By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
The freshly repaired and outfitted Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a new butterfly-shaped galaxy and wisps of stardust containing the elements of life being recycled into new galaxies, Nasa said on Wednesday.
The space agency released the first batch of images from the orbiting Hubble, repaired by shuttle astronauts in May, and said they show the once-doomed telescope has been reinvented yet again.
"The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade," Ed Weiler, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate, said at a news conference.
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'We believe that most of the matter in space is actually wispy filaments between the galaxies' The newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph got detail data on a galaxy called Markarian 817 being pulled into a supermassive black hole, and an exploded star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that are both spewing matter into space.
"We believe that most of the matter in space is actually wispy filaments between the galaxies," James Green of the University of Colorado told the news conference. Hubble is making these wisps visible for the first time.
The spectral imager detected oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. "The elements of life are being produced in stars ... but they are also being distributed through the cosmos," Green said.
Another star has jets, material being blasted out "from what probably is going to be a planetary system by the time this thing settles down," said Bob O'Connell of the University of Virginia.
In May, space shuttle astronauts repaired two shorted-out instruments and installed a new camera and the spectrograph.
'Hubble has fundamentally changed the course of modern astronomy and astrophysics' "We are giddy with the quality of data that we have with this new telescope," Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told the news conference.
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