081030 Rebooted Hubble scores a perfect 10

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Rebooted Hubble scores a perfect 10
BY DR EMILY BALDWIN
ASTRONOMY NOW

Posted: October 30, 2008

After numerous glitches with the software onboard Hubble, the world’s favourite space telescope is finally back online, and celebrates by capturing the perfect image.

Arp 147 lies in the constellation of Cetus, over 400 million light years away. This picture was assembled from WFPC2 images taken with three separate filters. The blue, visible-light, and infrared filters are represented by the colours blue, green, and red, respectively. Image: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio (STScI).

The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) captured this chance alignment of two galaxies that spell out the number ’10’. Together the interacting galaxies are known as Arp 147. The left-hand galaxy, the ‘1’, appears nearly edge on in our line of sight, and is relatively undisturbed apart from a smooth ring of starlight. The right-hand galaxy, representing the ‘0’, forms a ring of clumpy but intense star formation.

Astronomers speculate that the blue ring was created after the redder looking galaxy plunged through a galaxy on the right. The colliding galaxies would have created a powerful density wave that would have swept out the material into an expanding ring, stimulating star formation. The dusty reddish knot at the lower left of the blue ring probably marks the location of the original nucleus of the galaxy that was hit.

The galaxy pair was photographed on 27-28 October, demonstrating that Hubble is once again functioning as normal. Later today, NASA representatives will discuss the status of the upcoming repair mission, which was set back to early 2009 following technical problems with Hubble in the days before the mission was originally due to go ahead.