Students and members of the Stony Brook community packed into the Earth and Space Sciences Building on Oct. 1, for the lecture “Observing Galaxies Large and Small with the Hubble Space Telescope,” despite the rainstorm that did not allow the audience to view the stars afterward.
The speaker, Dr. Jennifer Donovan Meyer, a postdoctoral research associate in the physics and astronomy department at Stony Brook, discussed the Hubble Space Telescope and new advances in space exploration as part of the second Astronomy Night of the fall semester.
The Hubble Space Telescope, or HST, launched in 1990, orbits the Earth in only an hour and a half. Its most complex and colorful images are of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and of small dwarf galaxies nearby.
Meyer explained that the HST, with complex galactic images, has helped NASA understand how galaxies function with the development of a theory that galaxies are not isolated and instead merge together over time.
However, HST has a harder time capturing galaxies light years away. But this is soon to change with its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
“James Webb will be more useful than the Hubble,” Meyer said.
JWST will be launched in 2014, replacing HST. It will have capabilities that NASA never dreamed of back in 1990, with the ability to take images of the first galaxies that formed during the Big Bang fourteen million years ago.
While the Hubble Space Telescope circulates 200 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, the James Webb Telescope will circulate 1.5 billion kilometers from the Earth’s surface.
Therefore, the atmospheric dust that causes blurriness in Hubble’s images will be avoided by the James Webb due to its distance from the Earth.
Currently, the Hubble captures all frequencies of visible light in our atmosphere. The James Webb will change this by capturing mostly electromagnetic light and some visible light, according to the James Webb website.
What many people don’t know is that they can be their own astronomers online, as Meyer encouraged in her discussion.
With Galaxyzoo.org, developed in 2007, anyone can register to classify galaxies as they are captured by Hubble. However, the galaxies that Hubble is able to expose were classified within the past twenty years.
According to Meyer, when James Webb is launched, this site will become much more useful as new galaxies will need to be categorized.
Meyer and NASA are asking students and the general public to get involved in classifying stars and galaxies that have never been viewed before, which can be done right from their own computers.
