10 Most Impressive Photos of Our Universe

7/27/2019 10 Most Impressive Photos of Our Universe

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Pillars of Creation


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This Hubble image, showing star forming pillars in the Eagle Nebula, is one

of the most popular poster images of outer space, and often appears in

science-fiction movies. The Eagle Nebula was one of the space regions passed

through during the opening "zoom out" shot of the movie Contact (1997), and

appeared in the opening scene of the Babylon 5 episode Into The Fire. The

Eagle Nebula, along with the Hourglass Nebula, was featured in the linernotes of Pearl Jam's 2000 album Binaural.

Pale Blue Dot


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"Pale Blue Dot" is the name of THIS famous Voyager 1 photograph of Earth,

and the title of a book by Carl Sagan inspired by the photo. On February 14,

1990, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its

primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets it had visited.NASA ultimately compiled 60 images from this unique event into a mosaic of

the Solar System. One image Voyager returned was of Earth, 4 billion miles

distant, showing up as a "pale blue dot" in the grainy photo. Britt describes the

distance as "more than 4 billion miles". The picture was taken using a narrow-

angle camera at 32 above the ecliptic, and created using blue, green, and

violet filters. Narrow-angle cameras, as opposed to wide-angle cameras, are

equipped to photograph specific details in an area of interest. In addition, only

0.12 pixels represents Earth in the photo.

Sagan said the famous Earthrise picture taking during the Apollo 8 mission,

showing the entire Earth above the moon, forced humans to step back and see

the Earth as just a part of the universe. In the spirit of that realization, Sagan

said he pushed for Voyager to take a photo of the Earth from its vantage point


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on the edge of the solar system.

There was danger to the spacecraft's optics from the nearby Sun. Voyager

took similar pictures of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Thus the

Pale Blue Dot photo was part of a "portait" of the Solar System that was

created by Voyager 1.

Supernova 1987A

SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the

Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. It occurred approximately

51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth, close enough that it was visible to the naked eye.

It was the closest supernova since SN 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way

itself. The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987. As

the first supernova discovered in 1987, it was labeled "1987A". Its brightness

peaked in May with an apparent magnitude of about 3 and slowly declined in

the following months. It was the first opportunity for modern astronomers tosee a supernova up close.

Since 51.4 kiloparsecs is approximately 168,000 light-years, the cosmic event

itself happened approximately 168,000 years ago. To put this in perspective,


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Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) evolved about 200,000 years ago.

Antennae Galaxies

Hubble produced this image in October 1997. The Antennae Galaxies (also

known as NGC 4038/NGC 4039) are a pair of galaxies about 68 million ly

away in the constellation Corvus. They were both discovered by Friedrich

Wilhelm Herschel in 1785.

The chaotic swirls of blues and oranges represent a firestorm of new star birthignited by the head-on collision of interstellar hydrogen. The long arcing

insect-like "antennae" represent matter flung from the scene of the accident.

Hubble Deep Field


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The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the

constellation Ursa Major, based on the results of a series of observations by

the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 144 arcseconds across,

equivalent in angular size to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The

image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space

Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive daysbetween December 18 and December 28, 1995.

The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie

within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some

of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such

large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image

in the study of the early universe, and it has been the source of almost 400

scientific papers since it was created.

Crab Nebula


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The Crab Nebula (catalogue designations M1, NGC 1952, Taurus A) is a

supernova remnant in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula was first

observed in 1731 by John Bevis. It is the remnant of a supernova that was

recorded by Chinese and Arab astronomers in 1054. Located at a distance of

about 6,300 light years (2 kpc) from Earth, the nebula has a diameter of 11 ly

(3.4 pc) and is expanding at a rate of about 1,500 kilometres per second.

The nebula contains a pulsar in its centre which rotates thirty times per

second, emitting pulses of radiation from gamma rays to radio waves. The

nebula was the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova

explosion.

Cat's Eye Nebula


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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a gamma ray explosion

[shown at two different scales] on January 23, 1999. At the time it was the

most powerful explosion ever recorded.

According to NASA, gammaray bursts "may represent the most powerful

explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, the explosive birth of ouruniverse. Hubble images showed that these brief flashes of radiation come

from far-flung galaxies that are forming stars at enormously high rates. By

pinpointing the host galaxies, Hubble also identified the sources of the 'bursts':

the collapse of massive stars."

Protoplanetary Disks

A Hubble Space Telescope image shows "proplyds," or protoplanetary disks,

in the Orion Nebula.


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According to NASA, nebulae, flattened disks of gas and dust, "are the likely

birthplaces of new planetary systems. Hubble provided visual proof that

pancake-shaped dust disks around young stars are common, suggesting that

the building blocks for planet formation are in place."

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10 Most Impressive Photos of Our Universe