NASA’s GALEX spacecraft and its best pictures

April 26, 2008

On April 28th of 2003 the spacecraft GALEX, which means Galaxy Evolution Explorer, was sent into space with the mission of observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history through an incorporated telescope.

This mission which was originally planned to last only 29 months was extended and is still active making in the beginning of next week 5 years that it travels the space sending information back to Earth.

GALEX’s ultraviolet observations are telling the scientists how galaxies, the building block of our Universe, evolve and change.

GALEX observations are providing data for NASA’s investigators to find out when and how the stars that we see today were formed and which chemical elements are the galaxies made off.

Thanks to GALEX, which has already observed more than 100 million galaxies, investigators will have the first comprehensive map of the Universe of galaxies under construction, helping them understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way were formed.

In effect, GALEX acts like a time machine through which humans see the universe as it was a few billion years after its birth because it observes places so far away that the light reaching GALEX, even traveling at 299.792.458 meters per second is still the same as billions of years before.

Has you might imagine both the ultraviolet images from our galaxy and other galaxies are something amazing. If there are limits on were our sights can reach right now, we can say that some are being defined by GALEX.

Here you’ll find a collection of the best and most important images sent by GALEX .

(Above) This image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows the galaxy NGC 300, located about seven million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. It is a classic spiral galaxy with open arms and vigorous star formation throughout.

Blue represents ultraviolet light captured by the telescope’s long-wavelength detector. Green shows ultraviolet light from the short-wavelength detector, and red shows red visible light from the Las Campanas Observatory, Chile.

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(Above) A close-up view of a star racing through space faster than a speeding bullet can be seen in this image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The star, called Mira (pronounced My-rah), is traveling at 130 kilometers per second, or 291,000 miles per hour. As it hurls along, it sheds material that will be recycled into new stars, planets and possibly even life.

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(Above) A close-up view of a star racing through space faster than a speeding bullet can be seen in this image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The star, called Mira (pronounced My-rah), is traveling at 130 kilometers per second, or 291,000 miles per hour. As it hurls along, it sheds material that will be recycled into new stars, planets and possibly even life.

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(Above) This composite image shows Z Camelopardalis, or Z Cam, a double-star system featuring a collapsed, dead star, called a white dwarf, and a companion star, as well as a ghostly shell around the system. The massive shell provides evidence of lingering material ejected during and swept up by a powerful classical nova explosion that occurred probably a few thousand years ago.

The image combines data gathered from the far-ultraviolet and near-ultraviolet detectors on NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer on Jan. 25, 2004. The orbiting observatory first began imaging Z Cam in 2003.

Z Cam is the largest white object in the image, located near the center. Parts of the shell are seen as a lobe-like, wispy, yellowish feature below and to the right of Z Cam, and as two large, whitish, perpendicular lines on the left.

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(Above) This enhanced image from the far-ultraviolet detector on NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a ghostly shell of ionized gas around Z Camelopardalis, a binary, or double-star system featuring a collapsed, dead star known as a white dwarf, and a companion star.

The image was processed to enhance the diffuse emissions from the shell. Z Cam is the bright object near the center of the image. Parts of the shell are seen as a lobe-like, light-blue feature below and to the right of Z Cam, and as two large, light blue, perpendicular lines on the left.

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(Above) A pair of interacting galaxies might be experiencing the galactic equivalent of a mid-life crisis. For some reason, the pair, called Arp 82, didn’t make their stars early on as is typical of most galaxies. Instead, they got a second wind later in life – about 2 billion years ago – and started pumping out waves of new stars as if they were young again.

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(Above) Approximately 100 million years ago, a smaller galaxy plunged through the heart of the Cartwheel galaxy, creating ripples of brief star formation. In this image, the first ripple appears as an ultraviolet-bright blue outer ring so powerful that it may be one of the most powerful UV-emitting galaxies in the nearby universe.

This false-color composite image shows the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), the Hubble Space Telescope (green); the Spitzer Space Telescope (red); and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple).

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(Above) This image of the nearby spiral galaxy M101, better known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is a three-color combination of images from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft. The ultraviolet light, seen in blue in the arms of the galaxy, shows young stars (only 10 million years old), while the diffuse green visible light traces stars that have been living for more than 100 years. The red visible light image shows the stars that formed over a billion years ago.

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