Simply Awe Inspiring Hubble Pic

[n2doc]

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:
This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" or a Dr. Seuss book, depending on your imagination. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, 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. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.

This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around Earth.

Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionized gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation much like a towering butte in Utah's Monument Valley withstands erosion by water and wind.

Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions off the pedestal at the top of the image. Another pair of jets is visible at another peak near the center of the image. These jets (known as HH 901 and HH 902, respectively) are the signpost for new star birth. The jets are launched by swirling disks around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stars' surfaces.

Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on Feb. 1-2, 2010. The colors in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulfur (red).

link

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/13/image/a/

[JuniperLea]

1. Awesome!

Thanks for my new wallpaper!

[jgraz]

2. Damn, that's 17.6 *trillion* miles tall!

:wow:

[Chulanowa]

6. 4,810 times taller than the diameter of the solar system, from the Sun to Pluto

"Perspective" needs a new definition

[Qutzupalotl]

10. And I complain when I get stuck behind a Mercedes TurboDiesel.

[MUAD_DIB]

3. Cool image. Now one question...

If this image is from 7,500 light-years away then why can't NASA and the Hubble telescope ever take a crisp photo of sub-planet Pluto?

[n2doc]

4. Beacuse this is huge, while Pluto is tiny

Best they can do is this:

[MUAD_DIB]

7. Yes, it is huge compared to pluto or our soloar system, but much farther away than Pluto.

Pluto is in our own solar system. Size to size the original location of the image from deep space would be a spec in comparison to Pluto in the night sky. :crazy:

[pokerfan]

11. Ran some numbers

Carina pillar is 3 ly tall and 7,500 ly distant = 82.5 arcseconds

Pluto is 2000 km diameter and 4,000,000,000 km distant = 0.103 arcseconds

[progressoid]

8. We'll have a better view in a few years.

New Horizons gets there in 2015

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

Plus it's really small.

[Peace Patriot]

5. We are so-o-o-o LITTLE, by comparison! It's mind-boggling.

Also, our teensy bit of the universe is SO-O-O-O-O CALM, by comparison. You'd think that even our corporate dragons would want to protect what we have--our TINY little ball of life--from our own thoughtless activities. But no, I think they must be counting on most of us dying off, from climate change impacts, Frankenfoods and other pollution, and them having a monopoly of the funeral pyres.

Odd species, ours--so lofty, on the one hand, with achievements like Hubble, and so mindless, greedy and predatory, on the other. THINK what went into making us--fabulous "stellar nurseries" like this one! We shouldn't be so careless of the simple fact that we are here at all, to contemplate the Cosmos.

[atomic-fly]

9. Telescopes not Bombs!

Best thing we've done in my lifetime. Reality is way beyond what
we can imagine. Just keeps amazing us.

[krispos42]

12. wow.

Just... wow.