The Hubble Space Telescope launched 30 years ago yesterday, forever changing the way we see the universe
The telescope's ethereal, dreamy and almost fantasy-like views of space vistas have inspired people for decades and led to some of the most important astronomical discoveries.
"This has given us a new vantage point for viewing everything in the universe from the nearby solar system to distant galaxies and opened our eyes to the richness of the content of the universe and dynamic activity of the universe over time." "By Hubble's ability to observe activity in distant and faint galaxies, we've been able to measure that expansion rate. We're still refining it. In recent years, Hubble, along with others observatories, was a major contributor to the discovery that this expansion rate is accelerating and that was a surprise. We now call the phenom behind this dark energy."
The telescope was expected to last for 15 years, and it's still going strong. But Hubble was also designed to be serviced and upgraded over time. The Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was unexpectedly drawn into a collision with Jupiter, and the comet was pulled apart into fragments. Astronomers saw 21 pieces of the comet hit Jupiter, leaving temporary black scars within the planet's iconic clouds. They had never seen anything like it before.
Outside of our solar system, Hubble has explored our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring galaxies. The dramatic, colorful images Hubble is known for are largely of active nebulae in our galaxy, bright clouds of gas and dust where stars are forming. In near-infrared, seemingly blank parts of sky appeared to light up with the evidence of distant galaxies, and no one expected that, Thompson said.
Hubble's firsts in exoplanet science include measuring another planet's atmosphere, confirming the oldest known exoplanet, detecting the first organic molecule on an exoplanet and the first changes in an exoplanet atmosphere. Today, exoplanet science accounts for 20% of the telescope's observational time.
And Hubble is credited with helping astronomers realize that supermassive black holes are ubiquitous with centers of giant galaxies. Hubble was able to observe gas falling into galactic centers near the speed of light, which is now considered a fundamental understanding, Brown said. It's been used to follow up on detections of gravitational waves and the explosions of neutron star collisions by LIGO and VIRGO, which are gravitational wave detectors.
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