YOU might think any space telescope would naturally come equipped with a night-vision camera, but Hubble’s only went online last month. And the first stunning pictures from it, released last week, already have astronomers scratching their heads.
In March, the Hubble Space Telescope was upgraded with a new optical camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), with vision 10 times better than its predecessor. But the servicing mission also revived an infrared camera called Nicmos by giving it a new cooling system. When infrared radiation hits a telescope’s optics they warm up, and this can generate an infrared glow of…
