HUbble Archives - The Silver Ink

NASA to celebrate 25th anniversary of Hubble

April 4, 2015 By Stephen Kenwright Leave a Comment

The 25^th anniversary of Hubble Space telescope falls on April 24. In celebration of its success a documentary “Saving Hubble” is made.

Major understanding of our solar system was only possible with the help of Hubble telescope. It has helped scientist explore the vast solar system with the pictures captured.

The director David Gaynes at the Saving Hubble press conference said, “Hubble’s wide support among the general public, to say nothing of the space and astronomy communities, is obviously a testament to the success of the mission, but the achievement of Hubble is even greater than the sum of all the science and wonder the mission has generated – so great it’s hard to articulate the feeling, though so many of us recognize it and attempt to describe it.”

He continued, “Hubble’s story writ large, from the original idea of a telescope in space through its execution, utilization, and the subsequent transformation of our understanding of the universe is, simply put, the essence of the human story.”

He added “This is why thousands of people have profound feelings for the machine. Hubble is, in fact, not only a mirror on the cosmos but a mirror for ourselves, and that’s the unique angle of the Hubble story I sought to tell. I’m proud to have had a role contextualizing this very simple but powerful idea and to have helped create a film that explores the significance of the Hubble endeavor on a deeper level than ever before.”

NASA’s Hubble telescope discovers green ghostly structures of quasars

April 3, 2015 By Kyle Mills Leave a Comment

Quasars are furthest objects away from our galaxy that can be seen. Quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source or quasi-stellar object.

Telescope is needed to view the objects.

Quasars emit light waves, radio waves and x-rays.

Quasars are super massive black hole surrounded by the disk like structured gas. It attracts galaxies, gas and stars with its gravity and these objects are sucked into the black hole resulting in the massive collision and radiating light and energy, this collision results in flares which is a distinct characteristic of quasars.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the short lived ghosts of quasars that flickered into life and fade away.

They are thin, green objects and bright masses of light and energy.

In 2007, the first green object was discovered by the by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel.

The ethereal wisps which are glowing outside the galaxy are believed to be illuminated by the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the black hole which lies in the center of the galaxy.

Quasars are the most active of theses galaxy cores and any material fallen under the gravity are heated to a point where brilliant light shine into the space. This light is produced by the superheated gas encircling the black hole.

“However, the quasars are not bright enough now to account for what we’re seeing; this is a record of something that happened in the past,” said Bill Keel of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, who initiated the Hubble investigation of the distant objects.

The behavior of the galaxies having energetic core is very puzzling and these images throw some light on it. The quasars once emitted huge energy, which they shouldn’t and this is indicated by the glowing filaments. One justification is quasars may be co-orbiting black holes and this may act like a dimmer switch.

LHC is now ready to discover dark matter particle

March 21, 2015 By Kyle Mills

Now it’s time to reboot the world largest particle collider LHC for a new set of experiments. By the end of the march it is going to be restated by an international team of physicists.

The new experiment is to find out what is dark matter.

It was the Hubble telescope which for the first time discovered dark matter and dark energy. It further enlightened that noticeable matter is just 5 percent of the universe and 70 percent of the universe is dark energy and the remaining 25 percent is dark matter.

What is dark matter? This is the stuff that pulls gravitationally on matter around it, it is invisible because it does not interact with light and this makes it hard to detect.

The scientist has never come across a particle which exhibits such properties, and they are eagerly waiting that they could find the particle responsible for dark matter from the debris of the LHC collision.

What is LHC? LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider which is in Geneva. It is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world which is built by CERN or the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

This machine has long, oval shape tunnel where the subatomic particles like the protons, neutrons move at the speed of light. These two beams of particles are pointed against each other so that they can make a head on collision. This collision generates hot cloud of debris reaching temperatures which is 1,000,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and this debris may contain some never seen particles.

Back in 2008, just nine days into its first run of experiments, there was a significant incident at the Large Hadron Collider which has damaged some parts of it and was sent for repair.

After the collider coped, on July 4th 2012, there was another experiment performed at the LHC. There were two experiments conducted one at LHC and other at CMS and ATLAS. The result of the experiment was the biggest findings ever. They discovered a new invisible particle called the Higgs Boson. This is the particle which gives mass to everything and holds the universe together.

The LHC was shut down for maintenance and after two years, now the scientists are going to conduct a new experiment.

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