Terence Dickinson - Hubbles Universe: Greatest Discoveries and Latest Images

Published by Firefly Books Ltd. 2012

Copyright 2012 Firefly Books Ltd.

Text copyright 2012 Terence Dickinson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 978-1-77085-424-6

Published in Canada by:

Firefly Books Ltd.
50 Staples Avenue, Unit 1
Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 0A7

Cover design: Janice McLean / Bookmakers Press Inc.

Front cover: NASA, ESA, SAO, CXC, JPL-Caltech

Back cover: NASA

This is a book that required an expert team, and I was fortunate to have one from day one. First on the list is Ray Villard, News Chief at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, Maryland, and a longtime friend and colleague. Rays experience at space telescope headquarters dates back to 1986 four years before the launch of Hubble. This immersion of more than half an adult lifetime in all things Hubble has made him a walking encyclopedia of the history and accomplishments of the orbiting observatory. Ray has been invaluable in answering at least several hundred questions of mine during the preparation of the book you are now reading. For me to say he has been a stellar resource is to vastly understate his contributions.

Another essential part of the process is my publisher, Lionel Koffler, owner of Firefly Books. Lionel has partnered with me for 10 books over a span of three decades. I appreciate Lionels insistence on uncompromising quality throughout the production of these books, allowing the delicate hues of astronomical images to be fully rendered on the printed page. With well over a million copies of my Firefly books in print, it has been a rewarding collaboration.

The handsome appearance of the book is entirely due to the graphic design talents of Janice McLean, a whirlwind of creativity and inventiveness that is a pleasure to witness. Editor Tracy C. Read, as always, has asked the incisive questions and offered many helpful suggestions, all of which improved the final work.

Finally, my deepest thanks are reserved for my wife, Susan, who has been my copyeditor and assistant for all 10 Firefly titles. The books couldnt have happened without her. A great copyeditor, which Susan is, breathes new life into ordinary prose she makes my words sing.

The dazzling globular star cluster Messier 9, or simply M9, contains hordes of stars swarming in a spherical cloud about 25,000 light-years from Earth. It is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, and when it was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764, he observed it only as a faint smudge in his small telescope. He classified the cluster as a nebula (cloud in Latin). This Hubble Space Telescope portrait, the best image yet of M9, reveals 250,000 individual stars.

In addition to being one of the greatest scientific instruments of all time, the Hubble Space Telescope has given humanity a spectacular legacy of beautiful images of the universe. The best of these are displayedand explainedin this book.

As a teenager in the 1950s, I was captivated by the science fiction of the brilliant visionary Arthur C. Clarke. Browsing the local library, I stumbled upon Clarkes early nonfiction work The Exploration of Space, published in 1951. Half a century later, The New York Times described this classic text as a seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination that helped usher in the space age.

It was in the pages of Clarkes book that I first encountered the concept of a telescope in orbit around our planet. This telescope would peer at the universe from well above the interference of the Earths ever turbulent atmosphere, which relentlessly blurs the view in ground-based telescopes and makes stars twinkle. Ahead of his time, Clarke outlined the advantages of an orbiting telescope compared with a telescope that might, at some future point, be installed on the Moons surface, as had been suggested decades earlier. Even the Moons extremely tenuous atmosphere might affect certain delicate observations, he wrote. [Moreover,] an observatory in space would be able to survey the complete sphere of the sky.

The orbiting scope should even be able to detect planets of nearby stars, enthused Clarke, something quite out of the question with Earth-based equipment. I couldnt wait! During breaks at my first summer job in the shipping department of a publishing house, I made endless pencil sketches on large sheets of brown paper. I imagined just what the photos from that great eye-in-the-sky would look like images that would show surface details on the moons of Jupiter, views deep within the core of the globular cluster M13, and so on until my boss saw what I was up to and cautioned me not to waste any more shipping paper.

Today, the orbiting telescope Clarke envisioned is known as the Hubble Space Telescope, and it has been in service since 1990. That telescope has captured stupendous full-color images that depict the subjects of my crude brown-paper sketches and hundreds more of objects I hadnt yet conjured. What a pleasure it has been to select more than 300 of Hubbles best cosmic portraits for this book. While many of these images have never before appeared in print outside scientific journals and research publications, some were released by the Space Telescope Science Institute as recently as spring 2012. All are accompanied by captions and text that will serve as navigational tools as you undertake this breathtaking journey.

Hubbles Universe is a celebration of the astonishing achievements of a remarkable discovery machine. Enjoy the excursion!

A celestial shell of interstellar gas being shocked by the blast wave from a supernova, the Ornament Nebula was imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope and combined with X-ray images from NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory. The supernova the explosive destruction of a star occurred nearly 400 years ago and is 23 light-years across. The nebula is expanding at the rate of the Earth-to-Moon distance every minute.

The flagship of NASAs Great Observatory program, the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most ambitious, legendary and nail-biting science endeavors in human history. The payoff has been immeasurable: Hubble has given us the universe.

Before Hubble was launched into orbit around Earth in 1990, there was lots of scientific discussion about what a space telescope might find. Hubble scientists agreed that it would be anticlimactic if, in fact, the orbiting telescope found simply what was predicted.

The top to-do-list items for Hubble were to measure the expansion rate of the universe, to find distant galaxies and to determine the chemical content of the space between the galaxies. But everyone expected Hubbles most important discoveries would provide answers to questions that astronomers do not know how to ask and find objects that were not yet even conceived.

Still, no one imagined that Hubbles photographs of deep space would be so utterly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Or that the pictures would have a purely visceral appeal to an entire generation, making Hubble a household word synonymous with spectacular images of the cosmos. It was as though we were looking at the universe with a new eye. The crystal clarity of the images gave us a subliminal three-dimensional universe. The details were so clear and crisp that viewers were drawn into a fantasy landscape of unfathomable shapes and uncommonly vibrant colors.