Hubble

In his classic book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser claimed that people and places were the twin pillars on which all good nonfiction is built. These three books - all with a local connection - prove that point. Their subjects qualify them as textbooks. Yet they are written so engagingly that any one of them could be beach reading. The secret lies in the authors' attention to detail, story line, character and setting. The Universe in a Mirror By Robert Zimmerman Princeton University Press / 287 pages / $29.95 From bureaucratic bungling, technical delays and budget deficits to heated battles among scientists, the Hubble Space Telescope has had more than its share of misfortune.

Galaxies colliding! Sounds like a job for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Astronomers believe galaxies have been running into each other for billions of years. There's even evidence our own Milky Way galaxy has swallowed a smaller companion, with more to come, both big and small. These titanic "interactions" often trigger pyrotechnic eruptions of star formation, and sometimes they eject streams of stars into the loneliness of intergalactic space. Yet astronomers say creatures living in those galaxies would hardly notice a thing.

Pushing the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, astronomers say they have made the first discovery of the organic molecule methane in the atmosphere of a planet circling a sun-like star. Although methane can be generated by cows and rotting garbage, scientists say there's little chance that they've stumbled on signs of life on the planet, about 63 light-years from Earth. The Jupiter-size world's atmosphere sizzles at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. But their apparent success in detecting the gas so far away gives them confidence that they'll be able to find it again someday on a smaller, cooler planet circling a different star.

I am thrilled that the Walters Art Museum collaborated with the Space Telescope Science Institute to bring to the public stunning images of deep space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. I was recently at the Walters and caught the mesmerizing exhibit Mapping the Cosmos: Images from the Hubble Space Telescope. I later read the essay "Seeing stars" (Opinion Commentary, Feb. 10) by Gary Vikan, the director of the Walters Art Museum. In his column, Mr. Vikan says that art and science have been following divergent paths for centuries and that Mapping the Cosmos is the museum's small way of helping bridge this divide.

NASA selected two Baltimore astronomers yesterday to conduct a pair of yearlong studies - one to advance technologies for a powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and the other to design new instruments for other large orbiting observatories. The Hubble successor - called ATLAS - would have a 52-foot mirror and could become the first telescope to confirm the presence of life on planets outside our solar system, said Marc Postman, 49, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the principal investigator on the $1 million study.

Many people were surprised that the Walters Art Museum would partner with the Space Telescope Science Institute (along with the Johns Hopkins University's Program in Museums and Society) to bring photo enlargements from the Hubble Space Telescope to our exhibition galleries. After all, most of us believe that art and science have been following divergent paths for centuries - since long before physicist and novelist C. P. Snow made that seeming split explicit in his famous Rede Lecture of May 1959, "The Two Cultures," wherein he characterized the two as mutually incomprehensible.

Across unimaginable gulfs of space and time, a star very much like our sun is dying. Its nuclear fuel used up, a series of awesome explosions rocks its surface, ejecting material outward in a luminous shell of expanding hot gases a thousand times the diameter of our solar system. Now an image of that event, which occurred 3,000 light-years away in the Cat's Eye Nebula and was recorded by cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, will be among the highlights of a spectacular exhibition that opens this week at the Walters Art Gallery.

"Dark matter" is probably the most abundant stuff in the universe, making up more than 90 percent of everything out there. And yet scientists know almost nothing about it. They can't see it because it doesn't shine or reflect light. But astronomers in Baltimore said yesterday that they have used the Hubble Space Telescope to map the dark matter billowing out from the long-ago collision of two galaxy clusters. They're calling it the strongest evidence yet of the existence of dark matter, and the first observation to separate it from its associated stars, galaxies and glowing gas. "What we found is a very peculiar structure - a ring-like structure that surrounds the core of the cluster," said Johns Hopkins University research scientist M. James Jee, lead author on the study that will appear in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The seven astronauts picked to fly the final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope next year got a rousing welcome yesterday as they made the traditional courtesy call on the folks in Baltimore whose jobs may hang on how well the crew does its work. The crew of Servicing Mission 4 arrived to applause and cheers from a crowd that crammed the auditorium at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They introduced themselves, showed some training films they brought along from Houston. They also brought along their comedy act. OK, so it was astronaut humor.

To open its Explorer Series last November, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra had the benefit of an exceedingly engaging expert on exploration -- Mario Livio. This senior astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University's Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute gave the audience an introduction into the nature of nebula and other galactic phenomena. Astonishing images of such things, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and chosen by Livio, were then shown as counterpoint to a performance of a gripping work by Christopher Theofanidis called Rainbow Body.