Return to Posting
after a six-month hiatus (a consequence of my complete immersion into graduate student life at the university of chicago physics department), i'm back. here is what i consider the most beautiful image that hubble has provided us with this year: a star-forming region in the smc (small magellanic cloud). one of the most fortunate pieces of news coming out of nasa in the last few months is that servicing mission 4 has been approved, which will provide hubble with all sorts of great things, like new batteries, new gyroscopes, and two new instruments: the wide field camera 3 (WFC3) and the cosmic origins spectrograph (COS). the servicing mission will take place sometime next year, and will extend hubble's life until 2013. given the role that hubble has played both in providing data for professional astronomers and in inspiring interest in science in the general public, this is fantastic news. (image credit: hubblesite.org)
Labels: hubble space telescope, servicing mission 4, star formation
posted by Zosia A. C. Krusberg at
6:41 PM
2 Comments:
It'll be good to see some changes on this dang blog. It's one of the sites that I read every morning and I've been getting kind of tired of reading and rereading about dark matter.
This picture is part of my friend Elena's research, although she's not really happy with the color scheme that the public outreach people used. She thinks it's too dull and drab. The CMD of the region is really cool though, you can clearly see the protostars going down the Hayashi tracks.
that's cool! tell her i think it's lovely.
re: the dark matter posting. one of the guys from the CfA was giving the astro colloquium here at the U of C a few weeks ago and spoke about that particular dark matter study. people were up in arms! i've never seen so many questions during a presentation, the guy only got through a fraction of his slides. he spoke most passionately about the various analogies used by the popular press in describing his findings, ranging from a variation of the raisins-in-dough imagery (in the washington post), to truck drivers with no seat belts flying out the front window of their truck (not surprisingly, in some local russian newspaper). anyway, it was a fun time! :)
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