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Stars in their own right ; Hubble reveals the cosmic cradle

Posted on: Wednesday, 10 March 2004, 06:00 CST

When a dazzling new view of the universe from the Hubble Space Telescope was released Tuesday, scientists all over the world began furiously analyzing the gigabytes of information it contained, looking for new signs of what the universe is made of and how it began.

In New York, they did it onstage.

Three teams of astrophysicists, organized by a scientist from Bergen County, converged on the American Museum of Natural History, where they set up racks of computers in the Rose Center for Earth and Space.

After the Hubble data arrived in a FedEx box full of computer disks, they got to work, racing to be the first to discover some of the oldest and most distant objects in the universe.

Their temporary lab will be on display for the next four days, giving museum visitors a chance to see real scientists at work and to share in their excitement and discoveries. As they argue over interpretations, write software code on the fly, and peer farther into the universe than ever before, they will be doing it in public - which is fine with them.

"We do this every day," said Stefan Gromoll, a graduate student at Stony Brook University. "We love it. This is what I want to do every day, and we want to share it with people."

That was the reason for turning the science teams into a museum attraction, said Michael M. Shara of Edgewater, the museum's astrophysics chairman. The process of discovery can be fascinating, he said, and the museum wanted to share that fascination with as many people as it could.

"We're able to do stuff that no astronomer has ever done," Shara said. "This is equivalent to the deepest borehole ever drilled by geophysicists, or the finest-resolution electron microscope image ever taken by biological scientists."

The Hubble telescope made the new image by obsessively focusing on a tiny speck of the sky, just below the constellation Orion. To the naked eye on Earth, it's the same size as a grain of sand held up at arm's length. But under the Hubble's cameras, that patch of cold night reveals a profusion of light.

In the image, which required more than 400 orbits of the space telescope over four months, galaxies swirl in all the colors of the rainbow. Quadrillions of stars glow in the distance. Jets of primordial gas spew from colliding galaxies. Zooming in, scientists expect to find flashes of light from supernovas and quasars. The image is believed to contain 20,000 distinct galaxies.

"This may be the best image of the sky that is taken in the rest of this decade," said Arlin Crotts, a Columbia University astrophysicist working on the project.

It also gives an unprecedented view back in time. The universe is 13.7 billion years old - give or take - and the most distant points of light in the new image spent most of those years traveling across space until they reached the Hubble's lenses. So when scientists look at those images on their computer screens, they are actually seeing what those galaxies looked like just a few hundred million years after the big bang - the immense explosion that scientists say brought the universe into being.

"By looking at this image, you're literally peering back through time," said Kenneth M. Lanzetta of Stony Brook University, under a huge wall of video screens displaying the image. "The image just looks gorgeous."

The Stony Brook team is looking for interesting formations of the earliest galaxies; Columbia's team is hunting for supernovas and other signs of a roiling universe. Meanwhile, a team of the museum's own astrophysicists wants to see whether objects that zipped in and out of the Hubble's eye during the months of observation could be signs of undiscovered icy objects in the "Kuiper belt" at the edge of our solar system - or perhaps "brown dwarf" stars, closer to Earth than any known star.

Sebastien Lepine, a postdoctoral student at the museum who lives in Hackensack, is an expert on tracking such items. Despite all the telescopes that have been trained on the skies for so many years, he said, much of what lurks above our heads is still unknown - and the frenetic data-crunch going on at the museum shows the fun of hunting things that have never been seen before.

"I would be happy to find a number of asteroids," Lepine said. "In our wildest dreams, we could find a Kuiper belt object that's larger than Pluto. That's one in a million."

The three teams are searching for different findings in the Hubble data, so strictly speaking, they aren't competing. But as they compare notes and give regular public updates on their findings, they each want to be the first to find something new, undiscovered, and fabulous - and perhaps write a quick paper to publish their findings by Sunday afternoon, when the temporary museum lab is scheduled to close shop.

"We could hack away in a little room and do this for ourselves, but that's not the point," said Eilat Glikman from the Columbia team. "It's not just about the pretty pictures. It's about what we can learn from the data that also makes pretty pictures."

The Hubble makes its observations from 380 miles above Earth, free of light, air, and other disturbances that distort telescope views from the surface. It was launched from a space shuttle mission in 1990 and requires regular shuttle visits to keep it in good working order.

In the wake of last year's Columbia shuttle disaster, though, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration canceled all future shuttle missions to the Hubble, meaning that it is likely to fail in the next several years. A more advanced space telescope is scheduled to be launched in 2011.

For the time being, Shara said, the new Hubble data is a feast for researchers, and a new glimpse at the earliest origins of everything that we know.

"What we're doing is drilling through the universe," he said, "to a time very far away."

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E-mail: lisberg@northjersey.com

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