Dr. Jeff Hester’s Cool Science

From the original press release: Eerie, dramatic pictures from the Hubble telescope show newborn stars emerging from “eggs” — not the barnyard variety — but rather, dense, compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs). Hubble found the “EGGs,” appropriately enough, in the Eagle nebula, a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.

These striking pictures resolve the EGGs at the tip of finger-like features protruding from monstrous columns of cold gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (also called M16). The columns — dubbed “elephant trunks” — protrude from the wall of a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen, like stalagmites rising above the floor of a cavern. Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow as they accumulate more and more mass from their surroundings.

The image was taken as part of the telescope time that I was awarded as a member of the science team responsible for the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, or WFPC2. The WFPC2 is the camera that saved Hubble from the disaster of it’s incorrectly polished primary mirror.

The image itself is actually a combination of thirty-two different CCD frames that were taken through filters that isolate light coming from certain types of atoms.

The red part of the image shows light from singly ionized sulfur atoms glowing at a wavelength of 0.673 microns. That light traces relatively cool, dense gas. Green shows light emitted at a wavelength of 0.656 microns by hydrogen atoms. Blue light shows emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms at a wavelength of 0.501 microns. This traces the hottest, most diffuse gas streaming away from the surfaces of the pillars. The whole thing is being powered by the intense ultraviolet light coming from a cluster of massive, very hot young stars that are many thousands of times more luminous than our own Sun.

The Pillars of Creation image has appeared in countless books, TV shows, and movies.  It was made into a US Postage stamp, and was recently selected by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential images in history.

But I will always remember the morning that we first saw the images and thought, “Wow!”

Excerpts from the PBS NOVA special, “Origins.”

Excerpts from NatGeo’s “Hubble’s Amazing Universe.”

Hubble fell victim to a W.A.G. In the face of budget, schedule and political pressures, very smart people turned a blind eye to a wealth of evidence of Hubble’s problems when they could have been easily fixed. The result was a $1.5 billion disaster.

Excerpts from BBC’s “Miracle on Orbit.”

Almost overnight, Hubble became the butt of jokes on late night television. Jay Leno in particular took us to task. “What sound does a space turkey make? ‘Hubble Hubble Hubble'”

I have the dubious distinction of being the guy sitting at the computer console with live nationwide television cameras looking over my shoulder when the first images from Hubble were radioed to Earth. I was also a member of the science team responsible for the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, the instrument that would ultimately restore Hubble to its original promise. With the eyes and weight of the world on us, we had the task of making sure that it worked.

The scene in the operations room when the first image from the repaired Hubble was radioed back to Earth.

It is amazing how close that effort came to succumbing to the same sorts of errors responsible for Hubble’s original failure.

Those experiences shaped my thinking throughout the remainder of my career. They form the kernel of my message today. Success doesn’t come from looking for reasons to think that we are right. Success comes from looking for the things that tell us we might be wrong.

By carefully analyzing the composition of meteorites it was possible to determine that a particular radioactive isotope of iron was around when the Solar System formed. The only plausible source for the radioactive iron was a massive supernova very near the Sun close to the time that the Sun was born.

Discussing the origins of the Solar System for an episode of National Geographic’s Naked Science.

This tells us that the Sun formed not in a quiescent corner of the galaxy, but in a violent maelstrom shaped by stars hundreds of thousands of times more luminous than the Sun. The implications of this for the formation of our own Earth are profound.

At the heart of the Crab is the Crab Pulsar. The Crab Pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star with a radius of only about 10 km and a mass greater than the mass of our Sun. It has a magnetic field 2 trillion times stronger than Earth’s, and is spinning on its axis 30 times a second.

Movie of the wind from the Crab Pulsar. Orange shows visible light images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Blue shows X-ray images taken with the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

In those extreme conditions the Crab Pulsar creates matter and antimatter from our energy and sends it streaming out into space at close to the speed of light. The resulting cloud of relativistic particles emits radiation all the way from the most energetic gamma rays to the longest wavelength radio. I headed a team that used two of NASA’s Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, to observe the Crab over an eight month period and make a movie of its dynamic behavior.

NASA Space Science Update: Televised press conference discussing the Hubble/Chandra movies of the Crab.

My invited review in Annual Reviews summarizes 20 years of research on the Crab Nebula.

The physics going on at the heart of the Crab is similar to the physics going on around the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. But unlike distant quasars, cosmically speaking the Crab is in our own back yard. It is the only place in the sky where we can see these processes at work at close range.

The Crab Nebula was a major focus of my research for over 20 years. For those who would like to know more fascinating things about the Crab, I published an invited review of the Crab Nebula in Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Here is the Space Telescope Science Institute archive of Hubble-related press releases in which I played a part.

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