Any astronomer around the world can request time on the Hubble Space Telescope. Get an up-close look of your favorites here on high resolution images. You can see where Hubble is looking at any given time with Space Telescope Live. Hubble has made more than 1.
Which one is your favorite? By Alaina On October 25, By Alaina On October 19, Lucy Takes Flight to the Trojan Asteroids. By Christine On October 16, How Do Astronauts Eat in Space? By Adeline On October 8, Attraction Spotlight: Heroes and Legends, featuring the U. By Sarah On September 28, As in all good adventures, success does not come easily: it did not take long to realise that Hubble's mirror had a serious flaw. A focusing defect prevented Hubble from taking sharp images — the mirror edge was too flat by a mere fiftieth of the width of a human hair.
Over the next months scientists and engineers from NASA and ESA worked together and came up with a superb corrective optics package that would restore Hubble's eyesight completely. A crew of astronauts carried out the repairs necessary to restore the telescope to its intended level of performance during the first Hubble Servicing Mission SM1 in December Although the four subsequent servicing missions were at least as demanding in terms of complexity and work load, SM1 captured the attention of both astronomers and the public at large to a degree that no other Shuttle mission since has achieved.
Meticulously planned and brilliantly executed, the mission succeeded on all counts. It will go down in history as one of the highlights of human spaceflight. Among a long list of achievements: Hubble's ability to detect faint supernovae contributed to the discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, indicating the existence of mysterious "dark energy" in space. Observations of Cepheid variable stars in nearby galaxies were used to establish the current expansion rate of the universe to better than 10 percent accuracy.
In , Hubble provided our deepest view yet into the universe's distant past. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed just million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. This latest deep field view also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history. Hubble provided the first direct measurements of the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter in space.
Peering into nearby regions of star birth in the Milky Way galaxy, Hubble has revealed flattened disks of gas and dust that are the likely birthplaces of new planets.
It is a vital scientific instrument that is a result of a collaboration between NASA and ESA, and has produced beautiful images of the cosmos, but also data revealing the secrets of the Universe.
With the ability to observe in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light, Hubble can tell us a lot about the Universe. Data collected by the space telescope has been used to write more than 16, peer-reviewed scientific papers and has been referenced by others over , times, a figure that grows daily by around references. It has captured the deepest ever telescopic image, peering so far into the distant Universe that it can view galaxies as they appeared just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Just before light reaches out telescopes it has to pass through that turbulent atmosphere, which causes fine cosmic details to be lost. Though these telescopes make valuable observations, they are still not immune to the effects of our atmosphere. Along with producing infamous stunning images, Hubble has played a significant part in discovering and characterising the mysterious dark energy that infiltrates the depths of space. It has helped determine the age of the Universe, provided views of star formation and evidence of black holes.
In , astronomers published new data collected from their observations of Type Ia supernovae. These are exploded stars that shine with a consistent brightness, so their apparent brightness can be used to deduce how far away they are.
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