Reflection
51. Nebula
in Orion
Just weeks after NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble
Space Telescope in December 1999, the Hubble Heritage
Project snapped this picture of NGC 1999, a nebula in
the constellation Orion. The Heritage astronomers, in
collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used
Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to
obtain this colour image.
Credit: NASA/ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
Jupiter impact
52.comet zones
from
This true colour image of the giant planet Jupiter, by NASA and ESA’s Hubble
Space Telescope, reveals the impact sites of fragments ‘D’ and ‘G’ from Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Credit: H. Hammel, MIT and NASA/ESA
Bright
53. quasar 3C 273
This image is likely the best of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273,
which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of
Virgo (The Virgin). Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach
us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars
to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was
discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.
The term quasar is an abbreviation of the phrase “quasi-stellar radio
source”, as they appear to be star-like on the sky. In fact, quasars
are the intensely powerful centres of distant, active galaxies,
powered by a huge disc of particles surrounding a supermassive
black hole. As material from this disc falls inwards, some quasars —
including 3C 273 — have been observed to fire off super-fast jets
into the surrounding space. In this picture, one of these jets appears
as a cloudy streak, measuring some 200 000 light-years in length.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA