Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Orion Nebula As You've Never Seen It

Episode Date: January 30, 2006

The Orion Nebula As You've Never Seen ItLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An incredible portrait of a stellar nursery, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. You've seen the Orion Nebula, right? Frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. You've seen the Orion Nebula, right? If not directly through a telescope, then is one of the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope

or one of its terrestrial cousins? Ah, but you've never seen it like this. Massimo Roberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute will be our guest and guide as we explore a brand new one billion pixel picture,

the biggest ever assembled from the Hubble. We also hope you'll stick around for What's Up. Bruce Betts is back in person this week, offering another chance to win the new Explorer's Guide to Mars poster in the space trivia contest. The search for another Earth is getting warmer and warmer. That's the story at the top of our news this week with the discovery of the top of our news this week,

with the discovery of the smallest extrasolar planet yet. Maybe warmer and warmer isn't the right description, since this new rocky ball is pretty frigid. But it is only about five times as big as Earth. The details are in a nice article by my colleague Amir Alexander. You'll find it at planetary.org. Meanwhile, Mars seems to be getting more Earth-like every day. Did you hear the report from researchers at Brown University?

They think the red planet once had glaciers. That's right, glaciers. Lastly, this item from Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency. The head of the Energia Corporation wants to have a permanent base on the moon by 2015. No, that's not all. He wants to begin commercial mining for helium-3 by 2020, shipping the isotope back to Earth for all those fusion reactors that will be making our electricity by then. Uh-huh. Of course, stranger things have happened. Stay tuned. And while you do, here's an encore Q&A segment from Emily, who is on assignment this week. Enjoy. I'll be back in a minute with Massimo Roberto and the world's biggest snapshot.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, During the Apollo missions, they captured cool film footage of the Saturn rocket stage separations. How was this footage captured? Some of the favorite images from the Apollo missions are video of the separation of the first and second stages of the Saturn V rocket, followed by ignition of the second stage rockets. These amazing images show the curving blue marble of Earth in the background. They were captured using 16mm motion cameras mounted on the forward end of the Saturn rocket's first stage. forward end of the Saturn rocket's first stage. The cameras operated for less than 30 seconds as the rocket stages separated 80 kilometers above the Atlantic Ocean. After recording, the cameras

were ejected from the rocket. They were enclosed in waterproof aluminum capsules equipped with para-balloons that slowed their descent and kept them afloat once they splashed down. After they fell into the ocean, radio beacons and dye markers helped the Air Force to locate them. Nowadays, capturing film of rocket launches doesn't require such heroic efforts. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. It's the right time of year to gaze in wonder at Orion, at least in the northern half of our planet.

Up there, just below the bright belt, is the famous nebula named after the mythic hunter. Astronomers have been studying it for hundreds of years, but no one has ever seen it like this. Massimo Roberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute served as principal investigator for a team that has created the biggest image ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. We spoke to him last week, right after he arrived at the home of another famous telescope. So, Massimo, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you.

Thank you for much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Now, I hear you're in the lobby of a pretty famous telescope or astronomical facility on the surface of the Earth. Absolutely. I'm on keep peek at the four-meter telescope, which is the largest here on the mountain. It's an historical telescope. And here there is a room with a sofa. It's a quiet room. I'm not in the control room. I just took a few minutes out to talk with you. Well, I'm glad you were able to find a phone there in the lobby.

Now, while you're on the ground at Kitt Peak, we want to talk about some incredible work that has been done, that you have done or led with the Hubble Space Telescope, which I guess you just presented January 11th at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, basically we unveiled a picture of the Orion Nebula, which is a huge mosaic that we have done with the Hubble Space Telescope. So I'm here doing my ground-based follow-up observations of the main work,

the main project that we have done with the Hubble. We want to let people know that they can find this image, and in fact I would actually recommend, folks, if you're able to do this, pull up the image from the Hubble website, which is hubblesight.org. That's all you have to do, hubblesight, one word, dot O-R-G. And click on the right. There is a link to the Orion Nebula. And you'll find there, there is both really a guided tour movie

and a zoomable image. And it's that zoomable image, Massimo, that I had the best time playing with for about a half an hour a few nights ago. Yeah, exactly. And I must tell you, the zoomable image is not even full resolution. We could not produce for the web something that has the same detail of the images that we are using, the one that I have on my computer. The largest image you can download is something like 15 by 18,000 pixels,

and the full resolution of the original images is 30 by 33,000. So it's a monster. It's really a beast. It's the largest image ever put together by us at the Space Telescope Science Institute. It's really a milestone for those that produce this type of images. of a milestone for those that produce this type of images. So for comparison's sake, my digital camera does about three or four megapixels per image. This image is about a billion pixels. It's one billion, exactly.

And also another type of comparison I'm used to think about is that these images actually come with a real original physical size because the detector that you use in your digital camera is the size of, you know, a quarter of an inch square, something like that. Basically, one inch square is the size of the detectors that we, on the Hubble, have taken, you know, the most beautiful picture, those that are on U.S. postage stamps. This image of Orion corresponds to something like 20 by 20 inches, so it's really huge. Think about how much we have to move the telescope around for more than 100 orbits to put it together. So over 100 orbits of the Hubble focusing on the Orion Nebula. Exactly. It's actually the largest program ever done on star formation, so I'm sort of proud of it. Let's talk about this image

and the Orion Nebula itself. It's a great one to talk about because, of course, it's one of the few nebulae that anybody with a relatively small amateur telescope can actually, you know, turn toward, and if they're very lucky, might even see a tiny little bit of

color in the gas. Absolutely. I must say that when we talk about Orion Nebula, professional astronomers nowadays basically think about the Orion Nebula cluster. What's really going on there is that the Orion Nebula is like a cavity which hosts a few thousand, we don't know exactly how many, but the order of 2,000, 3,000 extremely young stars. So the reason of this program is not just to take a pretty picture. The pretty picture is what allows us to measure with the highest possible accuracy

the brightness of this factory of stars, this huge group of stars. So we went for stars. The image is actually a collection of five images in five filters, in five wavelengths. And they were selected in order to get the physics out, measure the brightness in various colors, in order to get the mass, basically, and the age of these stars. We want to have a census of star formation in Orion. The Orion Nebula is often referred to as a stellar nursery. Exactly.

Your work certainly seems to back that up. Exactly. It's the stellar nursery. It's the cornerstone stellar nursery. It's interesting because in Orion we have something that is sort of impossible in our human nurseries. We see stars that have weight that range over a factor of 10,000. So imagine something that weights from a few pounds to tons. And naturally, the nebula is basically the product of only one star,

the one that is one of the trapezium stars, the brightest one, Theta 1 Orionis C. 95% of the light that is coming from the nebula is the product of the light coming, of the ultraviolet light coming from Theta 1C. Wow. So it's really, there is a monster there with the entire bunch of low-mass stars. And when I say low, I mean really low, much fainter than the sun. Actually we see a population of stars, the brown dwarfs, that will never grow to the point of being stars.

They will never support thermonuclear reaction, and even probably objects of size comparable to Jupiter. And actually, the real record is the fact that through the Orion Nebula, we see galaxies. I have pictures of nice galaxies. So with the Hubble, we can really go through. And actually, they become a problem because at some point, you don't want to be confused by the background objects. Other than the sheer beauty of this image, the next impression that I was given was of this nebula as an extremely dynamic place.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's a very chaotic and harsh environment. It's not the place... It's interesting, actually, because we think that the sun is born in this type of environment. Most of the stars are born in this type of environment. So if you think that the sun is an average system and our Earth is around an average star,

then we must come from something very similar. But this is not the place where a planetary system like ours easily gets built because the density is so high, the stars are packed so densely that they interfere one with the other. In particular, the Big Beast is actually destroying the planetary, the protoplanetary systems, the very young planetary systems in the nearby stars. And we see this clearly with the Hubble. So you see this tremendous interaction from the very bright stars and all the dwarfs, the little stars, like the sun and even smaller, that they are actually destroyed. They don't evolve the way they should evolve, according to our models,

because they are in the presence of the monsters. Massimo Roberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute and principal investigator for the creation of the new Orion Nebula Mosaic. He'll be back to answer more questions about the formation of our own solar system and others right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects

and get the latest space exploration news in-depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Our guest is Massimo Roberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute. I still had a couple of questions for Massimo about what his giant image of the Orion Nebula tells us about the formation of solar systems, including the one we call home. If our neighborhood of space billions of years ago didn't really look much like the Orion Nebula, still we come from some kind of a similar situation. And in spite of the fact that these protoplanetary disks, I guess, are being ripped apart by the bigger stars in Orion, you do have some that are pointed out in the image.

Absolutely. Actually, if you go on the web page and, as you said, you go on the zoomable image, and you just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom to the maximum zoom, which is a factor of 10, and without moving the window, just you go through straight at the center, you will see at the center this spectacular dark silhouette. you will see at the center this spectacular dark silhouette disk. I got emails from people asking me if we took a picture of a spacecraft of aliens. It looks really weird.

It's a little well-defined dark street. Exactly. And this is the best example, the best-known example of a protoplanetary disk, I would say. It's a system which is in silhouette against the nebular background. It's dark, it's cold. This is the ideal environment where planets should form. And this is sort of exceptional because it's so far away

from the center of the nebula that it's not destroyed. But if you zoom, you move a little bit more on the center, you will start seeing arcs like little comets, cometary shapes. And sometimes you will even see the dark disk inside. And all this is the phenomenology of the disk evaporation,

of the disk destruction by the ionizing stars. What about some of the other features that we see in the nebula, the bubbles and bow shocks and things like that? Absolutely. We see these, well, the nebula is actually interesting the way the nebula formed. The nebula is basically a fossil nebula because you have to think the giant stars produce a huge amount of ultraviolet radiation. So when everything starts at the beginning, they create like a bubble of extremely hot

gas that pushes away and blows and grows. We call these compact H2 regions. And actually, no, there are the ultra-compact H2 regions, the compact. There are really tiny bubbles of hot gas around the massive ultraviolet stars. At some point, they become so large that they may find a hole. They can basically find their way out of the parental molecular neutral gas, neutral cold gas. And at that point, all this hot gas blows away. We call it a champagne flow.

And what remains is a cavity, empty, just filled with the radiation currently produced by the main star and possibly all the others that are around and formed in the cluster. So Orion is basically seen in this third generation. It's an empty cavity and in the wall we see all the interaction of the present radiation, the wind lost by the star, because it's also interesting that you form a star by putting together material, but at the same time there is a lot of mass loss from stars. So it's sort of go in and go out that happen at the same time.

So you see all this printed through the walls and in the features. We see jets, we see bubbles, we see bow shocks. I have colleagues that are specialists with this zoo of gaseous phenomenology, which is extremely fascinating. What about the colors, the magnificent colors? Well, the colors are as close as possible to original, but of course are not really original colors, because the five images that we put together,

three of them are actually in light that we can see with our eyes, but two of them are out in the near infrared. So what we have done is we have played a little bit with that. So the infrared images are actually those that give the red color, and the other three images contribute with the blue, the green, and some orange. So a bit of false color there. It's a little bit of false color. And also I have to say, this is something interesting. Our detectors are, of course, linear in the sense that if you get 100,000 photons,

you get 100,000 counts or something like that. There is a one-to-one or one-to-two, but it's sort of steady correspondence. Half of that, half of counts. And the eye is not working like that. It takes 10 times more flux or something like that to get twice the signal. The eye responds in a logarithmic way. So the eye, our human eye, is able to get a much better defined dynamic of the system. With our image, we saturate.

Everything gets completely flat and burned out unless you our image, we saturate. Everything gets completely flat and burned out unless you apply tweaks, which we did. So we adapted the image to look much more in the way the eye is. Basically, it's scaled in sort of a logarithmic way. It's closer to what we see with the eye than what we see with our computer if we don't apply any trick. We're almost out of time. Tell me, how was this billion-pixel image of the Orion Nebula received by your colleagues in the American Astronomical Society? Everybody likes it.

This was really funny. At some point, you start forgetting about temperature, mass, density, and, you know, also a little bit of competition. And just people start knowing, oh, in awe in front of this beautiful color. I think our guys did a great job also producing it. There are these greens, these yellows. It reminds me something of Rembrandt. It's just pure beauty in front of us. And I'm really happy it can be shared with the Internet.

Everybody can get it printed and post it, basically. So at some point, we all are in front of beauty, I would say. It is stunningly beautiful, I'll say it again, and recommend highly. Go to your computer right now, folks. If you're not at it, get to it, and go to hubblesite.org. Now, we will also put the link directly to both the zoomable image and to this little flash movie, the guided tour of this billion-pixel image of Orion. We will put those on our website at planetary.org, where some of you may be listening to this radio program.

Massimo, we are out of time. Thank you so much for taking us on a little audio tour of the Orion Nebula with this unprecedented image. Thanks for having me. Massimo Roberto is the principal investigator who led the team that put together this amazing image of the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery and quite a beauty, even from 1,500 light years away. stellar nursery, and quite a beauty, even from 1,500 light-years away. We'll be right back with more of Planetary Radio, and specifically this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts,

right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How do we capture video from launching rockets? There is now a private company called Ecliptic Enterprises that is making a profitable business from putting cameras on launch vehicles. Ecliptic's rocket cams have been mounted to Delta IIs, IIIs, and IVs, to Atlas IIs, IIIs, and Vs, on Spaceship One, and on the Space Shuttle tank and solid rocket boosters. The cameras are tiny, weighing less than 100 grams, and can radio color images and even sound

directly back to Earth as the rocket lifts off, or they can store the data for later download. The information that these cameras return as a routine part of space launches will be of incalculable value in diagnosing the causes of launch vehicle mishaps. They will also give human watchers the vicarious thrill of soaring into space. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio with Bruce Betts,

the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who is sitting across from me at the table, yes, live and in person again. Bruce, how are you? I'm reasonably moderately adequately okay. How are you, Matt? I wasn't overwhelming in my enthusiasm, was I? I'm doing great, Matt. Okay. That's better.

I'm glad to hear you're doing well. What's up? What's up? Planets. We got Mars. I was so afraid you'd say, what's up, must come down, because we've never done that. Well, since mostly I talk about planets, that would be very disturbing. Yeah, it would be. You know, there are some near-Earth objects that might come down because we've never done that. Well, since mostly I talk about planets, that would be very disturbing. Yeah, it would be.

You know, there are some near-Earth objects that might come down. When worlds collide. Exactly. But for now, let's talk about worlds that aren't going to collide with us ever, such as Mars, which is shining orange and still kind of bright but fading a lot. It's in the south during the evening. You can see it as the orange object in the south, oddly enough.

Looking kind of star-like. Now Saturn, Saturn again is a spiffy object to be looking at right now. Saturn is rising right around sunset and by early to mid-evening it is very high in the sky, high in the east and a great telescope object

as I keep telling you. Check out those rings. You can see them a billion miles away with even a small, semi-decent telescope. And then in the pre-dawn sky, the brightest star-like object you're going to see is Jupiter. No questions, no ifs, ands, or buts. It's Jupiter, and it's off in the east. There you go. Now, this week in space history, we have a birthday, the birthday of someone that has been being talked about a lot in the last week or so,

and that's Clyde Tombaugh. It would have been Clyde Tombaugh's 100th birthday. Did you see Clyde Tombaugh's family? I mean, I heard that they were at the launch of New Horizons. I was mere feet away from Clyde Tombaugh's family, including his widow, which I talked to some of his children, and they were quite pleased that the discoverer of Pluto, their dad, now there's a mission actually going out there in New Horizons.

