My God It's Full Of Stars!

Ebullient NASA scientists today released a stunning portfolio of full color images  of the universe taken with the newly upgraded and refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. 

The new Hubble camera, called Wide Field Camera 3, is  “panchromatic.” This is an old term from the days of photographic film  that  describes a black-and-white emulsion with a sensitivity to all colors of light. The WFC3 goes even further with sensitivity stretching from ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths. Call it Super-Technicolor!

Like B&W film used in the Technicolor motion picture process, a Hubble exposure starts out as monochrome. Next, separate pictures are taken though different color filters and assembled into a full color image.

My favorite early-release WFC3 photo is shown here. It is a view looking deep into the heart  of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri. 

This is an ancient dwarf galaxy that has been stripped of stars by close encounters the Milky Way. It contains as many as 10 million stars but could have been significantly bigger long ago.

There are 100,000 stars in this in one view from Hubble.  Looking into a snowstorm of stars is humbling. These kinds of views leave me with little doubt that the universe must have a virtual infinity of habitable worlds with unimaginably diverse life forms. Imagine the planets that could be orbiting these stars! 

The entire life history of stars can be seen in one picture.

The vast majority of the stars in the image are yellow-white stars. They are similar in age and temperature to our sun. The vibrant red stars have exhausted much of their hydrogen fuel and have expanded to red giants that are so bloated they swallow any close-in planets!

Even more bizarre are the ultra-blue stars are at an even later stage of stellar evolution. They have lost most of their outer envelop of gasses, and have been reduced to nearly “naked cores” – a legitimate scientific term that still might get you in trouble for being politically incorrect these days. (And don’t even think about calling this picture “Stars Gone Wild.”)  

These helium-fusion burning cores are fiercely hot, and so emit much of their light at ultraviolet wavelengths that are picked up by the WFC3’s “panchromatic” sensitivity. Very faint, totally burned-out stars in the field are called white dwarfs.

The cluster’s stars are so crammed together the distance between each star is only about a third of a light-year, or two trillion miles. They are roughly 13 times closer than our Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system.

If there are any civilizations living in this cluster they would behold a star-saturated nighttime sky that is roughly 100 times brighter than Earth’s nighttime sky. Space faring cultures might be common given the close proximity of neighboring worlds. technological civilizations might be expected to have a robust astronomy program, given the starry nighttime splendor.  But they would be so overwhelmed by starlight the extraterrestrials might never discover the universe of galaxies that exists far outside of the cluster.