A team of astronomers has created a new comprehensive catalog of astronomical objects observed with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
This image shows the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-colored glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-colored elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Hubble Heritage Team.
The catalog brings together observations from Hubble’s three instruments: the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, Advanced Camera for Surveys, and Wide Field Camera 3.
Named the Hubble Source Catalog (HSC), it now allows astronomers to perform a computer search for characteristics of roughly 100 million small sources ranging from distant galaxies to compact star clusters to individual stars, receiving information within seconds or minutes.
It lists all of the sources, and includes both a summary and compilation of the measurements for each object. The measurements include information about the brightness of sources, as well as a source’s color and shape.
“To make this possible, we had to develop new methods to align overlapping images and to determine which sources in different images are actually the same astronomical object,” said Dr Steve Lubow of the Space Telescope Science Institute, a member of the HSC team.
“The HSC is arguably the Hubble’s ultimate legacy,” added team member Dr Tamas Budavari of the Johns Hopkins University.
“Not only is it a one-stop shop, but it’s the first place to go. It’s the table of contents for and the summary of most Hubble observations. If a zillion investigators pointed Hubble in the same direction at their region of interest in different wavelengths, now we have taken all of those observations and put them together into a compilation of the measurements for all objects within that region.”
“Now we can have an even more holistic view of the Hubble universe because you can conduct multi-wavelength and time-domain analyses,” Dr Budavari said.
“Additionally, due to the improved accuracy of positions in the catalog, we can compare Hubble’s observations to those by other observatories, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey or the Galaxy Evolution Explorer.”
The HSC isn’t only for today’s astronomers, it will be a valuable resource for future researchers using the next generation of telescopes, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared observatory scheduled to launch in 2018.