Very exciting. So it was very interesting, very nice. Let us move on to Rainbow Space Talk! That had a nice sort of Flash Gordon air to it. That had a nice sort of Flash Gordon air to it. Well, Flash Gordon had no idea how many moons Jupiter really has. Well, neither do we. But we know what the count is right now, and sometimes I just like to update people.

Jupiter is known to have 63 moons as of right now. That's just wrong. I checked it right before we went on. No, I mean, it's not fair. I mean, it is wrong. There are more moons than that. We just haven't found much. So there's a little greater than carrot in front of that. Exactly.

It's greater than and probably not equal to 63. But right now it's 63. We keep this updated on our website, planetary.org, if you want to know what the latest count is for any of the objects. it on our website, planetary.org, if you want to know what the latest count is for any of the objects. We're pretty sure that the Earth has one, but these big planets, we keep finding more and more. Just nasty with them out there.

All right, shall we move on to our trivia contest? We asked you, and I'm sorry, but I just find this so fascinating. What is the second highest surface gravity in the solar system? And we said for giant planets, since they're gas giants, take that at the one bar level, about one Earth atmosphere level. Sea level, yeah. Yeah, like sea level on Earth. What is the second highest gravity, Jupiter having the highest? And how did we do, Matt?

What did we find out? Let's talk about this fascinating subject. Most people got it right. And it is, it turns out, a gas giant, as I'm sure you were well aware. Well, yes. Neptune is what most people came up with. And most people were right. We had a couple of Saturns. We had one Uranus. I don't know where they got those figures, but it is Neptune. Our winner, Tim Jordan. Tim Jordan of Eureka, Missouri, the show-me state. Show me. And he's going to walk away not with a shirt this week. He's the winner of that great poster.

Exactly. He's going to wear a poster on his back. The Explorer's Guide to Mars, our brand newly revised Explorer's Guide to Mars poster, which has a beautiful map of Mars, lots of images, lots of the latest data information from all the many, many, many, many spacecraft that are visiting Mars right at the moment. And in fact, I'd say that's what we're giving away this week too, Matt. But I want to reflect on this for just a little bit more because Neptune, I mean, that's not obvious, but that whole gravity thing, it depends on how massive the object is but also how far away you are from the center of the mass. And so even though Earth is a little pup compared to the gas giants,

we're on its surface much closer to the center of mass than if you were on one of the gas giants, which is why Neptune, not that much higher surface gravity. Saturn actually has a lower surface gravity than the Earth does. And Neptune's what, about 1.2? 1.125, something like that. Yeah, okay, 1.125. So really not that much more than compared to Earth's 1G.

What were you going to say, Matt? I was interested. No, I was going to say I didn't give the question much thought until I saw the answers coming in. And I thought, Neptune, that makes sense. You know why? Because it's cold, I figured. It's denser, I thought. It's probably, it's colder than Saturn. Not good enough, huh? No, your thing about it sort of being a trick question was, I think. Well, it's a combination. It's not, yeah, it's not, it's not obvious. It's

not your most massive bodies. We better move on to the next time around. All right. I was having such fun. Okay. For the next contest, we're going to switch gears to spacecraft and talk about the Hayabusa spacecraft, which is currently off at asteroid Itokawa trying to figure out how to get home. What was the name of Hayabusa's lander, which unfortunately failed and did not land on the asteroid? What was its name? The name of Hayabusa's lander.

Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter our contest and win a beautiful Explorer's Guide to Mars poster. Got to get those answers to us, though, by Monday, February 6th. That's the 6th of February at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And you will be part of this next competition for a poster. Indeedy-dee-dee-doo. Is that it? Yeah. Except that, you know what I always love most about the Flash Gordon serials?

Well, I don't know about most. I love the sparklers. Yes, absolutely. That would be right up there. But I always love how the rockets sound like propeller-driven airplanes. Cool. And always look like sparklers. Yeah.

Now that's a cool series for those of you who haven't checked it out. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what rockets would sound like in your world. I think there's one coming in the window right now. He's Bruce Fetz, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's with us every week here for What's Up. Really, just like Ford Trimotors. We're done for this week.

Thanks very much for joining us. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.