Explosively colorful images from the Hubble Space Telescope enable scientists
to answer key questions about the cosmos, satisfy federal agencies paying
its keep and continue to entrance the public.
That's more devoted fans than any ground-based instrument can boast and
the reasoning behind a lecture this week summarizing Hobble's high points.
Why does this one telescope so fascinate the public?The answer is simple
and universal. People want to know what the cosmos is like beyond the
fringes of the Milky Way. A powerful telescope like Hubble can answer
that question, said Doug Duncan, director of the University of Colorado-Boulder's
Fiske Planetarium.
"Astronomy holds an incredible power on people's imagination,"
said Duncan, who will give Friday's "Hubble Space Telescope and Beyond"
talk at 7:30 p.m.
"What other science has 500,000 amateur practitioners? It's a science
you can actually go and practice for yourself. The only equivalent I've
seen is geology," he said. "At a party, if somebody asks `What
do you do?' If I say I'm a physicist, ... they walk away. If I say I'm
an astronomer, they always have 10 more questions."
Jon Morse, associate director of CU's Center for Astrophysics and Space
Astronomy, still catches glimpses of that interest. Morse snared time
on Hubble to snap images of plumes of red-hot nitrogen gas and dust -
the remnants of Eta Carinae, one of the galaxy's largest stars that once
burned 4 million times brighter than Earth's sun.
That image, released in 1996, was published in National Geographic. Morse
still gets a dozen requests a year to reproduce it, including one from
a company that created a chandelier based on the Hubble snapshot.
Ground-based telescopes can now rival or exceed Hubble's sharp-eyed view,
but many of those instruments take images in the less sexy infrared range
of the light spectrum.
"I truly believe that it is the fact that Hubble takes images of
objects in the light that our eyes can see that really draws people's
attention," Morse said.
At least 19 CU professors have used Hubble for research projects in the
last three years, probing "everything in the universe," Duncan
said.
The view from Hubble can resemble a European master oil painter's view
of heaven with wisps of blue and sunset-tinged clouds.
Among the most significant confirmations made by Hubble was that most
young stars are surrounded by a skirt of dark, dusty material, he said.
Intense radiation from big, bright stars can gnaw away at that material
and slow formation of new stars.
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