitably raise new questions to challenge future generations of scientists.
Professor of Astrophysics at The Open University.
The Conversation's article is a Creative Commons licensed one. The original article can be found here.
