(SOMATÓRIA)
THE LONG VIEW
Last May astronauts gave the Hubble Space Telescope what will likely be its final overhaul. The team, including the spacewalker John Grunsfeld, on his third visit to the orbiting observatory, repaired power and control systems to give Hubble several more years of life riding high above Earth’s atmospheric haze. They also installed a new camera and spectrograph and repaired two other instruments to make the telescope more productive than ever. "The best times for this telescope are ahead of it," says Hubble Project Scientist Ken Sembach of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "The public is going to be amazed."
The signature images from Hubble, which turns twenty in April, show careering galaxies, exploding stars, eerie nebulae. With the telescope’s greater imaging sensitivity and resolution, its new images will be even more spectacular.
And even more profound! Soon after the upgrade, Hubble took aim at a dark patch of sky, gathering infrared light for a total of four days to detect the very faintest objects. The images reveal blurry dots, "just a handful of pixels," says Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astrophysicist. The dots, analyzed by computer to rule out camera artifacts, are images of objects that are among the most distant, and thus most ancient, ever seen – small, bloblike early galaxies shining 13.1 billion years old. The universe itself is but 13.7 billion years old. "The new camera has pushed the frontier a few hundred million years closer to the beginning," Illingworth says. In its final years Hubble is seeing back almost to the beginning of time.
Adaptado de: Chris Carroll, National Geographic Magazine. February 2010
Baseado no que informa o último parágrafo do texto, assinale o que for correto.
01) Quanto mais distante se localiza uma galáxia, tanto mais jovem ela é.
02) Uma análise feita em computador comprovou que alguns "objetos" fotografados pelo telescópio não passavam de defeitos da própria câmera.
04) O telescópio está conseguindo fotografar galáxias a bilhões de anos luz de distância.
08) O Hubble está conseguindo mostrar imagens que datam de um período próximo ao início dos tempos.