Sep 9, 2009, 23:08 GMT
Washington - The diaphanous image looks like an otherworldly butterfly with shades of lilac and red, but the photo is actually a look at a dying star sending off gas into the universe.
A handout photo from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope dated 27 July 2009, released on 09 September 2009 with a number of other photos to illustrate the newest imagery from the latest equipment installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope. What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. EPA/NASA HANDOUT
The picture of the so-called Butterfly Nebula is among the spectacular images captured by a revamped Hubble Space Telescope. NASA scientists on Wednesday unveiled the first images taken by the telescope since its repair in a series of marathon spacewalks this May.
The colourful images provide even crisper pictures of distant stars and galaxies and are a taste of the Hubble's new capability after the servicing mission that installed new instruments and repaired broken ones that had hampered the world's most famous telescope.
'The new equipment not only restores Hubble to full operational mode, but propel us forward to a new age in astrophysics,' said Heidi Hammel, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Other pictures include a field of some 100,000 stars in shades of yellow, red and blue inside the Omega Centauri star cluster and Stephan's Quintet, a group of five galaxies.
The views wowed even scientists accustomed to looking at images of distant worlds.
'You don't get jaded, you just keep being enthralled with every new image,' Hammel said.
Hubble has been orbiting Earth since 1990, sending back some of the most spectacular images of galaxies - helping scientists to place the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, learn that black holes are at the centre of most galaxies, monitor planetary formation and discover that the universe is expanding at an ever-faster pace.
Nearly scrapped early in its life when its camera sent back blurry images, it has been brought back from the dead before with repairs that restored its sight.
But despite its storied past, the Hubble looked set for the junk heap until the space shuttle Atlantis' repair mission that saw the installation of new instruments and the repair of existing ones to extend its life until at least 2014, and possibly beyond.
NASA had originally decided against the maintenance mission because of the risk involved and the pressures to complete International Space Station construction by the end of 2010, when the shuttle is to be retired. But US politicians and world astronomers fought successfully to keep alive the instrument that has expanded knowledge of space.
'Most of us humans, certainly many of us humans, will never travel physically to some of the exotic places that we see in Hubble,' said Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator. 'What Hubble has done is enabled our hearts, our minds, our spirits to travel throughout the Solar System even billions of light years to the very beginning of time.'
Researchers hope that the new telescope will reveal even more about the universe and its origins. They expressed relief that everything was in working order and that all repairs had been made, despite several scares with sticky bolts and other hardware during the repair mission.
'Never have so many scientists owed so much to two guys who fixed a stuck bolt,' said Bob O'Connell, who lead the committee in charge of the camera installed to the Hubble.
For their part, the astronauts said they were grateful that everything worked properly.
'Thank God we didn't break it,' joked astronaut Mike Massimino, who had to yank out some stuck hardware to allow the installation to be completed.
Among the most important work done on the telescope was the addition of a new camera. The Wide Field Planetary Camera 3 that will allow astronomers to see deeper into space and to capture images across all three regions of the light spectrum - ultraviolet, visible and near infrared.
Another new instrument, known as the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, will break up light into its components and allow astronomers to study the large-scale structure and origins of the universe, including how galaxies, stars and planets formed and how elements developed and spread.
'This is one of the most fundamental questions we have about the universe - how did matter wind up structured through the universe the way it is. It started out smooth and now its clumpy. How did it get that way?' said James Green, the instrument's principal investigator.
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