Mental Health Break: Spectacular new images from space

Published September 12, 2009 @ 07:25PM PT

Image of nebula, taken by Hubble Space Telescope.

The space-based Hubble Telescope got a $1 billion-plus revamp thanks to a complex repair mission by shuttle astronauts, back in May.

It is already returning the investment with spectacular new images and data that will fuel years of scientific research and discovery. The images are of far-off galaxies, a star cluster, and, above, this dramatic "butterfly" nebula, officially named "NGC 6302."

The "wings" are in fact "roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit... tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour," according to the Hubble team, "fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!"

At the center of this violent storm is a dying star, which was once about five times the mass of our Sun.

Hubble's new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph also detected the building blocks of life -- oxygen, nitrogen and carbon -- amid the matter being spewed into space by this nebula and other cosmic features, including a galaxy (Markarian 817) being pulled into a supermassive black hole. It's the first time we have had an instrument in space sensitive enough to pick up signs of this matter.

"We believe that most of the matter in space is actually wispy filaments between the galaxies," James Green of the University of Colorado told journalists at a news conference. "The elements of life are being produced in stars ... but they are also being distributed through the cosmos."

Check out more of the Hubble's latest images at Hubblesite.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

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