Sometimes it must seem like the Hubble Space Telescope is a time traveler.
Within hours of Hubble making headlines because it shut itself down due to a serious mechanical failure, mission scientists released a survey of galactic diversity based on new Hubble images.
NGC 253, Sculptor Group galaxy, 13 million light-years away
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington)
Using two of its powerful cameras, Hubble captured high-resolution views of 69 galaxies that lie 6.5 million to 13 million light-years away. This sounds pretty distant, but it's actually right in our cosmic backyard.
The project—delightfully named the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury, or ANGST, program—aims to use the new, detailed views of old stars in nearby galaxies like a fossil record.
More distant galaxies are younger galaxies to Earth-based observers, because the light had to travel for millions of years to reach us, so what we see now is how a galaxy looked in it's early days.
The young/far galaxies are loaded with active star formation and are good models in general for figuring out how galaxies grow up.
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington)
By comparing the closer, geriatric galaxies to their younger cousins, scientists hope to trace how various types of galaxies might have evolved, as well as possibly getting a clearer picture of stellar life cycles. [Yes, I know I'm supposed to be talking about planets here, but you gotta have stars for planets to form, right?]
But, you might ask, NASA says Hubble is broken, so how is it still releasing new images?
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